For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don't support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

If they have DDR3 RAM, I personally wouldn't use them Strictly for performance understandings. This being they would struggle to keep up with any more modern chip you can get that does support DDR4/DDR5 for a decent price.

That being said, if you need a server to run some basic tasks. You could do worse, but I wouldn't say I suggest it.

If I were using that site personally and looking I would look more towards the HP DL380 G9 for about $500. But anything from that site is going to SUCK when it comes to sound. Not something you want in a room where you want it to be quiet. Mine is in my office and makes a decent but not unbearable sound.

So this is one of those "You have $5 build a XXXXX" situations. You can build a monster for the full budget and put work into it and it work forever with plenty of power. You can spend a smaller portion of the budget and it requires less setup but maybe is lighter on power. You get the idea.

My thought process here is to understand what exactly you do need. You said you like the form factor of the mini PC. But then also the DIY PC ? So what are the requirements here? The Synology would be near identical to this in form factor so I am confused.

I am going to give two types of advice. The build I went with and its cost, and the honest truth.

1. My build is an HP DL380 G9 rack mounted server. It has dual Xeon CPUs and 100+ GB of RAM. I then also have a Tesla M40 GPU in the system. All together with 2 brand new 2TB SSDs it cost me about $800. The server was about $300 on ebay shipped. The GPU was about $100 including the cable for power. The extra RAM was about $100 for 64+ GB DDR 3 ECC. The SSDs were $260. Granted, you would have to use 2.5 inch drives in this setup, it is very much a powerful machine that can handle most anything.

2. For your setup. You are the only person who can determine what is best for you. I can tell you specs, I can tell you my experience, I can tell you about features of systems and OSes. What I can't tell you is what is going to fill your needs the most both in terms of hardware and its design in the space you have chosen.

The only piece of advice I will give you is this: If you plan on running a plex server, you will want a CPU that can use quick sync. Intel's new ARC GPU should be able to as well if you went with a GPU option but I cannot speak to this as I have not tested.

I don't think that really solves the problem here. That will still use the VPN all the time when mobile. So the battery will still drain quickly. Zero Tier I admit is quite heavy compared to Tailscale but the battery issue remains.

You know, honestly.. If you want to get into self hosting your stuff. The better option is to get one of those mini desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo. They are cheap and powerful. It will likely server you until the hardware dies depending on what you want to do. It also costs only the cost of the machine and the TINY amount of power it will consume per year.

Once we get a good, well priced E-ink tablet. I think e-readers are going to become much more common. But sadly every company wants to stuff them full of things that the display just isn't really good for. Like the Huawei MatePad should have 2 weeks of battery life easily. But instead they put an OS on it that eats battery and it barely lasts a full day.

What I think would be a good thing to start looking into as you progress, is the ability to take these scans and other items and turning them into actual text. This can give you more freedom and make the user experience much better. Like the ability to take a book and turn the bright white pages into a much friendlier dark mode for night reading. This could also mean, when E-ink tablets do start becoming easier to own. You will be able to easily adapt to them.

What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can't benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.

There are a TON of ways you can do this. Since you have a NAS already it makes it super easy. You just need a tiny desktop for about $100 and you are golden.

Look on ebay for one of those mini desktops from HP/Dell/Lenovo. The one thing though is you will need to find one that has a CPU that supports quicksync. So 7th gen or newer. So you want to find as far up the chain as you can.

They are:

1. HP Prodesk
2. Dell Optiplex
3. Lenovo Thinkcenter

This is the cheapest way to get away with it.

There may also be an option to use one of the Intel Arc cards with a cheaply built desktop for quicksync support. But I have not seen anything related to comparing them to on die quicksync. I would be especially curious on the cheaper option from Arc and how well it works for video encoding.

Then you goto homelab and homeserver and they tell you X and Y things and bitch and moan about power usage. Or they suggest things that logically don't line up with what OP wants/needs. Or they will say lines like "for just a little more" about 10 times until a build is $1000 or more.

Lets try to be helpful instead of just pushing people other places...hmm?

New tools get released every single day.

It is like this is an ever evolving space with new tools coming up all the time and people want the newer stuff to try and host.

Why not try github pages? It is free.