Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q

I'd love reading some blogs about what's the best usage for actually minimal computers, any suggestions? It always gets me how the world of self-hosting is usually introduced from claiming that you can start giving a second life to a Raspberry Pi or a forgotten laptop, and suddenly the next blog you read calls "minimal" a beast machine meant for racks and semi- or professional environments. Bought a ThinkCentre M910q with an internal SSD and 16 GB of RAM for €200 a couple years ago... Right now I got it chugging along with TrueNAS + 2 USB disks in ZFS Mirror (sitting in a closed cupboard so no chance of cable disconnections). For me, "minimal home server" means a small computer that fits on a cabinet on the living room, is practically silent, and has a very small power consumption profile (less than a decent Hetzner otherwise the cost wouldn't be worth it). I have a mini-PC in mind, but people think of Dell PowerEdges. Even if given for free , I would never install at my home a PowerEdge for a home server. I guess it must be the difference between living on a flat vs a 2 story house :-)

> ThinkCentre M910q I love these machines. I have 3 of them and an M720Q. Needs changed so only one of each is actually in use, but they are so low profile and quiet that I'm considering deploying the other two at home just in case I ever get the urge to play with K8s or something. The only thing I'm missing is a splitter so I can use one plug socket instead of three - not sure if something like that exists. One nice little fact about the M910Q is that they are rated to maximum 32GB but I have two of them with 2x32GB no problem. Recent RAM prices and forever regret is the only reason the third one doesn't have the same. The M720Q only takes 32GB though. You can also run 2 SATA off of the M2, and someone created a 3D printable enclosure for them: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1280680-thinknas-2x-hdd-enc...

I have some M910q that I am very happy with. UEFI is well supported, I was able to upgrade them to 32gb of RAM, i7 7700t and both a 512gb SSD and NVMe for mirrored storage. Highly recommended. Sure, it would be nice to get something newer than 7th gen, but it's still highly capable, small, quiet and fairly low power usage.

I got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q i5-6500T 4x2.5GHz 8GB RAM 240GB SSD for 100 €. Plenty fast for a couple of VMs with web servers. It's also a lot better for 24/7 than RPi, as I was always struggling with SD card wear

I find that Microsoft Authorised Refurbishers are a good place to start to find cheap old corporate machines - eg I can typically get something like an Intel i5 8500T based Lenovo/Dell/HP mini PC with RAM and SSD for less than £200. I actually bought a Lenovo M910Q with i5 6500T, 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM for ~£100 in the last year. It'll absolutely demolish a Pi 4 at CPU & GPU performance, can take much more RAM than a Pi, idles at <10W on 230V mains, you get the bonuses of easy software compatibility as it just runs any mainstream Linux distro & and it runs x86_64 code, it has real storage interfaces (SATA & NVMe), and has an Intel NIC. For home server uses, they're really nice machines.