In my opinion (others may disagree) a used Small Form-Factor (SFF) desktop like the Dell Optiplex series strikes a good balance of size, performance, and just enough room inside for a couple drives (I’ve actually added a SATA card and 4 laptop drives to one - more costly on drives, but gives me a small unit).

Plus they’re a decent price on eBay or locally.

The other option are the mini pc’s - these are very small, often have a very small fan (or none) so cooling limits how much performance you can get from them. But these are great for the light services you listed - cooling shouldn’t be an issue (my CPU doesn’t even bump from music streaming, and barely shows an increasing from video streaming with transcoding). Because they tend to cost similar to an SFF, and my space isn’t that constrained, I prefer the SFF with it’s performance advantages (including the ability to add a decent video card).

Because of their compactness, you can (usually) at best get a single desktop drive in a mini, and often they may only fit a single 2.5" drive.

Now the bad news for right now - both memory and drive prices are at a significant high.

Edit: One thing I forgot - both of these kinds of systems have low power draw at idle which is a big deal for self hosting. My SFF idles at 20 watts with an 8 TB data drive and 2 500GB SSD’s for VM’s. It peaks at 80 watts when converting videos.

Bad time to need storage, I bought used 10Tb HDD for $60 back in the end of 2024, same ones going for $200+ now.

I’d recommend checking out old Lenovo ThinkCentre or something similar to a small office pc that has a few slots for drives and start from there. You could get some for cheap, like $50 I think.

It’s a terrible time to be doing this. There’s some decent NAS devices that use mobile chipsets and don’t draw much power, slap some spinning rust in there for storage and you’re all set. Unfortunately they’ve basically gone up by US 400 in the last 6 months.

Unless you are adding hundreds of pictures to immich every day and you are planning on using their machine learning stuff a lot, I’d say you don’t need any new hardware. The services you want should run easily even on machines with 4GB of RAM. If I were you, I’d just get one 2TB hard disk, put it in an external case and connect to the laptop via USB and keep this setup until this bubble pops.