Hardware repeatedly dying

[messylichwholivesfordrama]

Hi, I'm new to Jellyfin and mostly having a good time with it. Set up and running the server were super easy and problem free. Unfortunately I've had the first two pieces of hardware I've tried to use as servers die on me relatively quickly. The first was an old budget laptop from probably 2017 that was kind of on its last legs anyway. I wasn't shocked when it bricked after a couple of months (totally unresponsive, no lights or noise) and just replaced it. The second was an HP 260 G2 mini pc I bought on ebay. This one lasted longer (6 months) but recently died as well. It's similarly totally unresponsive when I try to power it on. I checked the adapter with an HP laptop with the battery removed and it was able to power on.

So anyway, my question is, am I doing something wrong or using bad hardware? I don't want to spend more money on an ebay or craigslist computer only to have it die after a couple of months. Both devices were sitting in an are with plenty of space for them to vent, but I guess it's possible they overheated. Both were periodically restarted so they weren't on literally all the time. My goal was to use low-cost recycled hardware for my server, and maybe that just wasn't a reasonable goal? I'm far from an expert in anything related to computers but just kind of like trying out this kind of DIY stuff.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[TheDreadPirate]

I, and a lot of other people, have hardware older than what you used that are still going. So I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with continuing to use older/second hand hardware.

My gut tells me the issue might be the quality of your power. Many moons ago when I was still living at my parent's house I had many power supplies pre-maturely die in my desktop PC. I got a UPS battery backup to give me enough time to save games during outages, but it also had the secondary affect of my power supplies no longer dying after a year or two.

Consider getting a quality UPS from APC or Cyberpower (not the PC builder), making sure to run your Jellyfin server off the plugs that are battery backed up.

[Emailluka]

Maybe it is a good idea to figure out which part failed in the used systems - so you can identify the 'weakness' which caused the problem in the first place.
F.ex. try to start the old hardware with a thumbdrive with some linux to check if maybe 'just' the systemdrive overheated. Or at least try to get into the bios of the system.
I recommend doing that because sadly it happened to my own mini-pc server. The space inside is pretty narrow for cooling and longer periods of f.ex. copying data will heat it up to a point where the smart-attributes showed that it was set to read-only mode -> which ultimately bricked it and i needed to replace it.

Just my thoughts and experiences.