Over the last year I’ve been quietly building out my LXC/Incus lab on secondhand hardware sourced from Japan, and a few people in other threads asked how I keep the cost down. Here are my field notes — hopefully useful for anyone who wants more cores and RAM for containers without paying new-hardware prices.
Why Japan? The domestic secondhand market there is enormous and unusually well-kept. Business mini-PCs and 1L desktops (great low-power Incus hosts), ex-lease SFF machines, and even small tower servers turn up constantly at prices that are hard to match elsewhere — partly because gear is treated carefully, partly because the domestic supply is huge.
Where the deals actually are. The cheapest listings live on domestic-only channels: Yahoo Auctions Japan, Mercari JP, and the Hard-Off reuse chain. None of these ship overseas directly, and most won’t even accept a foreign card or address. That’s the catch that trips people up.
What “junk” means. A lot of the best-value listings are marked ジャンク (junk) — which in Japan usually means “untested / no returns,” not “broken.” The opposite is 動作確認済 (function-verified). Read the tag before you bid.
A few gotchas worth knowing before you buy:
| Gotcha | What to check |
|---|---|
| Power | Japan is 100V — desktop PSUs cope fine, but confirm before plugging in a step-up-free build |
| Keyboard/BIOS | Laptops ship JIS layout; fine for a headless container host |
| Storage | Used SSDs: ask for power-on-hours / TBW; cheap for a container pool but check wear |
| Shipping | Domestic-only sellers need a forwarding/proxy address in Japan |
The way I handle the domestic-only problem is a proxy-buy service that gives you a Japan address, bids/checks out on your behalf, then consolidates everything into one international box (consolidation is where you save the most on shipping). I’ve been using OneMall for this. Two searches I keep bookmarked:
Anyone else running Incus/LXC on secondhand SFF or mini-PC hardware? Curious what you landed on and what your idle power draw looks like.