Dell Wyse 5070

Which is still slightly useful - I've got two Dell Wyze 5070, fanless, and being able to load them with 16 GB of ddr3 ram each for a song meant they were basically an obvious upgrade from being so cramped for RAM running a Raspberry Pi 4. https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/

My NAS: 1) A refurbished Dell Wyse 5070 (8GB of RAM) with a cheap 64GB SSD from 2013 2) An 8-bay USB-C hard drive enclosure 3) 4 used 12TB hard drives from eBay, 4 3TB drives from 2010 that still somehow haven’t died. 4) A headless Debian with various Linux ISO trackers / downloaders in Docker / Plex (the CPU, though slow, has decent hardware encoding) 5) No RAID, but an rsync script for important Linux ISOs and important data that runs weekly across different drives. I also have cold storage backup by purchasing “Lot of X number” 500GB hard drives on eBay from time to time which store things like photos, music, etc over two drives each. The whole setup didn’t cost me much, and is more than enough for what I need it to do.

i bought dell wyse 5070 for building talos cluster using proxmox. pretty great and you can upgrade ram to 32gb

As an experiment, I've tried working with a Dell Wyse 5070 with the memory maxed out. Even for development work, outside of some egregious compile times for large projects, it actually worked ok with Debian and XFCE for everything including some video conferencing. Even if you had money for an upgrade, it's not clear it's really necessary outside of a few niche domains. I still use my maxed out Dell Precision T1700 daily and haven't really found a reason to upgrade.

Sounds fun. What kind of mini PC are looking at? I am a big fan of used Dell wyse 5070 devices you find from $70, native Linux support, rather big community (easy to Google). Running one as a server and one as an mobile PC even. One thing I would consider earlier is virtual machine hosting. Making it easy to setup, test, build and destroy a system without consequences. Virtual machines (and docker container, and more) are easy to setup and manage trough 'cockpit' and you can learn the command lines later when you need it. Imo there is no point going directly into Industrie tools (kubernetes, docker, anisble) it may is better to first learn why they even exist by building systems the traditional way.

I've got a few of these chips (or something very similar, the J4105) in some repurposed Dell Wyze 5070s. They're actually really impressive chips (to me), in that they really sip power and do a lot including web browsing, running a lightweight IDE, basic office suite stuff on Debian, and are really over powered as an appliance (they're popular to convert to run as routers). Honestly I'm really surprised they didn't sell a lot more of these. The Intel spec for these chips says only 8GB of RAM, but they're dual channel and I find they'll actually run 32GB just fine. The newer N-series processors everyone seems to like are actually kind of inferior in that regard, since they're single channel and apparently really only do 16GB of RAM.

If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070. They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.