Used Mini PC recommendations

[leeism]

Hi All

I have been watching a lot of videos and also reading a lot of reviews on mini PCs to suit my requirements and thought it was about time I asked for a few recommendations from you all.

What I currently have:

1 X RPI running Teslamate in Docker
1 X RPI running Home Assistant in Docker
1 X RPI running OMV in Docker as a NAS and Time Machine
1 X Older i7 quad core running Blue Iris with 6 cameras, every day use for business so nothing intensive and Unifi Controller (at idle runs at around 45 watts)

What I would like to do is virtualise all of the above using Proxmox on a used Mini PC (in the future will add a couple of nodes) that is low power. I would also like to seperate the BI VM and have another Windows VM for everyday work use (it would be used primarily for outlook, word, excel etc). I Would also like to have 2 M.2 drives in the Mini PC with at least a 2.5GB Nic.I would then have a NAS for any storage that is not for the OSes.

I have been looking at the Lenovo 1L, but am not sure if i5 or i7 with a minimum of 8700T is what I need, but then also confused on which one to buy that ban have the 2.5GB Nic added and also has 2 X M.2.

Any help would be great, thanks

 

[louie1961]

I bought an HP Elitedesk 800 mini G9 from E-bay. It has a i5-12500T processor and until recently 16 GB of total RAM. I was able to pick up a 2.5gbe NIC for it that goes into the FlexIO slot, for like $35. I has two m.2 drive slots and a 2.5 inch SATA bay. I am running Proxmox and have been totally happy with it. I have Proxmox set up as a ZFS mirror on 2 1TB NVMe drives, I have a 2TB SSD in the SATA drive bay for ISOs and such, and I keep all my data on a NAS (storage for NextCloud, docker volumes, etc.). It runs like a champ, and idles at 9 watts. I am running two LXC containers, 14 different docker containers (Cloudflare tunnel connectors, Watchtower, Portainer, Photoprism, Mealie, Grocy, some Maria DB instances, Home Assistant). I also run 3 Wordpress instances and a NextCloud instance all in their own VMs.

The PC cost right around $490 when I picked it up last summer. My only advice, is to BE SURE the machine you buy has an UNLOCKED BIOS. In the newer generations of the elitedesk mini, there is no way to reset the password and access the bios unless you get one that is unlocked or they give you a working password. I wouldn't bother buying one that is bios locked.

 

[leeism]

Thanks for your response @louie1961, a lot of good information.

Do you think the i5 12500T would handle blue iris and another windows VM?

I am in Australia and the G9 mini is still a little pricey at around $1200 AUD upwards. It is still worth looking at though.

 

[louie1961]

I just bought a $100 NUC-like mini PC with an N100 processor. Far less power than the 12500T. There are videos of people running half a dozen VMs on an N100. I suspect if you have enough memory in the unit, it will run everything you want with no problem. My CPU utilization never goes above 12%

 

[leeism]

I have been reading up on the N100, they seem to be very reasonably priced. Just unsure If it will be suitable for what I am trying to run though.