SerpApi.Org
When I built my proper home server last year, with a 12700KF, 64GB of DDR4, and a 7900 XTX I fully expected the box it replaced to end up in a drawer. That box is an Ayaneo AM01, a mini PC with a Ryzen 7 5700U in it, and it was the first machine I ever put Proxmox on. For a good while it ran more or less everything I self-hosted all while looking like an old-school Macintosh.
Surprisingly, though, it didn't end up in a drawer. It's still running, earning its keep, and the more I've watched people agonise over which paid NAS operating system to buy, the more I've come round to an awkward opinion. That demoted mini PC is a better home server than most of what you'd hand over a licence fee or a subscription for.
This isn't a totally fair fight, though, because if you want a device that you can plug some drives in to all with a friendly interface, an AM01 with Proxmox isn't that. That friendly interface, be it Unraid or HexOS, will hand you a working Plex library quite quickly, and if that's what you want, I'd happily point you to a more off-the-shelf NAS with one of those operating systems instead. But if you already own a capable machine and you're willing to learn a bit, the paid options pale in comparison to what's available for free.
The Ayaneo AM01 was never meant to be a server
But it works as one anyway
The AM01 is one of those mini PCs that was made to look the part, and it's a small little thing done up to resemble one of the original Macs, right down to the beige and the proportions. When I tested it a couple of years back, that novelty was most of the appeal. Underneath, though, it's still a perfectly reasonable computer.
There's an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700U in mine, room for 32GB of RAM, an M.2 NVMe slot, and, importantly for anything server-shaped, a proper gigabit Ethernet port rather than Wi-Fi. It doesn't exactly seem like a device capable of running your homelab infrastructure, but that's the point. I put Proxmox on it first because I had it lying around and wanted somewhere to learn, not because it was the sensible choice.
With that said, it became the sensible choice by accident. The 5700U doesn't use a lot of power compared to anything with a discrete GPU, it's silent unless you really push it, and a low-power chip is perfectly happy to sit there doing very little for weeks on end, which is most of what a home server actually does. When I started out, it picked up more and more of what I had been self-hosting on my TrueNAS box: namely Pi-hole, a reverse proxy, a handful of containers for the usual bits and pieces, and a couple of things I was only half-sure I'd keep.
It never went down or had any serious issues, and by the time I built the big server, the AM01 had already proven that the hardware wasn't a limiting factor. Shockingly too, it pulled it off on a chip most people would see and write off as a laptop part.
A home server is more than a NAS
Though a home server can be a NAS, too
The likes of Unraid and HexOS are solving a narrower problem than the one I'm using the AM01 for. A NAS operating system is built, first and foremost, around storage: pooling drives, keeping your data safe, and sharing it over the network. That's a genuinely hard thing to do well, and the good ones do it perfectly... but it's still just one job.
Proxmox isn't a NAS operating system at all. It's a hypervisor, which means its whole reason for existing is to run other things, whether those are full virtual machines or lightweight Linux containers. Almost everything I self-host runs in an LXC container rather than a VM, because the overhead is lower and the density is better, and Proxmox will happily run dozens of them on hardware this modest. A NAS is just one workload I can run on top of it, and if I want proper ZFS storage I can pass a disk controller straight through to a TrueNAS virtual machine and have it sit right next to everything else, on the same machine. Not really on the AM01 of course, but when that's an option, it works well.
When you want to do more than storage, be it hosting a reverse proxy, a game server, a home automation stack, or anything else, a NAS-first design can be a hindrance rather than a help. Proxmox works from the other end, where storage is an afterthought instead, but that's a significantly easier thing to add in my experience.
There's a lock-in question underneath all of this, too. A NAS operating system tends to hand you an app catalogue or a plugin system, and you more or less live within whatever it has chosen to support, which in HexOS's case is still a very short list. On Proxmox, if something runs on Linux, it runs, whether that's a container someone published this morning or a VM you cobbled together yourself.
Proxmox is free, and the paid options were never built for me
Paid options save you time, but I'm happy to do it myself
Then there's the money. Proxmox VE is free and open source under the AGPL, and I do mean free. Every feature is there without a licence, clustering and backups and the lot, and the only thing money buys you is access to the enterprise update repository and a support contract you don't need for a home lab. The community repository has run my machines for years without complaint.
The paid NAS world has drifted the other way, though. Unraid, which used to sell you a licence once and then leave you alone, changed its pricing in 2024 so the cheaper tiers now include only a year of updates, with an annual fee after that unless you spring for the pricier lifetime licence up front. HexOS asks for a one-off licence rather than a true subscription (though that is coming too), but a licence is still money you need to pay to do a job my mini PC was already doing for nothing.
There's still a case for paying for a NAS OS, though. When you buy something like HexOS or Unraid, you're buying time, and you're funding a team whose whole job is making the software easier to live with. Not everyone wants to learn what a dataset is or why their permissions are wrong, and that's a completely reasonable trade. It's just not my trade, because I already paid that particular cost years ago on this exact box.
Even still, HexOS in particular is one of the better things to happen to NAS software in a while. It takes TrueNAS, which is powerful and free and also quite intimidating, and wraps it in something a normal person can actually use. I've said before that it's doing for NAS software something close to what Ubuntu did for desktop Linux, and I still mean it, but it was built for the person who wants their NAS to just work without learning the internals. That person is not going to be any happier SSHing into a Proxmox host to work out why a container won't start.
Enthusiasts, the sort of people who already have a mini PC running a hypervisor, were always going to be better served by Proxmox or plain TrueNAS, both of which are free anyway. A paid, turnkey NAS is positioned to answer a question most people stop asking once they get comfortable with Proxmox.
What the mini PC actually does now
It runs some basic always-on services
These days the AM01 isn't carrying a whole lot, but that's kind of expected for a device in a home lab. The 12700KF box does the heavy lifting, with services that need the powerful CPU cores, additional memory, and the GPU. The mini PC sits alongside it as a second Proxmox node, running some small, always-on containers which I never want going down when I'm tinkering with the big server.
Those are the right jobs for a 15W mini PC, as it's low enough power that leaving it on permanently isn't an issue, it's small enough that it can be easily hidden on a shelf, and independent enough that a couple of essential services keep running all the time. For most of my services, it could still do most of my home lab's work if it had to, as many of the services on the main server were merely migrated over from it. The only reason it no longer became a priority was that I built something bigger and better, not that it was useless.
I'm not saying that the AM01 is a better piece of hardware than a purpose-built NAS, and in fact, it won't store data in a safer manner than a properly set-up TrueNAS pool, either. What I am saying is that it's a better deal and a far more flexible one for the type of person who already has a capable little machine sitting around and doesn't mind doing the work themselves. When you pay for a NAS OS, you're paying for the ease of setup and use, and to be clear, ease is worth paying for. However, if you already have the skills and the hardware, it's definitely worth putting that old hardware to use instead.
