I have never homelabbed, and this is going to be my first experience. I want to set up a home server. My current goals are to set up a gallery using Immich, an ad blocker/DNS using Pi-hole, and a cloud service.
I want you to suggest what second-hand PC or laptop I should get. I researched a bit and found out that a PC is better because of 24/7 reliability, better cooling, no risk of laptop battery swelling, easy RAM and storage expandability, and low idle power consumption.
What I think the specs should be for me is 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. And my budget is 10k INR.
I want to hear your thoughts. Thank you! :)
Retired business or surveillance hardware is worth checking locally too. My two servers are repurposed NVRs running plain Ubuntu Server, and a Dell OptiPlex handles dev work. For that list, I’d start with the hardware you can get affordably and check its RAM capacity and drive connections before buying. Docker on plain Linux keeps things straightforward. With Immich, budget for a separate backup of the photos before it holds your only copy.