Get a used/refurbished laptop for under $300. Make sure it has at least 1TB storage (or plan to get an external drive or upgrade). Install Linux.
The benefit of a laptop is that its battery acts like backup power in the case of an outage.
Discussion
I have a decent lap top now I could use. Should I just get an external drive? Why do you recommend Linux?
It depends on what youâre planning to do with your node.
If youâre just planning to use it to validate your own transactions from a new wallet, then you can get away with running a pruned node. This takes only ~6GB of hard drive space. Your daily driver OS is fine, and all you need is Bitcoin Core with stock config.
But if youâre planning to run a full archival node thatâs online at all times, and you want to be able to recover wallets quickly, then youâll need storage space for the full chain and tx index (~500GB and growing), and youâll probably also want to run an Electrum server (~30GB and growing).
For Electrum server, Iâve used ElectrumX and Fulcrum. Iâve heard good things about electrs, though I havenât used it. Fulcrum is what Iâd personally use for a new node today.
There are existing node bundles that make setup somewhat easier, like myNode, Umbrel and BTCPayServer. Not sure which is easiest to install and use.