Tell me what it's for.
I'll tell you what to buy.
Four questions — use case, where it lives, how much noise you can stand, what you'll spend. Out comes a build: compute, storage, network, and the thing everyone forgets. Every part comes with the reason not to buy it.
How this works, and how it makes money
The rule: buy for the workload you have this month, not the one you imagine in two years. Homelabs grow by accretion; every part you buy early is a part you buy twice.
Links go to Amazon searches, not to specific models. This is not laziness — it is the only honest way to write hardware recommendations that stay true. Mini PC model numbers turn over every few months, drive prices swing weekly, and any guide that hard-links a 2026 SKU is a graveyard by 2027. A search for "mini pc n100 16gb" is still correct next year; a link to one listing is not.
We are an Amazon affiliate, so we earn a small cut if you buy through a link. That commission is a small percentage set by Amazon per product category, not by us, so nothing here is recommended because it is expensive. Several answers in this picker — like "an unmanaged switch is genuinely enough for you" — actively cost us money, which is the point.
Prices are given as bands, never as numbers, because hardware pricing moves faster than we can edit.
Guides
- Mini PC vs NAS: which one first?They solve different problems. Buying the wrong one first costs you the second one anyway.
- Used enterprise gear: what's worth it and what's a trapFree RAM is not free. The power and noise maths, honestly.
- Building a homelab that lives in a cupboardEvery decision that determines whether the thing is audible.
- Storage maths: how much do you actually need?Usable vs raw, why RAID isn't a backup, and the 3-2-1 rule applied properly.