Is an AliExpress Homelab a Good Value?

Anyone who’s been involved in electronics for any length of time is likely to be familiar with AliExpress. This Chinese online retailer is well-known for offering products that are incredibly inexpensive. If you don’t mind waiting a few weeks for your order to arrive, you can get just about whatever you want for pocket change. However, there is a pretty big catch.

While some of the products really are a great value, it can be hard to pick them out from the sea of no-name devices and cheap clones that are made by manufacturers that aren’t particularly concerned about quality control. There are also some outright scams to be found on the pages of AliExpress, such as smartwatches with fake sensors. As the old saying goes: You get what you pay for.

Even so, the deals are very tempting. So much so that Michael Klements decided to build an entire homelab using only equipment purchased from AliExpress. His minimum requirements were a 10-inch rack with 5 to 6 units, a mini PC, an SSD, a router, an Ethernet switch, and a patch panel. In each case, the least expensive option meeting Klements’ minimum requirements was selected. In true AliExpress style, the total cost of all this hardware was very low. All in, Klements spent $216 on this homelab setup. But was it any good?

Before getting to that, let’s take a look at what Klements got for that price. The mini PC is powered by an Intel Core i3-4005 CPU and has 8GB of DDR3L RAM and a 128GB SSD. That’s not exactly a powerhouse, but for $104 it does sound like a pretty good deal. For storage, a pair of nameless 1TB SATA SSDs were ordered for about $20 each. SATA-to-USB cables were also purchased for $2 each. Additionally, a Wi-Fi 6 router was purchased for $28, an Ethernet switch for $9, and PETG filament and fasteners to 3D print a rack for around $30.

After printing the rack and installing the hardware, Klements took it for a spin. And the results? Less than impressive. CPU benchmarks put the mini PC on par with a Raspberry Pi 4. However, the processor is a dozen years old, so AliExpress can hardly be blamed. The Ethernet switch performed as expected in a series of speed tests. The Wi-Fi router was on the slow side, but that may have been simply because the mini PC only has a Wi-Fi 4 adapter onboard.

So far, the results were about what would be expected. Things started to shift when it came to the SSDs. Testing showed that although these drives reported their size as 1TB, they could only store about 120GB of data, and that write speeds were abysmal. In short, the drives are a total scam.

Considering all of the tests, Klements' final assessment is that you would be far better off buying quality used hardware than brand new mystery hardware from AliExpress. The performance will be comparable or better, and you will know what you are getting yourself into.