I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it, but I recommend going with an Intel processor (8th gen or newer). This gets you Intel QuickSync (hardware video encoding/decoding) and an integrated GPU, making 4K video transcoding/playback a breeze. This opens up possibilities like Jellyfin, Frigate, and improves performance significantly for Immich.

I’ve got an i5-8500T (no external GPU) that’s managing 6x always-on security cameras in Frigate and Jellyfin streaming for 6 family members (local and remote with transcoding), plus a dozen other docker containers for Home Assistant/websites/*arr stack plus 4 always-on Linux VMs for various other projects, and the CPU sits anywhere from 30-60%. It’s amazing how capable old CPUs are as long as they have hardware video codecs.

Your biggest concern is going to be RAM. The more things you want to run on the server at once, the more RAM you’ll need. I need 64GB for my above stack for example.

I think a used laptop or NUC-style mini PC is a great choice for a starter setup! Especially something with onboard soldered RAM, because this will be somewhat immune to the current RAM pricing crisis. If you can force the laptop battery to only charge to 50% in BIOS, you get a free UPS with little risk of battery death. You can always migrate to something more permanent/expensive if you enjoy the hobby.

I like lenovo thinkcentres I have a 700 series and a 900 series. At the time, one was less than $100 and one was $150. I put another ~$80 for old ram and old SAS drives. They’re working great and I have what I consider to be huge storage. Things are different now, but used office computers are always going to be plentiful, the only limitation is how old you want to go. Good news is that Debian will practically run on anything and doing docker via SSH CLI isn’t hard, especially if you get Dockhand or Portainer(for now) running first. If you’re serving data, 256gb won’t get though.

Get a NUC or one of those mini Lenovo things that show up in lots of homelab photos.

no risk of laptop battery swelling

This is wrong. Any device with a battery can swell.

Welcome to the hobby! It’ll consume your free time and (if you’re the right kind of person) deliver lots of satisfaction.

I am in a similar situation, the only difference is that I have played with things like networking, docker etc before at work. Honestly 10k INR is not enough in my opinion. You can get refurbished hardware which will be very old, consume more electricity and will not be good performance wise. You will either have to increase your budget or compromise severely on the specs.

Some mini-PC’s have room for more than one SSD. Those are more future proof. You can start with one SSD, discover what kind of stuff you run, only containers, only VM’s, or a certain mix of those. You can always add a second SSD later — when your enclosure allows it.

I’ve gotten a lot of use out of my old Lenovo Thinkpad. Only bc of Linux mint tho

I’ve had a lot of fun with used HP elitedesk/prodesks. Go for Intel, gen 6 i3/i5 or newer. Id push it to 16GB ram if you can manage it.

The SFF models (small desktops) are good if you plan on adding HDDs or anything PCIe in the future. If not go for the USSF (mini) models - they are very power efficient. All extremely quiet - you’ll have to really push the resources to hear more than a whisper from them.

I’ve had 7 all together and been pleased with them.

Not a Mac

I love using Macs, but I cannot get my desktop to not sleep, and when it sleeps, it disconnects its external hard drive (which is not bus powered, it has a dedicated power supply). The bus-powered SSD (Samsung T7) is fine though. I don’t know if it’s an Apple thing or an ARM64 thing, but I’m looking for a low-end 8th-gen Intel box that’s limited to Win10 to put headless Linux on it, and terminal in from my Mac for server/homelab stuff. Macs are good for Unix type stuff since that’s what they’re based on (since OS X) but they don’t seem too good as servers.

Could be PEBCAK but I dunno.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #161 for this comm, first seen 7th Nov 2026, 19:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Retired business or surveillance hardware is worth checking locally too. My two servers are repurposed NVRs running plain Ubuntu Server, and a Dell OptiPlex handles dev work. For that list, I’d start with the hardware you can get affordably and check its RAM capacity and drive connections before buying. Docker on plain Linux keeps things straightforward. With Immich, budget for a separate backup of the photos before it holds your only copy.

I’m not sure where AMD started allowing PCI and USB VM hardware pass through. But Intel 7xxx and up allow for it. Which really opens up what you can do. I have a tiny HP business unit with a 7th gen i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB nvme sans psu. I picked up for 60 bucks on eBay plus shipping and taxes. PSU was about 16 dollars.

Proxmox as a hypervisor, patching my zwave and ZigBee USB dongle through to HA. HA running on 2 core and 4GB. I passed the rest of the CPU, RAM, SSD, mouse, keyboard and display off to Haiku. For a nice graphical local admin console. I could easily split off more from haiku and get a 3rd setup running under proxmox. As haiku doesn’t necessarily need more than half a GB of RAM and 20 to 30 GB of disk space and 1 core really.

Lenovo M700q

Lenovo T-series is generally a good pick whenever you want to run Linux.

I’d say the same for their USFF and SFF form factors as well. Great systems for homelabs, I have several (and my laptop is a T495, and my son has my old T470s).

Problem with laptops and (u)SFFs is storage capability. If you want a NAS you need some sort of external JBOD or you will be limited to 1-2 storage disks (and possibly have to boot I.e. truenas from USB).

If you can find them with a PCIe slot (or extra m.2 slot that exposes 4 lanes at least), you should be able to get a RAID card and rig up a way to use eSATA and some sort of external disk enclosure though.

Pay attention to performance/watt. Consider different boxes for different roles if you want…I.e. ZFS doesn’t need a lot of processing power, but it does like RAM. If you have a system that can use dirt-cheap DDR3(L) like a 6th or 7th gen Intel, that may be a better choice for NAS-only.

Then use a more powerful NUC or (u)sff for proxmox and run LXCs or VMs on it.

Which part do you want to spend the least time maintaining: photo backups, remote access, or updates? I’m designing Doomsday Box, a home-server concept, and trying to understand what should work without constant attention. Your planned setup is relevant. Would you mind giving blunt feedback on the idea? https://heyeddi.com/projects/doomsday-box

Whatever is available on your local secondhand market. Mini PCs are usually pretty good. Less standard parts though, same with brands like Dell, HP, Lenovo.