HP EliteDesk

I'm not far into my homelabbing journey and I started with an HP Elitedesk for just over $100. I added an inexpensive SSD and a a couple of pretty large HDD for storage.

Because my wife works from home and the network has to be stable I can't just mess around with things so I was wondering if there was some way to do a virtual setup through my Proxmox homelab (refurbed hp elitedesk)

A second had HP Elitedesk or Lenovo 720q or similar costs about twelve beers here and could easily run all you’ve asked for, and is the size of a hardback and sips power.

HP Elitedesk is what you want. They support 2 3.5" drives.

I’ve also seen mentions of Intel Core i-series (9th gen and newer) achieving very low idle power, especially in refurbished business desktops like HP EliteDesk or Lenovo ThinkCentre.

Why buy a Mac mini when you can get a second hand Dell Optiplex , HP eiltedesk, etc machine for much cheaper. ... can run Linux ... better for expansion ... can add more RAM when you want

I have an i5 8500 in an HP Elitedesk and it idles at like 8W and sips a cool 11w with about 8-9 services running.

I understand that HDD are cheaper and using a SFF HP EliteDesk with 2x12 TB HDDS will probably will suite me just fine

An example would be an HP eiltedesk which idles/ low loads of 13W with a 2.5 inch HHD, Intel 6 gen CPU running Linux.