I've used a few cheap Chinese "mini PC" as found on Amazon. The model with an Atom quad core is fine for light uses (and with the built in dGPU can hardware enc

I've used a few cheap Chinese "mini PC" as found on Amazon. The model with an Atom quad core is fine for light uses (and with the built in dGPU can hardware encode with Plex, albeit not h265 10bit). The current one I have is an Ace PC with a Pentium Quad Core - it does have a fan, but it hardly ever comes on, and it has 2.5" sata drive support in addition to the 120GB eMMC flash on board. I've got a 1TB 860 Evo in there and it's a fine lightweight server for file storage, plex, nextcloud and InfluxDB which is monitoring the various routers and computers on the network.