Hello, so I want to get into homelabbing/self hosting stuff, I was looking at hardware that are generally recommended but can't decide whats better to buy. Im deciding between a rasberry Pi or a mini PC, I would like to have something small thats, why I would like to avoid old laptops or some old office PCs like a Dell optiplex.
I would like to run a small NAS, small media server, DNS blocker, discord bot not for big use, Nextcloud, of course the security and monitoring services, maybe once in a while a Minecraft server for a few people, and would like to use it for learning purposes so maybe a bit of more Virtualization, possibly more?.
To put it into perspective, here are some example prices in my area.
Rasberry Pi:
In my area it a Rasberry Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM costs around 210$ + ~16$ for the official 27W power supply + 20$ for a case with cooling + extra cost for disk/s.
Mini PCs:
Important note I have no idea what specs are good for a mini PC in terms of CPUs, GPU etc, only know RAM and disk space. A mini PC with 8GB of ram and a 256 SSD costs about 400-500$, or an "empty" mini PC with no RAM and disk costs about 230$.
HDDs:
A brand new 1TB disk costs about 130$, which is utterly insane, every TB more is like 1.75x in price from the previous capacity.
Any advice or recommendations would be much appreciated.
Source: r/homelab · by /u/TheBananaMemer