This is a good value for a home self-sovereign LN node.
* CPU much faster than RPi.
* 8GB: you should add another 8GB (DDR4 SODIMM 2400 or faster) or replace to max out at 32GB RAM.
* That's a 1TB SATA HD. You could add a nvme 2280 SSD to gain storage redundancy for your critical LN database. SSD's are at an all time low price now. I recommend TLC drives without HMB like Samsung 970 Evo Plus, Teamgroup MP34, or Crucial P2. 2TB is very affordable these days.
* You could also replace the spinning hard drive. Elimination of moving parts improves reliability. For 2.5" SATA I recommend the 2TB Crucial MX500 that's been below $120 recently.
* Most of the cost is your new drives. These drives will outlive the machine. If the machine dies you can simply move the drives into another machine. Linux won't care about the underlying hardware. It should work with zero or minimal reconfiguration.
I've been testing a similar model here. The screen and keyboard are of lower quality and music sounds bad from these speakers. These economy business laptops make excellent servers when you're able to buy them cheap enough which often is possible when fleets of corporate machines are liquidated.
There is risk in buying used. You want to immediately stress test the device including CPU, RAM, and disk after you receive it so you know if it needs to be returned. You want to flash the firmware to get security updates. That however has risk of bricking which would become a complicated discussion with the seller.
Note: Several other models are suitable as dual internal SSD home servers. I don't often post about them though because quantities for sale are not high. In this case the seller seems to have many for sale and the price is good.
Please follow and zap if you want more self-sovereign LN advice like this. I could be convinced to write a guide of what to do after you receive a used Thinkpad. I've lost money buying and testing non-refundable duds so you don't have to.
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Dual redundant 2TB TLC SSD's. This is stupid cheap for RAID-1 of this capacity and quality. Become self-sovereign with your LN node with data retention safety and tons of storage to run additional apps.
Below is a cheap yet powerful machine where you can use these two disks internally. Why were people buying RPi!?!?
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Note: I've not tested the TeamGroup MP34 myself yet. The specs and reviews make it sound good enough.
TeamGroup MP34 sounds good on paper with the very common controller and TLC NAND. For nvme you want DRAM, not HMB (Host Memory Buffer). The reviews described it as not making any compromises and it is seemingly fine except they offer a shorter 3-year warranty than Samsung's 5-year.
I normally would buy the Samsung 970 Evo Plus that's $139.99 for 2TB. The Samsung is a known level of reliability. I'm not too worried about trying the MP34 for my next node.
So long as you buy two different SSD brands, use a filesystem like btrfs that'll catch errors, and actually monitor the machine, you can probably get away with pretty much any cheap off brand SSDs.
…and even if you are buying expensive name brand SSDs, getting two different brands is still good advice.
Exactly. I recommend two different bus technologies and brands so the disks aren't likely to fail simultaneously.
These are not the cheapest off brand SSD's. These models are TLC instead of QLC, and DRAM not HMB. They're supposed to survive power loss without write buffer loss.
The review I read said it had a 3 year warranty. I feel cheated.
