Hi all!
I know I should have bit the bullet and purchased hardware so much sooner, but there’s no time like the present!
I’d like to begin my journey of building out a minilab for my apartment, and I’d like some recommendations. Since I’ve been a Macbook Pro-only kind of guy for over five years now, my first step is going to be to get a reasonably capable central Linux machine so I can experiment and learn about all the open source projects I’ve heard so much talk about on this and other forums related to homelabbing, like Proxmox, Truenas, ZFS, Jellyfin, the arr stack, etc.
Then from there, I’d like to slowly build up a collection of tiny machines for specific purposes and add hard drives to a 10” mini rack whenever I find good deals on them.
So my main questions are related around the specific bits of hardware I’ve been intrigued by so far. I’d like to know what your opinions on these are and if I’m going down a reasonable path.
For my main machine, I’ve spent the last week or so trying to spec out a computer built from custom parts, but it all seems to be prohibitively expensive now. So that’s why I’m considering a mini PC, namely the Beelink SER9 MAX H255. Seems like a decent deal on Amazon at $679, especially given it comes with 32GB of upgradeable DDR5 RAM and upgradeable storage, as well. Nothing I was able to price out on pcpartpicker came even close to that value. I’m open to exploring Optiplexes and the like, but there’s sooo many slightly different options and I’m wary of buying used these days tbh.
Then, for the modular 10” rack, I’m thinking about starting out with a Zimaboard 2 and a couple large-capacity HDDs, then build out from there with more drives and RPis as I fold in more functionality and need more space.
My main use cases are going to be a NAS for my media collection, a smart home hub, some light website hosting, getting to use my 3D printer to build out my 10” mini rack, and whatever else sounds neat to get into. My explicit NON use cases are heavy gaming (I’ve got a Steam deck for that), hosting game servers, running huge local LLMs (I know that dream is still a way’s away, so I’m happy to just experiment with <5B parameter models for now).
I should warn that I am influenced by aesthetics more than I’m sure I should be 
The two specific machines I’ve mentioned are alluring in part because they’re all-aluminum boxes that would look nice in a living room, and I will be basing some of my decisions for my mini rack and other hardware around maintaining a reasonable aesthetic for my home.
Would love to hear y’all’s takes on anything related to getting into the hobby, from a hardware perspective, in 2026!