Dell Latitude 11” 3000 (3140) Laptop Intel N200 256GB SSD 8GB RAM Win 11 Pro | eBay
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Capacity : 256GB. Latitude 11” 3000 (3140) Laptop. YOU AGREE THAT DELL’S LIABILITY IN ANY DISPUTE WILL BE CAPPED AT THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU PAID FOR THE ORDER OR PRODUCT AT ISSUE. Explore Latitude. Windows 11 Pro.

Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.

Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management.  Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank

Negatives:

Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen

I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.

  • MangoPenguinEnglish
    1·
    23 days ago

    Neat idea, a lot more money than a 7th/8th gen box on ebay, but you have a built in UPS and screen for troubleshooting which is nice.

    • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      23 days ago

      The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

      • MangoPenguinEnglish
        2·
        23 days ago

        Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

        • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          1·
          23 days ago

          Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

          I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.