Hello, long time lurker, first time poster here. I just got a router recently (unifi dream router), and wanted to start on building a little homelab. I currently live in dorm in my univ with 3 other roommates, so mini pcs looks good to me, they’re not too loud and small enough to live next to my router. I saw a deal on shopee which is a 2018 i3 mac mini, with 3.6GHz, 8gb ram and 128 gigs of storage. it costs 8000 NTD (about 250 in usd), it’s second-handed and has some scratches on it (I kinda don’t mind). Is it worth it, or should I be looking for something cheaper/not mac mini? (ps I live in Taiwan, sellers/things from east asia like china or japan are much preferred, otherwise the shipping might be a lil bit steep for me). thanks, appreciate all helps.
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For that kind of money you can get new mini PCs that will be much more powerful and have more than one NIC, like the other comment mentioned.
Take a look at Beelink mini PCs for example.
I like Mac Minis in general, but for a first homelab machine I’d choose something with 2+ NICs, without using USB dongles.
May I ask why you need 2 NiCs for home labs?
I would opt for like 3 older lenovo mini pcs or something for home labbing. Guess it depends on what you want to do. I like making Promox clusters.
mini pcs and mac minis are nice but if you want lot’s of customization options, I do recommend getting the asrock N100 motherboards. they’re around 130USD and these have an n100 cpu built in with a passive cooling heatsink. it’s a flex-atx sized(also ITX is available). if you have leftover disk, ram, psu and a case, you can build a great little server since it also has m.2 nvme storage support 2 sata port, and 2 pcie(x16 and x1) slots, you can add NIC, gpu or whatever you want!
I have mine with a nic so it has 3 eth ports which I run almost everything on from a router, backup to all kinds of apps on docker