Small and cheap sff with 1x 3.5 sata? (used, $50 budget)

My old Asus VM40B died (won't turn on at all) and it is ancient so no tears, but now I need something to put the drive in...

Options are put it in an old tower that's not doing much or maybe there's something else small I can pick up. I dunno if any of those hp/dell/lenovo tiny boxes do 3.5" drives.

Just need something to turn on once a week, update the backups and turn back off. zfs scrub once a month. x86 preferred because I run FreeBSD and FreeBSD on ARM looks painful. I'd like to spend $50 or less and don't mind waiting ... I can set up a tower and swap out to something better sized later.

Might possibly have it be a web browsing terminal too in the future... It's probably going to my barn and it's nice to look stuff up occasionally, but perf isn't really important. The vm40b was a celeron from 2013 and did all I needed.

No idea what to suggest but they do make low end x86 NAS boxes. Not sure about getting 1x3.5" but a quick search brought up some 2 drive models. Some of them might actually be a little weak for occasional browsing. Like one had 4GB ram. Chrome would be displeased. Might be easier than hunting down a mini-PC that can actually take a HDD. First thing I ran across from a brand that I've actually heard of is this BeeLink mini-PC, though given that it uses an Intel N95 CPU I think it's more of a NAS. That's not a recommendation, just the first thing I saw that I'd actually heard of. I'm really not a connoisseur of mini-PCs.

I know what you mean about old gear being just fine for this sort of thing. My way of handling NAS is an old Lian-Li all aluminum full tower with a row of 5.25" external bays down the front sitting in the utility room in my basement next to my networking gear. It's got an i3-10100 in it, which meets its performance requirements. In the case of that box its only real performance requirement is copy a large file over the network to or from an M.2 SSD at 10Gb speed. It handles that, so it's fine. It has HDDs too but just 2 drives in raid-1. I'm just not enough of a packrat to need a disk array, so I just run a mirror for storing backups and random crap and use an M.2 SSD as scratch space to move files around. I have an Ivy Bridge box that could do it too if I put an M.2 card in it, but it's an X79/Socket 2011 setup so it uses too much power to just leave on all the time as a file server and a WiFi controller (I'm using access points, and the ones I have need controller software to support fast roaming).

Another option is always just put the drive in an external enclosure and use whatever you want for the PC.

zandor said:

First thing I ran across from a brand that I've actually heard of is this BeeLink mini-PC,

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Yeah, that would work, but way out of budget; I'm looking more for things to find on eBay rather than new...

More drive slots is fine, I don't need them now, but I do run a 4 disk system and a 2 disk system (but those 'need' 2x 10G for my overcomplicated firewalling).

toast0 said:

Yeah, that would work, but way out of budget; I'm looking more for things to find on eBay rather than new...

More drive slots is fine, I don't need them now, but I do run a 4 disk system and a 2 disk system (but those 'need' 2x 10G for my overcomplicated firewalling).

Click to expand...

Ah, well, at least we got that out there. I don't see anything in your original post about a particular budget or that you were thinking used. Got any guidance on a budget? I probably won't have any useful suggestions but it'd likely be helpful to anyone who does.

I'll edit the title to add the budget, but I mentioned $50 in the text. Thanks!