SerpApi.Org
Until last year, my Raspberry Pi 4 was the backbone of my humble home lab. I ran Home Assistant, a Zigbee coordinator dongle, Pi-hole, and a couple of Docker containers bolted on it. There was occasional troubleshooting, but the Pi never crashed outright. The cracks of failure slowly crept in, and they weren’t evident from the spec sheet.
The final straw for moving the home lab server duties entirely from the Pi 4 to a $100 mini PC was embarrassingly small. An ESPHome firmware build took over five minutes to compile and flash for a single sensor. Often, I’d wait until I finished, only to get an error during the flashing process. That’s why I started shopping for a powerful replacement based on x86 architecture. Instead of splurging on a shiny new N100 mini PC, I bought a used HP ProDesk 600 G6 mini PC.
My $100 mini PC came from a corporate machine reselling pile
I skipped the N100 box everyone recommends
Amazon lists several mini PC models, typically N100 mini PCs, priced from $150 to $300. With the inflated prices of the Pi models, even those N100 units felt a little costly. So I looked on sites like eBay for decommissioned corporate machines in tiny or small form factor instead. I scrolled through several HP mini PCs, Dell OptiPlex PCs, and Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PCs.
Finally, I picked up an HP ProDesk 600 G6 mini with Intel Core i5-10500T CPU and 8GB of RAM for $100 shipped. This felt like a better option than an N100-powered mini PC or NUC. Even though my mini PC came with a tenth-gen Core i5 with a low-power “T” variant, it’s still more powerful than the N100 series chip. With more cores, larger cache, and strong single-thread performance, I had no doubts about the desktop-grade processor.
The only drawback was that the ProDesk has two M.2 slots and no SATA bay, so the spare SATA SSD from my Pi was a dead end. Hence, I installed an old 256GB Samsung 980 NVMe drive instead.
Raspberry Pi’s SD card was quietly dying before I noticed
I sheepishly blamed Pi-hole and Jellyfin for that
The microSD card in the Pi 4 slowly deteriorated over time. As Home Assistant took a few minutes to boot, all kinds of logs from the self-hosted services were constantly being written to the microSD card. SD cards aren’t built for that kind of sustained write load, and mine didn’t raise an alarm as it degraded. I only discovered that when some services had started behaving strangely.
Instinctively, I blamed Pi-hole and Jellyfin’s active monitoring features for pushing the memory card to its limits. When the errors showed up, I’d spend hours fixing things, assuming I'd messed up some configuration. While investigating the sluggish performance, I came across Raspberry Pi forums suggesting I check dmesg for errors, which revealed filesystem errors indicating a failing memory card.
So replacing the Pi 4 with a mini PC allowed me to use a proper SSD, which is fast and built to tolerate constant read-write cycles of the services I run on the home server.
Compiling firmware went from a coffee break to a non-event
ESPHome flashing took less than a minute for a sensor
I wasn’t expecting the switch from the Pi to a mini PC to matter as much as it did. Lately, I’ve been building cheap ESP32-based devices in ESPHome with configs for cheap sensors. Then, I let ESPHome compile and flash firmware on the boards. On the Pi, ARM cores were already busy doing other activities, and that’s why the compiling job took four to five minutes.
On the mini PC, the single-sensor firmware now finishes in well under a minute. The stronger single-thread performance and extra cores made a difference since the server isn’t transcoding or serving files simultaneously. I never thought about compile times when buying this box. However, that turned out to be one of the most noticeable differences in my daily use.
Home Assistant automations stopped lagging with real headroom
My server was the problem, not the devices
For months, I assumed all the delays in automation were due to configuration and network issues. I thought the Zigbee coordinator dongle wasn’t helping either. The lag in automation and response of a local smart home system was difficult to ignore.
Spending weekends troubleshooting the Pi made me realize something I should’ve seen sooner. Even though the Pi ran Home Assistant, the smart home platform’s automations always competed with the already overloaded roster of services. When I moved everything to Proxmox running on the mini PC, the automations started firing instantly, just like they should.
To save resources, I ran the Pi in headless mode and managed everything over SSH. With Proxmox on the mini PC, I got a real dashboard showing CPU load, memory usage, and disk health without typing any commands. Monitoring and managing self-hosted services made it easy to tackle and run my home lab. It’s a relief not to have to check the resources before experimenting with a self-hosted project or building another ESPHome sensor.
The $100 mini PC keeps surprising long after the Pi gives up
Looking back, every one of these problems was in fact the same problem wearing a different mask. Laggy automations, slow ESPHome builds, dying memory cards, and headless overhead weren’t about the services I was running. I made the Pi do the job it wasn’t built for. As a general-purpose computer with GPIO pins, it’s great for hardware projects (and some software ones too).
It was never a server. I treated it like one because the tutorials made me believe I could. I could have put the same $100 toward a Pi 5 instead. But I bought a mini PC that was built to run unattended from day one. That felt like finally using the right hardware for the job.
