Hello, long time lurker, first time poster here. I just got a router recently (unifi dream router), and wanted to start on building a little homelab. I currently live in dorm in my univ with 3 other roommates, so mini pcs looks good to me, they’re not too loud and small enough to live next to my router. I saw a deal on shopee which is a 2018 i3 mac mini, with 3.6GHz, 8gb ram and 128 gigs of storage. it costs 8000 NTD (about 250 in usd), it’s second-handed and has some scratches on it (I kinda don’t mind). Is it worth it, or should I be looking for something cheaper/not mac mini? (ps I live in Taiwan, sellers/things from east asia like china or japan are much preferred, otherwise the shipping might be a lil bit steep for me). thanks, appreciate all helps.
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I would opt for like 3 older lenovo mini pcs or something for home labbing. Guess it depends on what you want to do. I like making Promox clusters.
For that kind of money you can get new mini PCs that will be much more powerful and have more than one NIC, like the other comment mentioned.
Take a look at Beelink mini PCs for example.
I like Mac Minis in general, but for a first homelab machine I’d choose something with 2+ NICs, without using USB dongles.
May I ask why you need 2 NiCs for home labs?
mini pcs and mac minis are nice but if you want lot’s of customization options, I do recommend getting the asrock N100 motherboards. they’re around 130USD and these have an n100 cpu built in with a passive cooling heatsink. it’s a flex-atx sized(also ITX is available). if you have leftover disk, ram, psu and a case, you can build a great little server since it also has m.2 nvme storage support 2 sata port, and 2 pcie(x16 and x1) slots, you can add NIC, gpu or whatever you want!
I have mine with a nic so it has 3 eth ports which I run almost everything on from a router, backup to all kinds of apps on docker