Looking for some advice here on upgrading my homelab setup. I currently have an older Intel NUC i5 running Proxmox with Home Assistant, Frigate, and a handful of other services. I’m looking to move Frigate to running stand-alone on the NUC and get some new hardware for Proxmox. Looking to run all of my current services plus a Windows Server lab environment for some work stuff and leave a little headroom for the future.
I have been following the TMM series for a while now and was looking at getting a couple M920q tiny’s with i7s, add some RAM, maybe HA Proxmox cluster and be at or under $1k. Then I saw Patrick’s video on the P360 Ultra which looks like it could also fit the bill, with plenty of capacity to expand in the future and newer hardware. An i7 is right around a grand on eBay, add some RAM and be good to go.
Couple things I care about, in no particular order are:
Noise level - these boxes will be in my office.
Heat - same reason.
Power consumption - not a huge concern, but would like to get decent run time on UPS/not run up the power bill too much.
vPro - this is definitely something I want which is why I’m not looking at M75q, etc
Reliability - as this hardware will be running Home Assistant and several other important services for the house, I want it to be reliable and not have to mess with it much. That’s the primary reason I’m not looking at a custom built box.
I have a Synology NAS currently running Plex, but may shift this to the new hardware at some point so wouldn’t mind if the hardware was capable for that.
There are so many options with both of these routes that it’s hard to know what specs to look for on eBay and what is cheaper to upgrade after the fact, so any recommendations on that front would be great. Also any other places to buy besides eBay?
All that being said, I’m open to any advice on one of these two options, or possibly something else entirely. Thanks!
I have been following the TMM series for a while now and was looking at getting a couple M920q tiny’s with i7s, add some RAM, maybe HA Proxmox cluster and be at or under $1k. Then I saw Patrick’s video on the P360 Ultra which looks like it could also fit the bill, with plenty of capacity to expand in the future and newer hardware. An i7 is right around a grand on eBay, add some RAM and be good to go.
Couple things I care about, in no particular order are:
Noise level - these boxes will be in my office.
Heat - same reason.
Power consumption - not a huge concern, but would like to get decent run time on UPS/not run up the power bill too much.
vPro - this is definitely something I want which is why I’m not looking at M75q, etc
Reliability - as this hardware will be running Home Assistant and several other important services for the house, I want it to be reliable and not have to mess with it much. That’s the primary reason I’m not looking at a custom built box.
I have a Synology NAS currently running Plex, but may shift this to the new hardware at some point so wouldn’t mind if the hardware was capable for that.
There are so many options with both of these routes that it’s hard to know what specs to look for on eBay and what is cheaper to upgrade after the fact, so any recommendations on that front would be great. Also any other places to buy besides eBay?
All that being said, I’m open to any advice on one of these two options, or possibly something else entirely. Thanks!
