I would second this! The N100 is super efficient., and can often be found for around $150. I can also recommend looking at used intel “NUC” mini PCs if you’re budget conscience. I have a couple of 5th gen i5 NUCs i got for $60 that that run multiple VMs and LXC containers as part of a Proxmox cluster.

Another valid option is a synology nas, not only can you build the storage you probably want (I have 12TB 1 redundancy with one slot spare, read backed by ssd) but can also run containers on em as well.

I use one of these for home assistant, it’s perfect.

Ryzen one I got 2 years ago for my dad outperforms my M1 pro.