this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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227
Low Cost Mini PCs (lowcostminipcs.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
77 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Next time, check out Level1Techs on YouTube. Wendell reviews a lot of these devices, and he'll give pretty good feedback on what's legit and what's not. Ho has reviewed MinisForum for years and has consistently recommended them. Just be careful, because he also reviews the more sketchy devices and sometimes recommends them (but with caveats), so don't assume that because it is covered, that it's legit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that's accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I might end up getting one for that. My current TV doesn't have ads, but does have enough smart features to have a Jellyfin app, so I'm good for now. But my SO wants a bigger TV, so that may end up being sooner than later.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Beelink are solid in my opinion, but I was in the same boat, I picked one at random that had the specs I wanted.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I was mainly looking for used ones like Optiplex, Thinkcenter etc when I made this. Hence those brand filters. Thought they were a much better deal than a beelink, so I guess the site is optimized for that. Oh also can you send the link for the KingHive Pro listing? Might be able to filter out brands like that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Those were just made up brands, but you can see what I mean if you look through Amazon, eBay, Alibab...etc.

From your own tool you can see these brands stand out:

Some extra context: https://news.risky.biz/risky-biz-news-acemagic-mini-pcs-shipped-with-pre-installed-malware

'AceMagic' AKA 'AceMagician' AKA 'AcePuter' AKA 'AceMini' depending on your market.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Need to add shipping charges to the price...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's a free shipping filter, but if you're not in that country, shipping costs a lot. The solution to that is to add more marketplaces, which I'm going to next. Where are you located?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What's an HHD?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Hybrid hard drive. Basically, a hard drive with a large solid state cache.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Shipping prices would vary depending on location though, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Actual shipping would vary depending on location, but sellers are padding the shipping charge so they can display a lower unit price.

[–] starshipwinepineapple 22 points 2 months ago

I really like that it is a static website being updated and built on a schedule from github actions.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Number of Drive bays is also a neat filter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately this info is rarely provided by sellers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I know, which is why it would be extra helpful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I don't see a filter for drive bays. I'm on mobile so maybe that's why?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Not quite as simple as checkboxes, but the ability is there to some degree!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I'll add gen filters. Form factors are tougher because sellers are inconsistent with them.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I've heard but not confirmed that the various NUC models have CEC

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

This is a great site, thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have a few services running on Proxmox that I'd like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I'm done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I'll probably buy two.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn't have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?

Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.

I've had zero issues without ECC, so I'm just curious about your need for it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sadly only for US and UK, or am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I plan to add Canada and Australia next.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

FOR THE COMMONWEALTH

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

Doesn't work for me on Firefox mobile. Neither "mobile" site or Desktop versions. Hitting "Next/Enter" on my keyboard does nothing, there is no Submit button that I can see, and refreshing the page just resets all fields to defaults.

I don't want an Intel with 4gb RAM and a 256GB spinning drive, and OS included? No dice, that's what I'm offered. Without being able to filter results, its just another craigslist/amazon/newegg front-end ... a less useful one.

EDIT: Turns out there are zero fanless non-Intel, 16+GB RAM, 1024+GB SSD/eMMC offerings with USB-C to list. Strange no-one is packaging an OrangePi 5 Plus like so, but I haven't seen a fanless heat-sink sufficient to make that a good idea anyways.

I had tweaked some of the options, but without clearing either-or-both of those last two, especially "fan-less", all I was getting was the five sponsored "results" the top, which changed just enough to make it seem like that's all the results I could get.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I'll try to optimize it, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Works for me, but damn it's dog snot slow. Like typing takes 1-2 seconds for each character to show up

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

This; works on Mull; there is no submit button, it just constantly refreshes the results and thus is slow AF from continuously juggling the data.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

works fine for me

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Using Firefox mobile, everything works and is mostly performance 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I didn't have an issue.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Update: added germany https://lowcostminipcs.com/de/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Awesome! I was looking for one to gift to my cousins

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (15 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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