Guide
What we would buy first (and what we would skip)
If we were starting a lab from zero this month: a quiet N100/N305 twin-LAN box for Home Assistant, a separate Ryzen mini with real RAM headroom for Proxmox, and a four-bay NAS that is allowed to be boring.
We would not buy a single chassis that tries to be hypervisor, media transcoder, and disk shelf. Those boxes are fine until you want to upgrade one job without touching the others.
Use Labstack Fit for the ranked shortlist — then open the product pages and check the exact SKU. Our scores are weighted opinions on public specs, not a receipt.
Hardware in this write-up
- Beelink EQ12 — Low-power Intel N100 box suited to quiet Home Assistant and light Proxmox nodes with dual 2.5GbE.
- Beelink EQ14 — Twin-LAN Intel N305/N100 family box for quiet always-on labs that outgrow a single N100 node.
- Minisforum MS-A1 — AMD AM5 mini workstation-style box popular in expandable Proxmox and TrueNAS Scale builds.
- Beelink SER5 — Compact AMD Ryzen mini-PC often used for Proxmox and Home Assistant with upgradeable SODIMM.
- UGREEN DXP4800 — 4-bay NAS alternative often paired with a mini-PC compute node for media libraries and backups.
- Synology DS923+ — Plus-series 4-bay NAS with expandable RAM and DSM ecosystem — common Plex storage backend.
FAQ
Why split the roles?
Heat, fans, and upgrade cycles. Disks want different cooling than a CPU that transcodes. Snapshots on the NAS should not depend on the VM host staying healthy.
Is Fit Score a benchmark?
No. It is a transparent ranking of catalog fields for a named job. If two machines tie, read the reasons and the vendor page.