Beginner

Choosing Hardware

Used enterprise gear vs a mini PC vs a Raspberry Pi vs the laptop already in your closet - what actually fits a first homelab.

Hardware Updated August 29, 2026

  • hardware
  • budget
Before this, read:

There's no single right answer here - it depends on the budget and constraints you wrote down in Planning Your Homelab. What follows is the honest trade-off for each common starting point.

The machine you already own

If you have an old laptop or desktop doing nothing, start there. It costs nothing, it's already proven to work, and you'll learn just as much running Docker on a five-year-old ThinkPad as on new hardware. The only real downside is power draw on an old desktop CPU, and a laptop with the lid closed needs a setting to prevent it sleeping.

Good enough for Beginner tier, full stop. Don't let "but it's old" talk you into spending money you haven't decided you want to spend yet.

Mini PCs (Intel N100 class and similar)

The best value-for-effort option if you're buying new. A current-gen mini PC (Intel N100/N305, or an equivalent low-power AMD part) draws 10-25W at idle, is silent or near-silent, fits on a shelf, and handles Docker plus a handful of services without breaking a sweat. Expect 8-16GB RAM and a 256GB-1TB NVMe drive to be enough for this entire tier and most of Intermediate.

This is the recommended default if you're buying something new and don't have a specific reason to go another direction.

Used enterprise gear (Dell/HP/Lenovo small-form-factor or rack servers)

Cheap on the used market and genuinely powerful for the price - but read the trade-offs honestly:

  • Rack servers are loud. Server-grade fans are designed for a data center, not a living room. If you're buying a used rack server, plan for it to live somewhere the noise doesn't matter, or budget time to research fan replacements.
  • Power draw is real. A used rack server idling at 80-150W costs meaningfully more per year to run than a mini PC, even before you load it with services.
  • Small-form-factor desktops (SFF) from the same vendors (e.g. a Dell OptiPlex Micro) split the difference nicely - quiet, low power, cheap used, and a good match for this tier.

Used enterprise gear becomes more compelling once you reach Intermediate and want more RAM/cores for running several VMs under Proxmox - it's often overkill for Beginner alone.

Raspberry Pi (and similar SBCs)

Cheap, silent, and sips power (3-8W), but limited: modest CPU, RAM capped well below a mini PC, and storage is usually a microSD card or a USB-attached SSD rather than proper NVMe. It's a genuinely good fit for lightweight, always-on single-purpose services (Pi-hole/AdGuard is a classic Pi workload), but it will struggle as a general-purpose Docker host running several heavier services (a media server transcoding video, for instance).

A reasonable pattern: a Pi for Pi-hole/AdGuard specifically, and a mini PC or repurposed machine for everything else.

What to actually buy, if you're buying

For a first Docker-based homelab, in order of recommendation:

  1. The machine you already have, if you have one that isn't ancient. Free, proven, good enough.
  2. A new N100-class mini PC if buying new - low power, quiet, plenty of capability for this tier.
  3. A used SFF desktop if you want more headroom for less money and don't mind used hardware.
  4. A Raspberry Pi as a dedicated, single-purpose add-on (DNS sinkholing is the classic use), not as your only machine.

Whatever you pick, aim for at least 8GB RAM and an SSD (not a spinning hard drive) for the OS - Docker and its images are much happier on solid-state storage.

Next: Choosing an OS.