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! :)
I am in a similar situation, the only difference is that I have played with things like networking, docker etc before at work. Honestly 10k INR is not enough in my opinion. You can get refurbished hardware which will be very old, consume more electricity and will not be good performance wise. You will either have to increase your budget or compromise severely on the specs.