HP ProDesk

I got an Hp prodesk for a something like 140 bucks (8500t) a couple of years ago from a company that went bankrupt. My laptop stopped working and I never got a new one. Now I have a proper monitor (4k, 27 inch), proper keyboard (Matias quiet click), a proper mouse (Logitech trackball), and a proper webcam (some cheap 1080p one I bought from amazon that beats everything in a laptop).

I've been running a HP ProDesk 600 g1 for years now. It's my NAS (using external storage), general purpose server and home assistant server. I initially bought it for other purposes, but it made sense to use it. It's not as power-hungry as "real desktops" due to its laptop power supply, and much more capable of running a bunch of docker containers than something like a Pi. Second-hand this kind of computers can be had for super cheap, many companies use them. I got mine for €100 many years ago, including a power supply and an Intel pro SSD of 512GB. For that price I can't get a recent raspberry pi with decent SD card and power supply. I guess I do pay some more in terms of electricity, but it's reasonably efficient and the extra performance makes up for it.

I self-host Jellyfin on an old HP ProDesk PC that came from an office selling unneeded equipment. It's connected to my consumer wifi router/switch switch via Ethernet, and I stream videos on my TV via the Jellyfin client on a Roku Stick (which itself is connected to my network via wifi). Jellyfin streams great on my setup. I know that's not very helpful in improving performance in your specific situation, but I just wanted to add my anecdata that Jellyfin doesn't require beefy hardware or above-average networking to run well. Sorry that I don't have much insight as to what was causing the performance issues in your setup.

Mostly media server and home security related stuff. Box 1: Truly ancient HP Proliant N54L - Bastion/DMZ machine, router forwards all incoming traffic to it - NAS - JBOD that I cobbled together over the years, storage is only ~12TB, and mostly used for media. - NGINX - proxies traffic to the rest of my network Box 2: Some SFF Lenovo desktop - NVR, running zonemonitor - Dedicated storage for my home security cameras Box 3: Some HP Prokesk Mini SFF - Homeassistant - Various docker containers running homeassistant ajacent stuff Box 4: Another HP Prodesk SFF, but with 10th gen i3: Media server - Everything in docker - Emby - Radarr - Sonarr - Transmission - etc. - Latest addition to the family, I deployed this a week ago. I have to say I'm mighty surprised by the performance of the i3 for media transcoding. It can do at least one 4k->720p transcode without even breaking a sweat.

If you had a RPi setup and your SD card died, I would suggest one or more of the following: 1. Buy an endurance-oriented card (e.g.: Samsung Pro Endurance), and try to get a higher capacity card just for the added endurance. 2. Make sure to disable write heavy configurations if possible. 3. If you can bear the expense, consider swapping the RPi with a used corporate mini PC (HP ProDesk/EliteDesk are my personal favorites, but the Dell Wyse 5070 is great bang for your buck) - you can get a pretty powerful setup with plenty of CPU, RAM and a real SSD, while still consuming ~10 watts at the wall, which is close enough to the RPi for my taste. Most of these units are not fan-less, but they are extremely quiet unless you're pushing them...

HP ProDesk 405 G8 Mini, or HP EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini. The ProDesk 405 G8 can take a 35W RYZEN 7 PRO 5750GE. This includes AMD DASH (IPMI), and the Ryzen Pro has a few extra security features from EPYC/Threadripper. I got mine shipped for just $665 including tax, and did the SSD (1TB 980 Pro) and memory (64GB DDR4-3200 CL16) myself for another $300ish. If you get three of them, you can have a pretty fantastic Spark cluster that consumes only about 100-120W! But yes, they do XCP-NG or Proxmox clusters extremely well. The EliteDesk 805 G8 can have the 65W Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G, has a copper heatsink (instead of aluminum), has a 2nd NVMe slot, and can be shipped with a 2.5GbE port (you can order the part for the ProDesk 405 G8). Though if you get the 35W 5750GE, you can have an NVIDIA GeForce 1660Ti 6GB installed as well. Since both use Ryzen PRO processors, they actually support ECC memory as well. I'd argue they may be the best overall 1L form factor systems on the market, especially in terms of performance per watt. The only other thing I'd ever want is 10GbE instead of 2.5GbE -- though in the EliteDesk 805, you COULD get an NVMe to 10GbE Ethernet and install it, just need to make a faceplate to properly mount the port on the back of the chassis.

I used a HP ProDresk (USFF) for that. Quite small, reasonably powerful, supports 3 monitors and linux-friendly (at least the i5-9500T Version I have). Drawback is that it doesn't really take up much less space / weight than a small laptop and you always need external monitor + keyboard, which makes it much less portable.

It depends quite a bit on what era of machines you want to emulate. Last year I upgraded the PC in my high-end custom MAME cabinet to one of these ( https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-prodesk-600-g1-small... ) which I purchased on Ebay for around $100. I added a circa 2014-15 Radeon HD3850 I had laying around because it has native analog component output on a VGA connector to drive my 27 inch Wells-Gardner multi-scan arcade CRT (that analog authenticity is sweet perfection). Because that PC happens to be low-profile, I had to hack some metal out of the internal cage to get a full size graphics card to fit but there are tons of similar HP, Dell and Lenovo enterprise desktops being recycled on EBay so just find one that suits your budget and matches whatever stuff you already have sitting unused in your recycled PC parts bin (RAM, HD/SSD, GFX). One of the bonus joys of emulation is achieving something so cool and crazy fun out of free (or dirt cheap) recycled and thrift-store grade parts. The PC I got on Ebay will emulate virtually any arcade machine of the 80s or 90s. It can also emulate 8 and 16 bit home consoles and even quite a bit of the PS1 and Gamecube libraries. Our family and friends have so much fun with that MAME cabinet that, frankly, we'd pay for a new top-shelf PC for it but for the games we enjoy, there's no reason to pay for more expensive hardware. Also, be sure to hit the tip jar of whatever open source projects you use.

I have similar process setup as original poster, instead of MQTT, I use home assistant Node-RED pallete which exposes all home assistant entities to nodered. Node-RED automation is SO much better than home assistant automation or Huggins, ability to deploy modified flows when nodes on same flow are kept running is AMAZING!, makes dev cycle so much faster. I use home assistant's builtin zwave, homekit controller, homekit bridge, Sonos, and InfluxDB, everything else is commented out. It's all running on used $50 HP Prodesk G2 with Ubuntu server with HASSOS in VM, VS.Code server in docker. Uses about 7 watts/hr.

For hardware: in the past, I would say start with a raspberry pi. But those are impossible to find at list price now. So instead, if you look on ebay for SFF (small form-factor) workstations, you can find something like an HP Prodesk G1 with cpu/storage/memory for ~$50-60. Which is significantly cheaper than a raspberry pi 4B @ $100+ by resellers. Slap on a distro, and you're off to the races. Checkout /r/homelab and /r/selfhosted on reddit. You'll probably want to read about DNS and local networking (DNS & Bind is a good book). You'll understand by doing things. Don't blindly copy-paste configs. Spend some time to figure out what they're doing and type every line in manually.