

Makes sense, yeah it definitely takes more system resources vs storage for a personal server. I host for myself and some friends, so it’s really just thumbnails that take up space.
For reference, I’m hosting on an r220 w/ a proxmox VM allocated as above. I think you could probably get away with less, but not too sure. Your idea with the mini PC would probably work, or you could get a cheap dell Optiplex on eBay and see if it runs well
$1k for the base isn’t horrible IMO, especially if you compare it to something like the mac mini starting at $600 and ballooning over $1k to increase to 32GB of “unified memory” and 1tb of storage.
I get why people are mad about the non-upgradable memory but tbh I think this is the direction the industry is going to go as a whole. They can’t get the memory to be stable and performant while also being removable. It’s a downside of this specific processor and if people want that they should just build a PC