Home Lab Starter Guide: What to Buy First

The most common mistake in home lab planning is buying everything at once. You spend well over a thousand dollars on a NAS, drives, a managed switch, a UPS and a mini PC. Three months later half of it sits idle because you ran out of weekends to configure it, or you realize you bought the wrong NAS for what you wanted to do.

Sequencing matters more than specs. Each piece of hardware should solve a problem you already have, not one you think you might have later. This guide covers what to buy first, second and third, why the order matters, and what each phase costs. Prices are planning ranges; the product links show the current price. For finished parts lists at several budgets, see home lab builds at every budget.

Phase 1: Start With Compute (about $350)

Your first purchase should be a mini PC. Not a NAS, not a switch, not a rack.

A mini PC running Proxmox teaches the foundational skills that make every later purchase more useful: virtualization, containers, network bridges, storage pools, SSH and firewalls. You learn all of it on an inexpensive box.

The Beelink Mini S13 is the default recommendation. It runs an Intel N150 (four cores, 3.6GHz boost), comes with 16GB of DDR4, a 500GB SATA SSD and dual 2.5GbE, idles at an estimated 6 to 10W, and costs about $350. The two ports are enough for a pfSense or OPNsense router VM later, with no USB Ethernet adapter. Beelink’s earlier Mini S12 Pro (N100) now costs more than the S13, so we no longer recommend it.

The Beelink EQ14 (N150) is the step up at roughly $370 to $390. It has the same chip and, on the version we link, the same dual 2.5GbE. It adds two M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 slots for NVMe drives instead of the S13’s SATA SSD plus one PCIe 3.0 x1 slot, two HDMI ports and a built-in power supply. Both ship with a SATA SSD. Beelink also sells dual-1GbE versions, so check the exact version.

What to do with it

1. Download the Proxmox VE ISO and write it to a USB drive with Rufus or Etcher
2. Install Proxmox on the mini PC
3. Create a Debian VM and install Docker in it; Proxmox’s documentation recommends a VM for Docker-style application containers when you want the strongest isolation and live migration
4. Spin up Pi-hole, Uptime Kuma or Home Assistant, and try an LXC container for a single lightweight service

You will learn more in that first weekend than from a month of watching home lab tours. When you break something, you reinstall Proxmox and start over. The cost of failure is an afternoon.

For deeper recommendations, see the best mini PC for home server roundup. If Proxmox is your main goal, the best mini PC for Proxmox guide covers hardware compatibility in detail.

How long to stay in Phase 1

At least four to six weeks. You need time to find out what you actually want to run. Some people realize they mostly want Docker containers and a reverse proxy. Others want full VMs for Windows testing or Kubernetes clusters. Your later purchases depend on answers you only get by using Phase 1 hardware.

Phase 2: Add a Managed Switch (about $30 to $109)

Many guides tell you to buy a NAS second. For most people, buy a switch first.

Most ISP routers have only a few Ethernet ports, no VLAN support and little traffic visibility. Once you have a mini PC, a NAS later and a couple of other devices, you need more ports and better control. The bigger reason to buy a switch early is that it teaches networking fundamentals, such as VLANs and IGMP snooping, that make your NAS and future devices easier to set up correctly.

What to buy

Budget: TP-Link TL-SG108E (about $30) Eight gigabit ports, 802.1Q VLANs (up to 32), QoS, IGMP snooping and a web management interface, fanless and rated at 2.7W maximum. It does not do PoE, so look elsewhere if you need to power access points or cameras from the switch. For learning VLANs and separating lab traffic from your home network, it is the right first switch.

Mid-range with PoE: TP-Link SG2008P The same eight gigabit ports, with four PoE+ ports and a 62W PoE budget. If you plan to add an access point or PoE camera, this saves you buying a second switch later, and it joins TP-Link’s Omada SDN if you go deeper into that ecosystem.

