Mini PC, NAS or used enterprise gear

The three shapes are not competing on performance. They compete on watts, bays, noise and who owns the software. Get those four straight and the decision usually makes itself. If you have not yet worked out what the machine has to run, start with Choosing home server hardware and come back.

The running cost, with the arithmetic shown#

Annual kWh is idle watts times 8.76. The price used here is 18.34 cents per kWh, the US average residential rate for June 2026 from the EIA. Substitute your own rate; in most of Europe it is 0.28 to 0.35 EUR, which roughly doubles every figure in the last column.

Read the last two rows as the real price of a 300 USD server: over five years the R730xd costs about 1044 USD in electricity, and the mini PC costs 64 USD. That gap buys a lot of mini PC.

Idle draw is also the number vendors never publish and reviewers rarely measure correctly. Add 8 to 12 W for an LSI HBA, 3 to 5 W for each spinning 3.5 inch disk at idle, and 5 to 10 W for a permanently powered management controller. What a home server costs to run builds the full total-cost picture including disks, domain and off-site storage.

Mini PC: N100/N150 class and up#

What you get: silence, 8 to 15 W idle, a machine the size of a hardback book, and Intel Quick Sync on the iGPU, which is the correct transcoding answer for Jellyfin and the correct decode answer for Frigate. Jellyfin's own hardware page names the N100 as a recommended integrated GPU.

What you give up is expansion, and it is a hard ceiling rather than a soft one. Intel documents a 16 GB maximum memory size for the N150. Most chassis take one M.2 NVMe drive and one 2.5 inch SATA disk, so bulk storage means USB or a DAS enclosure, and USB-attached disks are the single most common cause of a ZFS pool going degraded for no reason. If you want more than 16 GB, step up to a 12th-generation or newer i5 mini PC or a used Lenovo/Dell micro desktop, which take 64 GB and still idle around 10 to 15 W.

Right for: a light-to-mid stack, a first server, anyone in a flat, anyone who has to put the machine in a bedroom, anyone whose bulk data is under about 8 TB.

Wrong for: parity arrays, more than two disks, anything needing PCIe slots.

Prebuilt NAS: bays and a vendor OS#

What you get: four to eight hot-swap bays, a chassis and PSU designed for them, and an operating system where creating a share, a snapshot schedule and a scheduled SMART test is four clicks. That last part is worth more than enthusiasts admit. Most people who build their own NAS never configure a scrub schedule or an alert, and then discover a dead disk during a rebuild. If you build your own, Scrutiny or a plain smartd alert is the part you must not skip.

What you give up comes in two parts.

The first is control over what runs. On x86 models the vendor container package runs ordinary images. On the ARM entry models it runs ordinary arm64 images and nothing else, and while 95.2 percent of the profiled tools publish arm64 builds, the ones that do not are often exactly the ones you wanted. Whether the container package is available on your specific model at all is the vendor's decision and it changes across OS releases.

The second is software end of life, and it outlives the hardware by years. A NAS chassis with good disks is mechanically fine at ten years old. The vendor OS on it is not receiving security updates at ten years old. At that point you are running an internet-adjacent file server with unpatched services, or you are wiping it and installing a general-purpose OS, which is the thing you paid a premium to avoid.

The open equivalents make this failure mode visible instead of hiding it. TrueNAS's documented migration path from the FreeBSD-based CORE line to the current Linux line is not an in-place upgrade past 24.04: it is a clean ISO install and a configuration restore, and the docs warn that rolling back to a FreeBSD boot environment can break the system. TrueNAS 25.10 removed the built-in certificate authority, removed SMART test scheduling from the UI, and switched to open NVIDIA drivers that only support Turing and newer, so a Pascal-era card used for transcoding stops working after the update. Unraid moved from lifetime-only keys to tiers in 2024: Starter at 49 USD for six storage devices, Unleashed at 109 USD, Lifetime at 249 USD, with the first two including one year of OS updates and a 36 USD optional annual extension after that.

None of that is a scandal. It is what owning a storage appliance costs, and the honest version is that a NAS is a subscription to somebody's release notes.

Right for: four or more disks, households where somebody other than you needs to fix a share, anyone who wants hot swap.

Wrong for: people who will end up installing Proxmox VE on it anyway.

Used enterprise: the value-per-dollar trap#

What you get is genuinely extraordinary on the spec sheet. A Dell R730xd with two E5-2600 v4 CPUs, 128 GB of registered ECC memory and twelve 3.5 inch bays trades for 250 to 450 USD. Registered ECC DDR4 is close to free. You get redundant power supplies, a proper backplane, an SAS expander and a chassis designed to be serviced.

You also get IPMI, and this is the underrated part. iDRAC or iLO gives you power control, a browser console and virtual media over the network with the host powered off. You can reinstall the operating system on a machine in a garage from a laptop in another building. Once you have used it, a machine without it feels broken. Keep it on a management VLAN and never on the internet: BMC firmware has a long history of authentication bypasses and it is not something you patch monthly, which is a case A security baseline for a home server covers in more detail.

The costs are the ones nobody photographs. Noise: 40 mm and 60 mm fans at 6000 RPM, which is not "a bit loud", it is unusable in living space and audible through a closed door. Heat: 130 W idle is a permanent 130 W space heater. Power: the table above, roughly 200 USD a year. And DDR3-era gear is worse on all three counts while being cheaper, which is how people end up with a 200 W machine to run eleven containers.

Right for: many virtual machines, a real Proxmox cluster with quorum, anyone who needs 128 GB or more of RAM, anyone with a basement or a garage and a spare circuit.

Wrong for: everyone else, and specifically anyone whose reason is "it was only 300 dollars".

What most people should buy#

Buy a mini PC with a 12th-generation or newer Intel CPU, 32 GB if the platform allows it, one NVMe drive for the OS and container data, and put bulk storage on either one large internal 2.5 inch disk or a separate storage box.

The reasoning is that the two things people underestimate are the electricity bill and the noise, and the mini PC wins both by an order of magnitude while losing nothing that a normal self-hosted stack needs. Quick Sync covers transcoding. 32 GB covers Immich, a media stack and an automation hub. Docker Engine does not care how many sockets the board has.

The split-brain version is better still, and it is what a lot of experienced people converge on: a low-power mini PC that is always on and runs the services, plus a separate storage machine that holds the bulk data and can be powered down or spun down. The services box stays at 10 W. The storage box costs what it costs, only when it is awake, and it is also the machine that holds the local copy your backup plan restores from.

Before you buy#

Size the RAM against your actual list with Stack planner rather than guessing, and settle the storage layout with ZFS, btrfs, mdadm or one disk before you commit to a bay count, because a two-bay chassis makes some choices for you permanently. If you are choosing an operating system for the box, Proxmox vs TrueNAS and Unraid vs TrueNAS cover the three realistic options. Then buy a plug-in power meter and check what you actually bought: What a home server costs to run turns that reading into a number you can compare against the subscriptions you are replacing.