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WOW I'm seeing them for $80-350

use the solering iron to apply heat-shrink tubes since it is already hot and it's in your hands, instead of open flame get a jet lighter highly improove the results ;)

can u do light gaming on one of those i got i5 6500 like valorant or minecraft

Another good example is Esprimo Q956 with i5-6500T which is slightly more powerful than this i3...

Nice!

Awesome video, gonna check these out, thank you!

Damn, nice channel. I own a server rack myself with my gaming PC and server in it, still missing a firewall tho :D Love the shelf in the background with all these systems and old monitors <3

Great job! One thing anyone trying this on older backplanes should be aware of is some don't support the 'Power Disable Feature' provided by the SATA/SAS drive Pin 3 of larger/more modern hard drives. If a smaller, older drive spins up when insert into the backplane, but a newer typically 6+ TB drive doesn't then this is the issue. I have an older Lenovo server I refused to e-waste. Thinking it was something wrong with the backplane I finally discovered the reason and an easy solution. I just placed Kapton tape over pin 3 on each of the drives I'm using as detailed here th-cam.com/video/9W3-uOl4ruc/w-d-xo.html

Mini PCs are great for all sorts of projects. I bought the 600 version of this a few years back (at the time it was $220 AUS) with an i7 6700T, 16GB of RAM and 256GB NVME for a retro gaming PC. There's also Dell and Lenovo's in similar form factors. For a HTPC, I don't think the HP would look out of place on a TV unit. You can sometimes save money if you buy them without memory or drives but in a lot of cases, they can supply this pretty cheap compared to buying new. At least if they have a warranty and you have the RAM and drives and you have issues, you can send it back for a replacement or money back if you bought from a refurbish seller. One thing you need to look out for is overheating on these types of refurbished machines. I had issues with mine initially where it would just stop and reboot. I ended up removing and applying new heatsink paste and giving the fan and heatsink a dust (which wasn't all that bad)

Nice work, far better than my own janktastic Dell T5810 "thing" but then mine is for a somewhat different usecase, found it cheap with 32gb, quadcore xeon and 500gb disk -- it is now a 96gb ram equipped 14core with 2Tb SSD and 10Tb HDD and a Quadro P4000 GPU. Not what you'd expect from the outside as the front has transport damage making it a proper jankylooking sleeper. The GPU is for AI LLM stuff and encoding but the thing can play games too, better than I expected based on the cores being pretty slow on the e5-2683v3 it has. Also stuffed a 4port GBE in it, so it can run properly isolated VM's with multiple dedicated cores, ram and NIC. There are probably "smarter" ways to arrive at a similar result but I absolutely did not want a heavyass rackserver or something too loud to sleep in the same room with. It has an ML350G10 next to it that serves as the storage server among other duties, the ML350 has one 2,5" and one 3,5" disk cage, the smaller one stuffed with mirrored 480Gb SSD's for boot and 3x 15krpm SAS 900gb drives for fast storage, and the bigger cage has 16Tb bulk storage drives. So with a 10GBE in the HP fiber linked with Mikrotik CRS310 plus the DELL 1+ quad gigabit for now it's a decent homelab I think.

My google fu is lacking as I could not find this unit online and I too am an Aussie

Excellent structure and well researched video. The algorithm was right with this one. Subbed and looking forward to your future projects.

Love this kind of content. Great job!😁👍 Nice to see. Would you use only Sas drives or split the two cages between Sas and Sata? Also do you know if the back planes support Sata 3.0?

These are Delta double ball bearing fans aren't they? I really wouldn't replace them. Maybe take out the bearings and put some heavy grease on the shaft to damp the bearing rattle against it, maybe wash the bearings themselves first in degreaser then when dry in gear oil if they no longer feel great, or replace just the bearings. Fundamentally these fans are built to outlive us all.

How did you connect power to the drive backplane?

Stay making videos.

Finally someone did it. I bought this summer HP ML330 G6 with one PSU and one LFF 3,5" sata caddy and moddified it for my NAS build. It is awesome that these old HP ML cases are so wersatile and easy to moddify. Actually you can swap many parts between ML series. I bought, so ML110 G7 for my collegue and took his LFF caddy, just needed to drill holes for mounting, nothing special. It is really awesome that homelabers can buy and reuse these old, but still great cases and that they use standard parts. BTW I made that front panel to work, just repinned original one to single pins.

Solid video, great example of reusing older tech, just a question about noise levels , of the server power small fans vs standard power fans, and do you know if the server power fans are constant speed? and when i went to sub to your channel, I had allready done in the past

Always great when one can reuse a case like that.

Dude for a small channel you have the whole setup pretty well figured out. Already got the scripts and concise content down. This had everything you need and nothing you don't. Great job.

keep going my man!

the screws on the mounting plate for the psu's looks like it just might fit a regular atx style psu, im not going crazy right?

