First server: Buying hardware in a developing country

I spent a few years living in a developing country in Africa so I have some appreciation of what you’re going through. I used to find lots of technology shops on Google Maps, etc, then when I got there they just sold phone covers and SIM cards and knock-off iPhones.

I can’t really offer much advice but have you considered just making something based on a second hand laptop? A lot of them are still pretty powerful just with old batteries and they’re designed to run efficiently.

Hmmm, I repurposed an old PC of mine, only buying large WD red HDDs. If I were to expand, I'd ask friends/family if anyone has an old box to sell. And maybe buy a server rack. Second option would be "used goods websites" and only after that I would be looking to buy new.

That's because jellyfin+immich+planka+a few static websites really don't need that much compute power. The heaviest work to be done is playing a movie, which could be done by a laptop. Unless you are planning for many users to use the server at the same time.

I live in slovenia

To make sure there is not a misunderstanding, the wattage of a PSU is not how much power it will draw. The wattage is how much is can supply. So if you have a 1000w PSU, but all your components draw 200w of power it will use about 200w of power.

Additionally, if you plan to get a lot of HDDs in the future, do some research on power rails. Some PSUs are designed to only be able to supply a small amount of power to things like HDDs because most people only have 1 or 2.

I think Brazil has very high tariffs so that is probably what is driving up prices.

10 year old hardware may not be that bad. It depends on what it is and how much electricity costs.

Building on a nonserver hw is a good idea. You could look things up at aliexpress, they almost always have free shipping. Alternatively you can buy stuff in US/EU for cheap and use some service for parcel delivery from there (meest/shipito etc.), often they deliver super cheap (like us$10-20 for something that would be two timesmore expensive locally)

Generally power supplies are the most electrically efficient at 20-60% utilization, so there's no issue with over-provisioning power, other than the (generally minor) upfront extra cost, which might very well pay for itself in the first months/years of usage. I'll take a look and see what I can find on those sites.

Edit: okay, trying to shop through google translate / currency calculator is actually aids so I'm gonna teach a man to fish instead. This is what I should have done from the start anyway.

Power supply: Anything from a decent brand, at basically anything >450W. a 650W or 850W is totally fine if it's at a decent price. They only draw the power they need, they don't just constantly pull 850W if the downstream components aren't calling for it.

CPU: 12400 is a fine cpu for what you're doing. You'll transcode at 720p no problem, 1080p maybe a single stream in real-time. I wouldn't bank on more than that. Only downsides here are the relatively shallow core counts if you ever expanded into other workloads. Without access to used xeon boards/cpus, it might be a reasonable choice though. What I would say is look for something older but with more cores/threads if you can. For example, a 10900 or even 10700k would probably be a better server cpu than a 12400.

Memory: DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money, as long as you aren't planning on expanding to inferencing on cpu. Get as much as you can. 32-64gb of ddr4 should be dirt cheap, especially if you find a cheap motherboard with 4 memory sockets.

Motherboard: If you want this thing to be versatile, you want 2x pci-e slots. Old gaming full-sized ATX boards are the way to go here. 1 slot for an HBA, 1 slot for a GPU, and that should be all you need. Bonus for as many open sata sockets as possible. 6-8 is pretty typical on 10th-12th gen gaming ATX boards.

GPU: gpus will be much more efficient at transcoding than an igpu, especially from older intel CPUs. A 1050, 2060, 3050, basically anything from the 10-series onward has a decent nvenc encoder that would work well with plex/jellyfin. My goto is generally old workstation cards, I use a p620 myself and it handles a single 4k encode job no problem. I'm not sure if they're viably purchasable anywhere in your area, but I'd definitely look out for a P620, P1000, or T400. Great value in those cards.

Drives/HBA: there are inexpensive LSI HBA cards to expand how many drives you can attach to a system if you need them, all you need is a spare pci-e slot and a place to physically mount the drives. The cheapest way to start here is to look for a motherboard with 4-6 sata slots and use those. Hardware raid is functionally dead these days in the real world, just use zfs or mdadm under linux to create an array with your desired level of resiliency/capacity.

Once you've priced out what it would cost to buy all of this new, look for prebuilt gaming PCs and office PCs that might be able to be expanded to fit these requirements. Prices look kind of steep on those markets you listed, but I'm sure something exists if you look hard enough.

This is all off the top of my head, as I'm not at my server atm...

I believe the 12400 should be good for hardware transcoding. I have a dell optiplex (i5 9th gen, can't remember exacts) running a low traffic server (my wife and I), with no issues running at least 2 4k streams concurrently. It comes down to what you encode your videos to.

Additionally I'd grab at least one new NAS drive, as they tend to be rated for long term use. If options aren't great there, then maybe a few drives in a raid configuration may also work. If you do get a NAS drive make sure its fairly quiet, my server is located in a common room, and the hdd fan is fairly audible. oops.

I've been running my server on an old laptop and a 20TB external hard drive connected via USB. it's not fast, there's a multi-second delay when the drive goes to "sleep" if nobody has used jellyfin in a while, which makes it appear to not work, but once it spins up it works like normal. this has let me keep things simple and cheap. I back up to another 20TB hard drive, which I recently bought as I could finally afford it. beefy hardware is great but not necessary, if you're okay with some limits.

Here in Panama a lot of people buy things online in the US and use freight forwarders, I don't know how they do it but I never pay taxes on that stuff

Just want to point out you don't need beefy hardware if you'll use jellyfin only in your network or if you won't stream very heavy media over the internet. If your library is mostly 1080p, you'll be able to stream that without transcoding for the most part.

Make sure you can afford the elctricity later. 250W constant draw doubled the bill I had before installing my rack. Do the math with kWh per month.

I agree with everyone saying you can run what you want on most any hardware. Only thing I’ll throw in is that with older/more used parts, you’re at a slightly higher risk of hardware failure, so if you wanna store data on there that you really don’t wanna lose, consider looking into online backup storage services. I’m not sure of their international availability but some good ones:

• borgbase
• backblaze

if it’s not a lot of files that you actually want backed up you might be able to get away with free/cheap tiers of google drive/one drive using rclone

Good luck!

You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it'll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it'll be fine.

What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family's files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.

I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.