My use case is a homelab kubernetes cluster, so I want multiple nodes for redundancy, but I don’t want to use too much electricity or generate too much heat. But for the sake of other readers, let’s keep it general:
What’s a nice little computer for a homelab, with its own power supply, ethernet, and room for 2 internal disks?
Bee-link and GMKtec make some tiny computers purposely designed to be home servers. I thankfully got a ME mini NAS before the LLM apocalypse and it is a beast that can expand up to 24TB. It comes with an Intel N150 that runs all my personal services and consumes almost no power at all. But they also make other smaller models (the ME mini is already minuscule for what it does) that can fit 2 M.2 disks and they all have their own power supply and ethernet connection. The only problem is that the prices have skyrocketed because RAM and solid state storage starvation.
They are still, somehow, cheaper than Raspberry’s post-price hikes while being more powerful.
+1 to beelink but be careful of sketchy resellers. Their website has a direct link to their actual 1st party Amazon storefront that can be tricky to pin down.
I have a fleet of 5 n100/n150 beelinks running k8s that works perfectly well for a super low power homelab. I also replaced the stock m.2 ssds with patriot low power ones but I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze on that with current pricing.