UniFi ecosystem: UniFi USW-Lite-8-PoE ($109 at Ubiquiti; Amazon sells it as a 2-pack) Four PoE+ ports, a 52W PoE budget, fanless, and managed from the UniFi controller. If you already run a UniFi access point or plan to, this gives you one management interface for the whole network. The premium over the TP-Link is the software ecosystem, not the hardware.

For a full comparison, see the best network switch for home lab roundup.

What to do with it

1. Connect your mini PC, your main desktop and your router to the switch
2. Create a VLAN for lab traffic, separate from your home network
3. Set up a trunk port to your Proxmox host so VMs can live on different VLANs
4. Practice firewall rules between VLANs using pfSense or OPNsense in a VM

This is where networking stops being abstract. You can read about VLANs for hours, or you can create two VLANs and watch a ping fail between them until you add the right firewall rule. The second approach sticks.

Phase 3: Protect Your Investment With a UPS (roughly $170 to $275)

This is the phase most people skip, and it saves you from the most expensive failures.

A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) sits between the wall outlet and your equipment. When power drops, even for a fraction of a second, the UPS keeps your devices running on battery. That matters because:

• Drives mid-write can corrupt data. A power loss during a RAID rebuild can destroy the array, along with the drives’ contents.
• Hosts with running VMs lose state. Dirty shutdowns can corrupt ZFS pools, databases and Docker volumes.
• Sags and brownouts stress hardware. A line-interactive UPS corrects minor voltage dips without switching to battery.

Buy the UPS before the NAS, not after. The NAS is the expensive part and holds your data, so do not plug it into a bare wall outlet.

What to buy

For a mini PC, NAS and switch: CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD (roughly $240 to $275) 1500VA/1000W, sine-wave output, six battery-backed outlets, and USB monitoring so your NAS or Proxmox host can shut down automatically when the battery runs low. CyberPower rates it at 10 minutes at half load (500W); a small lab draws a fraction of that and runs much longer. It is the default tower recommendation for most starter labs because it has room for the router, switch and second mini PC you will add later. If the lab will stay tiny, size down.

For a mini PC and switch only: CyberPower CP850PFCLCD (roughly $170 to $190) 850VA/510W with the same sine-wave output in a smaller case, and five battery-backed outlets. Enough for a mini PC, a switch, your router and your modem, but its outlets run out once you add a NAS.

Sine-wave output matters. Simulated-sine UPS units can cause problems with the active PFC power supplies found in many desktops and some NAS units, so do not save a little on a simulated-sine model for a lab that will grow.

For more options, see the best UPS for home lab guide and the UPS sizing walkthrough.

Setup checklist

1. Plug the mini PC, switch and (future) NAS into the battery-backed outlets, not the surge-only ones
2. Connect the UPS’s USB cable to your NAS or Proxmox host
3. Install NUT (Network UPS Tools) on Proxmox to monitor the battery
4. Configure automatic shutdown at 20% battery remaining
5. Test it by pulling the UPS’s power cord and confirming your gear shuts down cleanly

Phase 4: Add Network Storage When You Need It (roughly $720 to $1,180)

This is Phase 4, not Phase 1. A NAS is the most common first purchase for new home labbers, and it is usually premature. You buy a NAS before you know what you will store, how much performance you need, or whether Synology’s ecosystem or TrueNAS on your own hardware suits you better.

By Phase 4, you have been running services on Proxmox for a couple of months. You know whether you need media transcoding, bulk file storage, Time Machine backups or all three. That knowledge shapes the NAS you buy.

What to buy

Default pick: Synology DS225+ (roughly $340 to $400) Synology’s current two-bay Plus model. It has an Intel Celeron J4125, 2GB of memory (expandable to 6GB), one 2.5GbE and one 1GbE port, Container Manager for Docker and Btrfs snapshots. Under DSM 7.3, Synology’s 2025 Plus models accept third-party hard drives such as IronWolf. Two bays in RAID 1 give you one drive’s worth of usable capacity with redundancy; RAID is not a backup.