8$ for a 8 bay case and 2 750w PSUs is a great deal

I bless the algorithm this day, period. What an excellent find. And an extremely viable case for someone who wants to tinker and enter the DIY NAS space. [EDIT] The youtube effect has struck. These jawns are pricey on ebay. BUT, may find one locally or wait for price to drop.

Great video!

Nice work, a reasonable home server for starting with! I think its superb thank you 😀😀

Awesome

This is brilliant!

Awesome. Great info thank you.

Just stumbled on your channel, interesting idea. I've been using a Thinkpad T420 as our home server for several years. Replaced the HDD with an SSD and stuck a large HDD in the DVD bay. Agree about buying used off-lease commercial computers. I've had good luck doing that over the years.

4GB RAM wow

Amazingly comprehensive

I wanna eat chicken burger now.

I got an hp elitedesk 800 g3, and my idea was to use it as my daily driver, but to also use it to vnc into my other computers. Problem was I'm not near my router and using a LAN cable to hook it all up was out of the question. I added an ax wifi chip to it, and updated my gaming rig to an ax wifi card, and now remoting into the gaming rig to play games is viable. I was finally able to put the KVM switch aside. Only problem is my work laptop does not allow folks to remote in. So, I still have to KVM into it.

After the housing crash of 2008 in the US, laws were passed forcing fintech companies to run thin-clients that employees would use to log into virtual machines. Idea was it would keep all fintech data on servers w/o risk of employees taking it home on laptops and what-not. So, fintechs started buying these minipc's and smaller thin clients up in droves. If anything went wrong, IT person would just hand you a new one and take the old one. Plug-n-play it in, log into your VM, good to go. I worked at a fintech a few years ago, and the IT guy carried 2 around in his bag all the time. The companies go through accounting depreciation cycles to replace the things, so you see all their old kit get bought up by refurb companies that flip them on places like Amazon. As long as large companies are forced to use a thin-client model, you're gonna keep seeing mini pc's flooding the refurb market. And it's actually quite nice, b/c they're powerful enough to be a daily driver. That way you don't hve to boot up your gaming rig every day just to surf the web.

just to add. the Prodesk 600 G3 Mini and the Elitedesk 800 G3 mini are functionally identical hardware. To the point that the 600 can fully use vPro, like the 800, with a supported vPro CPU in it. They both have the same chipset and RAM limits.

I recently came across the dell version of these with a 6100t for $21.25 $AUD each on ebay with black friday coupons. I ordered 4 of them to mess around with proxmox clustering :)

Looking at getting one of these to run some game servers like Minecraft for some friends was planning using proxmox so I can shut up and down vms as I need them

Thanks (from S. Korea)

I wonder if intel processors with e-cores gonna be proxmox beasts? 7500T 4 cores, 14500T 14cores.

Just got one of these from ebay for about US$40 plus another 40 spent on more memory and an M.2. It will replace a I5 2nd gen notebook and I am really happy with what I got. It lacks nothing. In fact, I was l looking at a new Pi 4 or 5 but the cost versus performance was always discouraging. But this HP mini is just so much more powerful and flexible for the cost while not being too much bigger. And it can easily handle Windows 11 if I decided I needed to run that. Best of all, this G3 Mini used the same power adapter as the old HP notebook it replaced so I was able to plug and go, after adding a monitor, of course.

Related question: do you know if there's any software capable of controlling the fans on these HP machines?

I am considering to buy one of these mini PCs for using as an internal, small server. I first considered AWS ec2 but 4 vcpu which I think is minimum I need is expensive (around 30 AUD per month) Then I considered raspberries but they are very limiting as you also stated. I recently found out about these mini pcs and I am going to order soon. Thanks for the nice content!

@server science what power usage is your system pulling most of the time? Around 15w?

Useless shithead never even mentioned power consumption

Can the mini 600 g3 be a gaming pc? If so, what parts are needed?

have 2 600 G1's as HTPCs, turning a 600 G3 into a suitcase computer rig, and just bought an 800 G3 to turn into a home cloud server. in fact I'm watching this video from one of my 600 G1's projected onto my bathtub tiles from my Nebula Mars Lite projector. I've become quite the fan of these Elitedesk mini pc's but I also just bought a dell equivalent mini PC to experiment with.. lastly I wond up with a barebones 600 G3 last year that has a bad motherboard i kept as a parts donor machine..

I have two of the first gen 800 models. I use the usdt 800 G1 for my home server. Has an intel i7 4790k with 16gb of ddr3 1600mhz with a blue ray burner drive, m2 ssd, 5tb hdd and the best part is the usdt has an mxm slot that you can put a gpu in. Mine has a amd 4gb wx3100. Love this tiny machine!

I would call this "honest review" :) How much noise is there, at 50% or 100%, would you notice it in living roum under the tv, so few meters distance? You mention it has much noise at 50% cpu usage

I got the G3 prodesk 800 and I absolutely love it. I use it for my Plex server My only complaint is no NVMe storage