I saw some of the HP and Lenovo mini PC’s on ebay, etc for a decent price. I went with the BeeLink because of the deal I got on it. $250 USD for a 10th gen i5, 16GB RAM, and a 500GB M2. Figure I would spend the bit of extra money for an more up to date proc and extra RAM. I tend to keep machines for a VERY long time so I wanted to start at a good spot.

Sounds like esxi storage provisioning. You can grow, but shrinking is a whole different story

I have in on backorder to use as my plex server

I like the beelink and minisforum nucs more than Intel branded.

Note that in order to use hardware transcoding you have to have plex pass.