Budget alternative: UGREEN NASync DH2300 A two-bay NAS with an 8-core Rockchip ARM processor, 4GB of memory and one 1GbE port, running UGREEN’s UGOS Pro. Consider it when purchase cost matters more than Synology’s DSM ecosystem, and compare app support, backup workflow and the current price rather than assuming feature parity.

Drives

Pair your NAS with CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. Do not buy SMR drives for NAS use; they slow badly during RAID rebuilds and sustained writes. There is a full explainer on CMR vs SMR.

• Seagate IronWolf 4TB (roughly $190 to $240 each): a good starting point if you do not hoard media. Two in RAID 1 give you 4TB usable.
• Seagate IronWolf 8TB (roughly $330 to $390 each): more headroom. Two in RAID 1 give you 8TB usable.

Total Phase 4 cost: roughly $720 to $880 (DS225+ with two 4TB drives) or $1,000 to $1,180 (DS225+ with two 8TB drives). Drive prices move a lot, so compare the cost per terabyte of both sizes on the day you buy.

For more NAS options, including four-bay models, see best NAS for home lab.

Phase 5: Expand Only When You Hit a Wall

Phase 5 is not a single purchase. It is a category of upgrades you make over months or years as you hit specific bottlenecks. The key word is specific. Do not buy 10GbE because it sounds fast. Buy it because your NAS transfers are limiting you and you can show it.

Common expansion paths

More compute: a second mini PC (about $350 for another S13) lets you build a Proxmox cluster and move VMs between hosts. Proxmox’s documentation says reliable quorum for high availability needs at least three votes, so a two-node cluster needs a QDevice as the third vote before HA works. Live migration is only supported between nodes with CPUs from the same vendor.

GPU for local AI: to run local LLMs with a discrete GPU, you usually step up from a mini PC to a desktop tower. A 12GB card holds 8B models at up to Q8_0 and 14B models at Q4_K_M, and Radeon 780M or unified-memory mini PCs can run smaller models without one. Our AI home lab on a budget guide and the best GPU for local LLMs guide cover the tiers before you spend.

10GbE networking: only relevant if you edit video directly from the NAS or run iSCSI storage for VMs. For most home labs, 2.5GbE between the NAS and the Proxmox host is plenty. When you do need 10G, a four-port SFP+ switch such as the MikroTik CRS305 (MikroTik suggests $149) plus a 10G NIC or port on each machine is the usual starting point.

Four-bay NAS upgrade: if you outgrow two bays, a four-bay NAS with RAID 5 gives you more usable capacity per drive. The Synology DS925+ is the default four-bay choice. It is a replacement, not an addition, so sell or repurpose the two-bay.

Common Mistakes

Buying a rack before you need one. A rack is cable-management infrastructure. A mini PC, a NAS and a switch fit on a shelf. A rack makes sense when you have rack-mountable gear such as a patch panel, a rack UPS or rack-mount servers. Before that, it is furniture.

Skipping the UPS because “power rarely goes out.” It takes one bad outage to corrupt a RAID array or lose a ZFS pool. The UPS is insurance, and at roughly $240 to $275 for the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD, it is cheap relative to what it protects.

Starting with enterprise rack servers. A used rack server looks like a bargain until you notice the power draw, the fan noise and the rack and rails it needs. A modern mini PC handles most starter workloads at a small fraction of the power and noise.

Buying a NAS before you know what you will store. If you run services on Proxmox for two months without once wishing for network storage, you probably do not need a NAS yet. Wait until the need is real.

Overbuying drives. Two 4TB drives in RAID 1 are a fine starting point, and you can migrate to larger drives later without losing data. Starting with 8TB drives makes sense if you know you will store a lot of media, but most people do not need 8TB on day one.

The Complete Buying Sequence

Phases 1 through 4 total roughly $1,340 to $1,535 and give you a complete, protected home lab. You can spread that over two or three months, and each phase is useful on its own.

If that is more than you want to spend, see the home lab under $500 guide for a tighter build. The sequencing logic is the same: compute first, then networking, then power protection, then storage.

The point is not to spend as little as possible. It is to spend at the right time on the right thing, so every dollar teaches you something and every device gets used.