Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Yeah, try to avoid using USB hard drives.
A refurbished business PC is an excellent choice (or, better yet, make friends with someone who works in an IT department and grab a few machines when they're being thrown out; you'd be amazed how often companies dump perfectly good hardware). Don't worry about the windows license, you're not actually paying for it by the time you get to refurb prices.
You should easily be able to pick up something decent for under $200 (hopefully that fits your budget). If you go with a small form factor (not ultra small) you can probably get an SSD and two 3.5" drives in there (watch out for the small form factor Lenovos though, they only have one 3.5" slot). Alternatively, look for a larger desktop tower style that could have 3 or 4 drive bays if you want to do something like a RAID5.
Don't sweat too much about buying older hardware. What's old and busted for Windows is lightning fast when we're talking about self-hosting a file server or a Pihole.
Yes, having friends who deal with hardware sounds very good.
I learned a lot from this post about small form factor pcs having different mainboards than towers so I might get a micro atx for my old tower to stay flexible for the future.
Can you elaborate for which use case you'd see them as less reliable than other options? I am using USB connected drives now for about 2 years in a home setup and haven't had any bad experiences. My use case might be a lot more low tech and than others though.
You definitely wouldn't want to use them in any kind of RAID for a start.