Find the best deals for mini PCs on eBay. With many of them entering the used market, this tool helps you find a cheap mini PC based on your needs. Prices are updated a few times per hour.

Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Nice, but I wish there was a “Reputable Brand” or “Warranty” filter.

    A lot of these boxes are made by the same OEM, and branded a thousand different ways under various names specifically for price fixing on large marketplace portals online - different colors, different cases, but same features without a warranty.

    A lot of these fake brand names come out of companies who simply change names once they hit a certain number of bad reviews on marketplaces. Same shitty hardware, different brand name. Beelink and Minisforum are legit, but ‘KingHive Pro’ is probably made by ‘MiniKing’, and also sells things under “GamerKing”, for example.

    • fpslem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Beelink and Minisforum are legit

      I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Does anyone happen to know if there is a N100 model that supports HDMI-CEC so I can make my old TV set smart with a recent Kodi and maybe some retro-games? But I’d rather not let it consume 9W or whatever such a machine needs all day long. So it’d need to start and shut down on its own. Preferably without manual additional steps involved, hence the CEC…

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

    [Thread #974 for this sub, first seen 17th Sep 2024, 00:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Anyone have experience with external HDD enclosures? I currently have two 3.5" HDDs, and I’d like room for two or three more. Reliability is pretty important to me, so something that’ll cut out periodically isn’t going to work.

    • pirat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’m in the same situation as you, more or less… I have three new 22TB drives that need an enclosure, preferably for JBOD (no hardware RAID needed) but I can’t figure out which ones are actually good products… I don’t mind using a random-brand product if it’s actually solid.

      I find it very difficult to figure out which ones will support my 22TB drives. And for some of them, it seems, it’s impossible to add new drives to empty slots later (because of hardware RAID, I guess?), which has made me hesitant in buying one with more slots than I have drives, in case they can’t be utilized later on anyway…

      I was looking at the QNAP TR-004 which was mentioned by someone else somewhere on Lemmy some months ago, but IIRC it would be impossible to use the fourth slot later if the drive isn’t included in the hardware RAID configuration…

      EDIT: I have also been looking into so-called “backplanes” as an alternative, since they seem to do the job and are cheaper, but I’m unsure if I’ll need a PC chassis/case/tower for that to actually work?

      If you find something good (products or relevant info), feel free to share it with me.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, I don’t understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don’t expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I’ll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I’m not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.

        FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn’t give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he’s seen…

        After a bunch of research, what I’ve found is:

        • okay chipset, but garbage build quality (no dampening for drives, no hot-swap, etc)
        • fancy controller that doesn’t support JBOD - non-starter for me, I don’t want anything to do with hw controllers
        • expensive - at a certain point, I’ll just keep my oversized ATX case that does the job

        Now I’m looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren’t that popular.

      • SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I’ve run a TR-004 for the last 5 years haven’t had any reliability issues so far. In hardware raid modes, drives are hot swappable but you can’t grow the array without wiping it. I’m JBOD mode you need to power off before swapping drives. The main problem I’ve had is their chipset is only partially supported by smartmontools due to proprietary crap so there is some strange behaviour there.

        • pirat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Thanks for your response. Much appreciated. Do I understand it correctly that I’ll be able to add more drives later in JBOD mode, but I’ll simply have to power it off before adding or swapping drives?

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.netEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Looking great! I think it would be amazing if there are filters for processor generations as well as form factor. Thanks for sharing this tool!