I’d been a staunch supporter of RPi nodes for homelab work for a decade (and don’t get me wrong, I still love ‘em), but the various N100 miniPCs have been a pleasant little game changer. Got two for $130 each fully loaded (N00/16GB RAM/512GB SSD), slapped a 1TB SATA 2.5” SSD inside, threw Proxmox on them and voila, I have a highly efficient homelab that hosts my Plex server.
That said, there’s three reasons I got them versus a RPi5:
* Built-in RTC with battery (no more post-power outage downtime)
* iGPU with video acceleration (for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding)
* PRICE (seriously, a comparably outfitted RPi5 would be twice the price of these things!)
Intel has a little sleeper hit here, if they can get out of their own way on pricing and marketing it. At sub-$150 versus a RPi5, it’s a no-brainer if you don’t need GPIO support.