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Hardware
Pick efficient, reliable hardware for your budget. Buying guides for mini PCs, hard drives, SSDs, memory, switches, routers, cases and UPS units.
In this category
Best Home Server Hardware in 2026
How to choose the CPU, RAM, storage and power for an efficient, reliable home server — with recommendations for every budget.
How to Reduce Your Home Server's Power Consumption
Practical tips to lower your home server's electricity use without sacrificing reliability or performance.
Glossary
UPS(Uninterruptible Power Supply)
A battery backup that keeps your server running briefly during a power cut and enables a safe shutdown.
ECC RAM(Error-Correcting Code Memory)
Memory that detects and corrects common data errors on the fly for greater reliability.
SATA
The common interface for connecting hard drives and 2.5-inch SSDs to a motherboard.
NVMe
A fast storage interface for SSDs that connects over PCIe, far quicker than SATA.
M.2
A compact slot on a motherboard used mainly for NVMe or SATA SSDs.
PCIe(Peripheral Component Interconnect Express)
The high-speed expansion bus that connects GPUs, NVMe drives and network cards to the CPU.
HBA(Host Bus Adapter)
A card that adds many drive ports, commonly flashed to pass disks straight through to ZFS.
HDD(Hard Disk Drive)
A spinning magnetic drive offering large capacity at a low price per terabyte.
SSD(Solid-State Drive)
Flash-based storage with no moving parts, far faster and quieter than a hard drive.
TDP(Thermal Design Power)
A rough measure of how much heat (and roughly power) a CPU produces under load.
NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express)
A fast storage interface designed for SSDs, offering much lower latency than SATA.
ECC RAM(Error-Correcting Code Memory)
Memory that detects and corrects single-bit errors, improving data integrity on always-on servers.
Hot-Swap
The ability to remove and insert drives while the system is powered on, without shutting down.