Used desktop or mini PC first?
The first homelab decision is the box, not the hypervisor. A used office desktop and a used mini PC can both run Proxmox. They fail in different ways.
Used desktop
Mini PC
- more RAM slots and SATA bays
- cheap to add a second drive
- louder and bigger
- quiet and small
- often one NVMe slot
- easy to tuck on a shelf
Buy the machine that matches the first three services you will actually run. Do not buy the machine that looks like a rack in a YouTube thumbnail.
Need
| Used desktop | Mini PC |
| Virtual machines | Storage |
| Noise | Power |
If I were buying tomorrow, I would take a used desktop with 32 GB of RAM and a spare drive bay. A mini PC is the better second machine once the lab has a job to do.