Home Lab Deals: Best Prices This Week

This page tracks current pricing on home lab hardware worth buying. Prices shift week to week — I update this page manually when I spot meaningful discounts or new products that change the value landscape.

Last updated: March 28, 2026.

This Week’s Notable Deals

NAS

The Synology DS1525+ has dropped to $590 at Amazon — about $40 below its typical street price of $620–630. The DS1525+ is Synology’s 5-bay prosumer NAS with an AMD Ryzen R1600 dual-core CPU, 8GB ECC RAM, and four PCIe 3.0 expansion slots for 10G or M.2 NVMe caching. If you’ve been eyeing a 5-bay build, this is a reasonable entry point.

At $590 without drives, add five 8TB IronWolf drives ($160–180 each) for a total of $1,390–1,490 with roughly 32TB usable in RAID 5 with one drive’s worth of parity.

For a broader NAS comparison, see best NAS for home lab.

Mini PC

The Beelink SER9 is at $409 on Amazon as of this writing — the lowest price it’s been since launch. The SER9 ships with a Ryzen 9 6900HX, 32GB DDR5, and a 500GB NVMe included. Upgrading to 64GB DDR5 costs another $50–60 and is worth doing immediately if this will be a Proxmox host.

This is a strong buy for anyone building a new compute node. The 2.5GbE NIC and dual M.2 slots make it well-suited to both Proxmox and Docker-only builds.

Current Best Value by Category

Mini PC Under $200

The Intel N100 segment has stabilized around $150–170 for the Beelink Mini S12 Pro. No significant new entrants have changed the landscape. If you’re buying a low-power, always-on node for containers and basic services, this remains the pick.

2.5GbE Switches

The TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 (5-port, unmanaged) has been hovering at $55–65 for several months. It’s the default recommendation for anyone who wants a quick 2.5GbE upgrade without managed features. The TP-Link TL-SG108-M2 (8-port version) is $90–100 and worth the extra spend if you have more than 4 devices.

NVMe Drives (OS and Cache)

Samsung 990 Pro 1TB has been consistently at $80–85 for the past few weeks, down from $100 earlier in the year. It’s a good pick for Proxmox OS drives and NAS SSD cache pools.

WD Black SN850X 2TB at $140–150 is the right choice if you want a single drive for both OS and local VM storage on a mini PC.

What’s Not on Sale (And Why It Doesn’t Matter)

RTX 4090: Rarely discounts. MSRP $1,599 but street price typically runs $1,700–2,000 due to persistent demand. If you need 24GB VRAM, a used RTX 3090 at $650–750 is the better play right now.

UniFi switches: Ubiquiti does not discount meaningfully through normal retail channels. The USW Enterprise 24 PoE has been $900 for months. Buy when you need it, not when it’s “on sale” — it usually isn’t.

Enterprise gear (used): Dell PowerEdge R730/R740 units have come down to $300–500 on eBay for configured systems. This is not a steal — factor in the 200–300W idle draw and noise before getting excited.

When to Buy vs. Wait

Buy now: Anything in the NAS or mini PC category near historical lows. These don’t drop dramatically with new generation launches — they plateau and stay there until the next product cycle.

Wait: Any GPU purchase if RTX 5000 series GPUs are continuing to roll out. Used RTX 3090 prices typically dip 10–15% in the 60–90 days after a new generation launches as upgrade sellers flood the market.

Prime Day strategy: NAS devices and networking gear see the best discounts of the year during Prime Day in July. If you’re not in a hurry and can wait until July, it’s worth it for NAS in particular — $50–100 off a Synology enclosure is common.

For a historical look at when to buy different categories, see best time to buy NAS.