I have a couple of Intel NUCs and they are great, one is the first generation NUC with the Celeron and runs Home Assistant without problems.

At the moment I am eyeing the new N100 CPUs they are pretty powerful compared to the previous generation. Asrock and Asus are bringing out motherboards with the CPU soldered and they are also fanless. The Asrock is nicer because you don't need a real PSU for it and it has an extra SATA port. They are not yet available.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-n100i-d-d4/

Definitely a NUC or similar mini PC from the likes of Geekom, Beelink, or Minisforum. My whole homelab was mini PCs until I consolidated to a NUC 12 Pro as I build up my rack. Slap Proxmox on the machine, build some VMs and LXCs, and have at it.

Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.

This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.

The best resource imo for big home servers if you graduate using old PCs is the Homelab Discord server. They’re also at !homelab@lemmy.ml.

I use a Dell Micro with Ubuntu for docker containers mounted to a wall with a Synology NAS 4 bay for storage. I used to have a small form factor with a 12bay SAS array attached but the power consumption was ridiculous.

I just built a Server using J5040 board. With 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system , 2x4tb ironwolf, all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.

Will run proxmox as first layer.

At the moment hardware is just expensive. I ended up with a NUC with 32gb of ram in order to future proof myself while I wait for hardware to become cheaper. Other than another stick of ram I can't see me needing to update any time soon.

You can get some decent enterprise hardware for fairly cheap on places like amazon. I got a dell R710 for around $800 a couple of years back. The equipment tends to be a little scuffed up and older in terms of hardware, but they still offer plently of performance IMO. The one I have has a 6 drive RAID with 1.5TB disks, dual 6-core processors, and 128GB of ram. Only downside I would say is they tend to use quite a bit of power (around 207W from what I've measured).

I am still quite happy with my old Sun Fire X2270 M2 with Dual Xeon X5675. Not new, but its 12 physical cores, 88 GB RAM and 4 hotswap SATA drive bays in a 1U rack unit make it quite a decent machine for running a couple of VMs.

I also like my Dell T320 Rackable Tower server. It has room for 8 hotswap 3.5" SAS drives (or 16 2.5"), redundant power supply, and you should be able to get it for under $300. With a Xeon E5-1428L V2, mine is still quite capable and uses between 140 and 160 W (with 8 disks).

Im using refurbished thinkpads (x220-203) but i've seen a lot of homelabs using Nuc pc