Recently I picked up a $100 Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q off ebay with an i5 7400T, 8GB of ram and a 256GB NVMe SSD to add to my Proxmox cluster.

The good & Bad#

Mini PCs are built to be small, quiet and power efficient, perfect for a home server. They’re also tiny, hence the name meaning they can live pretty much anywhere.

However, their form factor makes them hard to upgrade for future expandability and hard to add redundant storage to.

Where to buy them#

I’d recommend having a browse on eBay, find a listing with lots available which means they’re selling in bulk and make sure its not “barebones” since then your pretty much just getting a motherboard and case.

Why they’re such good value#

Similar to Thinkpads, businesses buy these machines in bulk and then decommision the old ones selling them in bulk for cheap.