Best Mini PC for a Home Server

Picks refresh twice a day.

Write the stack down before you shop. Plex, plus Home Assistant, plus about ten containers wants 16GB, and 32GB if those containers are databases, photo libraries, or anything that caches hard. An N100 is enough when Plex is direct-playing or lightly transcoding. Move to a Ryzen 5 or a Core i5 when you are also compiling, running VMs, or transcoding for several people.

Keep bulk media on a USB disk or a NAS. The mini PC needs room for the OS and the apps, a wired network port, and low idle power so it can stay on. The NAS guide is the storage-array version of this. The picks here are the computer: a lighter box, one that can transcode, and one with more RAM when the pool has that spread.