My 10,000 Yen Homelab: It Is Not a Raspberry Pi

My 10,000 Yen Homelab: It Is Not a Raspberry Pi#homelab#NEC Mate#Debian#Docker#Frigate

AI Summary

Alan introduces his homelab server in Japan, a used NEC Mate business mini PC that cost about 10,000 yen. Although its user account is named "pi", it is not a Raspberry Pi but an x86 machine with an Intel Core i3-9100T, 12 GB of mismatched DDR4 and a 500 GB 7200 rpm laptop hard drive, running Debian 13. The post lists what it runs: an ArozOS web desktop, Frigate NVR with object detection on the integrated GPU through OpenVINO, a Munin monitoring stack, an OnlyOffice document server, a Virtual DSM instance for API testing, a Samba file share and a Go-based Keio Line train board, reached through Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale. He reviews its health, including temperatures around 40°C, about one watt of CPU package power at idle and a high head-parking count on the drive, and closes with planned upgrades such as an SSD and matched RAM.

My 10,000 Yen Homelab: It Is Not a Raspberry Pi

My 10,000 Yen Homelab: It Is Not a Raspberry Pi

If you ever SSH into my homelab, the prompt says pi@debian-server-jp. Everyone assumes it is a Raspberry Pi. It is not. The username is just an old habit from my Raspberry Pi days that I never bothered to change.

The real machine is a second-hand NEC Mate office mini PC that cost me about 10,000 yen. Japan is full of these: companies lease business PCs for a few years, then the used market sells them off cheaply. For the price of a Raspberry Pi 5 kit, I got a quad-core x86 box with a real SATA drive, 12 GB of RAM and Intel graphics.

The Hardware

Here is what is inside:

PartDetail
ModelNEC Mate type ML (PC-MKL31CZG6), mini PC chassis
CPUIntel Core i3-9100T, 4 cores / 4 threads, 3.1–3.7 GHz, 35 W TDP
GraphicsIntel UHD Graphics 630
ChipsetIntel B360
RAM12 GB DDR4 SO-DIMM (8 GB SK Hynix + 4 GB Samsung)
Storage500 GB WD Black 2.5" laptop HDD, 7200 rpm
NetworkIntel I219-V gigabit Ethernet, Intel Wireless 8265 Wi-Fi
FirmwareNEC BIOS from June 2019, UEFI
OSDebian 13 (trixie), kernel 6.12

A few honest notes about this spec sheet:

  • The RAM does not match. One stick is 8 GB rated at 2133 MT/s, the other is 4 GB rated at 2666 MT/s, so the pair runs at 2133. It works fine, and it was free, so I am not complaining.
  • The system disk is a spinning laptop drive. It is a 7200 rpm WD Black, which is about as good as a 2.5" hard drive gets, but it is still a hard drive. More on that below.
  • The "T" in i3-9100T matters. It is the low-power version of the chip, which is exactly what you want in a machine that never turns off.

Why Not a Raspberry Pi?

I like Raspberry Pis, but for a machine that runs a pile of containers all day, a used office PC wins on almost every point:

  • x86 compatibility. Every Docker image just works. No hunting for ARM builds.
  • Real storage. A SATA port instead of an SD card that will eventually wear out.
  • A usable GPU. The UHD 630 handles video decoding and runs AI object detection for my camera (see below).
  • Price. Around 10,000 yen for the whole box, power supply included.

The trade-off is power draw and size, and even there it does better than I expected. When the machine is mostly idle, the processor itself draws only about 1 W. That is not the whole box at the wall plug, but it tells me the chip spends most of its day asleep.

What It Runs

Here is what I run on it today:

  • ArozOS, a web desktop and file manager. I also use this machine as my development box for ArozOS work.
  • Frigate NVR for my security camera. Object detection runs on the integrated GPU through OpenVINO, so there is no need for a Coral TPU.
  • Munin for monitoring: CPU, memory, temperature, bandwidth, disk I/O and time drift, all graphed.
  • OnlyOffice Document Server for editing documents in the browser.
  • Virtual DSM, a Synology DSM running in a container, which I use to test and reverse engineer Synology APIs.
  • Samba for a network file share, with WS-Discovery so Windows can find it.
  • A Keio Line live board, a small Go service that turns the Keio train-position feed into a wide dashboard for my desk.

For access, Cloudflare Tunnel publishes the web services without opening any ports on my router, and Tailscale gives me a private way in when I am outside.

A Quick Health Check

Since I bought it used, with a used drive, I keep an eye on how it is holding up:

  • Temperatures: the CPU sits around 40°C and the drive around 36°C. The little NEC case handles a 35 W chip without any trouble.
  • Drive health: The drive passes its health check, with no bad sectors so far. It has about 13,900 hours of use on it, most of them probably from its previous life in an office.
  • One thing to watch: the drive has already parked its heads about 139,000 times. Laptop drives park their heads aggressively to save power, and on a server that never sleeps, those parks add up. It is not an emergency, but it is a good reason for the upgrade below.
  • Memory: everything above fits in about 4 GB, so there is still plenty of room in the 12 GB.

What I Would Upgrade Next

  1. Move the OS to an SSD. It would make everything faster and remove the head-parking worry. The hard drive can stay as bulk storage for camera recordings.
  2. Matched RAM. Two identical 8 GB or 16 GB sticks would give more room for containers and virtual machines.
  3. Backups. Last year's homelab report taught me that drives die without warning. This machine deserves a proper off-site backup too.

Conclusion

For about 10,000 yen, this little NEC box runs my camera system, monitoring, file sharing, office suite, test environments and a train board, all at the same time and quietly. It is not a Raspberry Pi, whatever the prompt says, and I think it is a better homelab for it. If you are in Japan and want to start a homelab, check the used business PC shelves before you buy a Pi.

H

Homelab

Homelab