Used corporate mini-pcs make excellent home servers if you don't need too much storage (typically they support two SSDs), and want low power consumption & noise and small form factor. Right now ones with 7th or 8th gen i5 are a pretty good deal, often around 50-120 USD on ebay, a bit more in the EU. Idle power cosumption is about 10W. If you want to play around with virtualization, a higher-end model with Intel NIC is recommended due to some Linux driver issues (at least with Proxmox).
Corporate thin clients with Pentium J5005 or similar also make decent raspberry pi replacements, usually just not as good price-power ratio as proper minipc. Certain models have pcie slot, which makes them ideal DIY routers when fitted with pcie NIC & pfsense/opnsense as OS. If you're using a consumer router, such project can make lots of sense.
For NAS, I recommend building your own. Personally I use Asrock J5040 mini-itx board with Node 304 case and Unraid as OS, houses 4x 3.5" drives, so far happy with it. For maximum reliability you might want a mothebroard that supports EEC memory though.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
Corporate thin clients with Pentium J5005 or similar also make decent raspberry pi replacements, usually just not as good price-power ratio as proper minipc. Certain models have pcie slot, which makes them ideal DIY routers when fitted with pcie NIC & pfsense/opnsense as OS. If you're using a consumer router, such project can make lots of sense.
For NAS, I recommend building your own. Personally I use Asrock J5040 mini-itx board with Node 304 case and Unraid as OS, houses 4x 3.5" drives, so far happy with it. For maximum reliability you might want a mothebroard that supports EEC memory though.