I'm not the OP but have a little collection of mini pcs (5 of them) so, if you'll allow me, I'll comment on why I have them...
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
I'm interested in your TV box. What OS are you using? I assume it has a remote control of some kind? I'm guessing it doesn't run apps like Netflix? Do you have a browser or something for that instead, or do you just run local media?
I ask all this because I'm sick of my android tv boxes locking up about once a month, and I'd like something a little more powerful.
At my work we use NUCs a lot - we put them into custom enclosure together with touch screen (1920x1080, not something small), then mount that on CNC machines to let users browse work plans, access ERP etc., get measuring data from dislocated unit, etc.
NUCs are underrated IMHO. I picked up a NUC7 mid-2020, mounts on a VESA plate behind my monitor, used for media, fileshare, general Linux tinkering and VMs. Zero problems (except for a secondary disk failure last year, spinning rust type).
Nice to see Asus have finally started doing something with them.
I see there's lots of competition (or at least, lots of options) in that space now.
They are suprisingly reliable - the only problem we repeatedly have is CMOS batteries draining if they are turned off during vacation period (happens for less than 5% of our rigs though).
I just bought one for 120€ (from AliExpress). I will use it to replace my small 2-disk NAS by adding an usb HDD dock and to host some small personal servers (for managing recipes, groceries, tools, downloads, etc, nothing fancy).
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
Note that I was surprised to discover it was not possible to install Linux headless easily like on the SBCs. Also I decided to try out nixos but I don't really have the time and energy to learn a new paradigm and I will probably go back to Debian or similar when I have the time
What models are new enough to consider? Do any of these support ECC ram? And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use? Most of my storage is media for Plex or edited in Resolve and such. I have a 6x3TB zraid2 setup at the moment with aging disks (2015~), but looking to upgrade that. Not sure if I can go the route of just having 2x10TB or something instead, perhaps with a off-site backup to a identical system for the important stuff. Currently I rely on having the important bits copied several places, and just accepting I'll lose some data if everything catches fire here locally
Depends on really what do you want to do. For just data storage, NAS, pretty much anything goes. If you want to run VMs, Docker etc. you want something newer. Personally I use Optiplex Micro 3080 with i5-10500T. That was 270€ refurbished.
>Do any of these support ECC ram
No, as far as the Dell, Lenovo, HP mini PCs goes.
>And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use?
Yes but reading your use case you probably don't want a mini PC. You can only have 1x 2.5" SSD and 2x NVMe SSD. A single 8TB NVMe SSD is currently 1000€ and you would need two. Unless you want something smaller of course.
I have a older Intel S2600CP dual Xeon board now, which still works fine, but is a huge SSI-EEB board and draws like 90W mostly idle.
I think most of my use-case could be covered by one or more mini pcs, since I mostly run stuff like Home Assistant and other small things in containers. But for storage I'm not sure what makes sense now. I went with zraid2 back then (in 2015) because I already had four of the 3TB disks, so purchasing two more was worth it for the cost and extra parity drive.
But now I'm not sure if ZFS is the right choice. I think now you can expand pools with more disks, in theory anyway, but I never tried it.
I don't know what options I should consider, and why. Unraid for example looks promising, since you can just keep adding disks.
Realistically most of what I have on the server is replaceable, I really only care about personal photos/videos/documents.
If I am replacing hardware to lower power consumption/electricity cost, spending lots of money to do so does not really make much sense. I would very much like to get 90W+ of heating power out of my home office though, it's noticeably cooler in the room if I turn off the server and other computer(s). Less spinning disks and less hardware would help with that part, but other than making the office cooler I don't think I would save that much money (initially anyway).
The disks I have are from 2015, so probably better to make a choice for hardware/disks now than having to emergency purchase one or more of them to replace failing ones.
I'd probably just buy a Synology station. Yes it's proprietary but the system itself is really good. I know a lot of people buy one just for its own photos system alone https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos
The problem with those is that they are insanely expensive for what you get. Here locally the DS423+ (4-bay one) is like $614 USD + shipping without any disks, and has a Intel Celeron J4125 and 2GB ram. They are unfortunately ridiculously overpriced
That's a good tip, thanks! I have a older i7-6700K machine around here somewhere, that could work. But no ECC ram, and no idea if it draws any less power in the end. Some setup with just two drives mirrored would likely work, but feels a bit risky having no parity drive
What model did you get? I've been looking at various micros on eBay/local sites, but none that I find are actually available for reasonable prices shipped to me (Norway). Finding lots of machines around ~$220 USD, but then add in $50 shipping + VAT and it adds up
