• So his system is newer than the systems I have. Those tiny mini micro devices generally come off corporate leases after a year or two and that’s a 12th gen Intel system, so fairly new. By contrast I’m using a Wyse 5070 from 2018. It’s only got 4 cores, 4 threads, but can take up to 32 gb of ram and SSDs. I paid $50 for my Wyse 5070s and around $100 for each with new drives and ram. At the same time the pi 4b were $125ish. Totally worth it considering they have 3x the power of the pi.

    A homelab is just a machine you use to experiment with servers and services for yourself. One of my machines runs a vpn service, my dns server, ad blocking, and my home assistant server for my smart devices. My other machine is my media server for my Usenet stack and Jellyfin media server. It handles all my streaming of hard copies of tv and movies.

    I have a newer machine like his that did cost about $200 but it’s going to function as my game server for valheim/terraria/etc and my NAS storage.