I've been re-establishing my home lab and decided to get away from rackmount gear. I found ServeTheHome's TinyMiniMicro[1] series invaluable for choosing some mini PCs that would be right for me.
I went with three HP Prodesk 600 G4 that averaged $250/ea with the i5-8500T/i5-8600T, 256GB NVMe, and a total of 40GB RAM. They can go to 64GB RAM, the dual M.2 M-key plus potentially an SFF SATA drive offer plenty of storage potential, they're effectively silent, and power consumption is much lower than a big server full of fans. vPro potentially offers out-of-band remote management but I haven't tried digging into that yet.
I have two dedicated to Frigate with M.2 Coral TPUs. On the third I've been consolidating the sprawl of Linux VMs and Docker containers running home automation and network management stuff. Could probably make do with just two but why buy only two when you can have three?
I went with three HP Prodesk 600 G4 that averaged $250/ea with the i5-8500T/i5-8600T, 256GB NVMe, and a total of 40GB RAM. They can go to 64GB RAM, the dual M.2 M-key plus potentially an SFF SATA drive offer plenty of storage potential, they're effectively silent, and power consumption is much lower than a big server full of fans. vPro potentially offers out-of-band remote management but I haven't tried digging into that yet.
I have two dedicated to Frigate with M.2 Coral TPUs. On the third I've been consolidating the sprawl of Linux VMs and Docker containers running home automation and network management stuff. Could probably make do with just two but why buy only two when you can have three?
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/