this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Recommended mini pc for a homelab? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by FukOui@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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My old laptop for self hosting just croaked, and I'm thinking of buying a 2nd hand mini pc, but this time I want to do it proper. I want to optimize the electricity consumption and specs needed/ future upgreadability, considering how expensive everything is now.

My use case is just for self hosting files (infrequent access and reducing reliance to google drive), and occasional dev workload via ssh. I'm thinking of buying a used optiplex with at least i6 gen cpu (SFF or micro form factor), but I want to see if there are better options.

There was a link posted in this subreddit about power consumption comparison of different mini pcs (raspberry pi, n100, etc), and I regret not saving it.

If anyone could suggest me better options it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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[–] tangeli@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

I have a FriendlyELEC NanoPi R4S with metal case, running Armbian with a couple of USB SSD drives, for file and website hosting mostly. Just my personal use: no heavy loads. It's air cooled (no fan). It typically reports a temperature of about 35 centigrade. Up into the 40s if I increase the load (development, upgrades, indexing, etc.) I don't know the actual power consumption, but the power adapter is only 15w. My original NanoPi R1 works fine for the same purpose and uses even less power - runs cooler. I got the R4S and an R2S Plus, so as to have spares and development/tinkering systems and to have a 64bit CPU, in case I wanted to run anything that requires it.

It's not upgradeable but it's fairly cheap and has worked well enough that I haven't wanted to upgrade it for years, other than migrating from the R1 to the R4S, as mentioned. If by dev workload you mean running local LLMs or heavily loaded CI build system it probably wouldn't be a good fit, but fine for compiling a package occasionally, local git and npm servers and similar. I don't recall when I got the R1: some time before Covid. The R4S and R2S Plus have been running for about 5 years now.

There are many other SBCs supported by Armbian. You might find something better matched to your requirements.