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.

This is a very old post, I now have a fully functional homelab here - and a full walkthrough of everything on it here.

Im planning to start a homelab this year so I can get real hands on experience with server hardware and software, and also own my information and data instead of having to trust hosting companies with it

Upsides to running one

Most programmers and developers have a homelab for a few reasons