When you shop Black Friday homelab deals, the hard part isn’t finding a sale banner. It is knowing whether the number under it is low, because many strikethrough prices on Amazon are list prices nobody paid. A GPU marked 20% off can still cost far more than its MSRP. A $36 Zigbee dongle, on the other hand, is unlikely to drop more than a few dollars however long you wait.
This hub points you to our five category pages: local AI GPUs, mini PCs for Proxmox, networking, NAS and drives, and Home Assistant gear. It also links the four trackers that follow GPU, SSD, RAM and hard drive prices into Cyber Monday. Each category page sets buy-below targets from our price logs and last year’s Black Friday prices, and the table pulls two picks per category. The RX 9070 target comes from the GPU tracker, the rest from the category pages. Every price here was re-checked against Amazon on October 31, 2026.
Comparing the best Black Friday homelab deal in each category
Four of these ten picks already sit at or under their target, and none of them is a big-ticket item. The switch, access point, thermostat and Zigbee dongle are at their targets now. Every GPU, mini PC, NAS and drive row is still above the line. Read “Buy below” as the price that makes a pick worth buying, not as a forecast for November 27.
| Category | Pick | Price on Oct 31 | Buy below | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | PNY RTX 5060 Ti 16GB OC | $799.99 | $780 | Wait |
| GPU | ASRock RX 9070 Challenger 16GB | $749.99 | $739 | Close, wait |
| Mini PC | Minisforum MS-A2 (32GB, 1TB) | $1,335.00 | $1,240 | Fair now |
| Mini PC | Beelink Mini S13 (N150, 12GB) | $339.00 | $300 | Fair, can wait |
| Networking | MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN | $191.80 | $195 | Buy now |
| Networking | Grandstream GWN7672 Wi-Fi 7 AP | $156.17 | $157 | Buy now, low stock |
| NAS | UGREEN DXP4800 Plus | $632.98 | $600 | Wait |
| Drives | WD Red Plus 10TB | $459.99 | $410 | Wait |
| Home Assistant | Google Nest Thermostat (2020) | $79.00 | $80 | Buy now |
| Home Assistant | SONOFF Dongle Plus MG24 | $35.90 | $36 | Buy now |
Prices on these listings move during the day, so check the live price before you pay. The pattern matters more than any single row. Cheap accessories are already at or near their floor, while expensive hardware is still held up by the memory and hard drive shortages. If a pick you want says “Wait”, its source page shows the lowest price we logged and the date, so you know how far it has fallen before.
Shopping for a local AI GPU
GPUs are the category where a Black Friday discount can still leave you overpaying. Our Black Friday GPU deals for local AI page found every GDDR7 card selling well above MSRP. So it ranks cards by dollars per gigabyte of VRAM, since VRAM decides which models you can load at all. The used RTX 3090 there is priced from an eBay sold-listing average, because no new 3090 is left to price.
The 16GB RTX 5060 Ti is a common first card for a homelab, and at $799.99 it sits $20 over the $780 target on the GPU deals page. If you only want numbers, the GPU price tracker is faster. It compares the lowest new Amazon price for 15 cards against MSRP, with a “good” and a “great” Black Friday target for each. Its good target for the same card is $788, set from its October snapshots, and on October 30 no card was within 10% of MSRP. That’s why we’d wait on any GPU still above its good target.
Choosing a mini PC for Proxmox
Mini PCs need a target more than a sale date this year. Our Black Friday mini PC deals for Proxmox, local AI and Home Assistant page tracks 11 boxes, each with its lowest recorded price, today’s price and a buy-below target. Several have sold for less earlier this year than they do now. That history tells you which boxes are fairly priced now and which have room to fall in the sale.
Take the Minisforum MS-A2: we logged it at $1,239 on August 11, and it costs $1,335 today. The mini PC page still rates $1,335 as fair, because the memory market may not allow a real discount, and anything under $1,240 is a clear buy for a node with two 10G SFP+ ports built in. For a low-power box that runs Home Assistant, Pi-hole or a few containers, the Beelink Mini S13 is the budget row. It’s fair at $339, but nothing breaks if you wait a month for $300. For a box the deals page doesn’t track, compare the sale price with our mini PC price baseline by CPU class, which logs the low, median and high Amazon price for N150, 8845HS and AI Max+ 395 machines at fixed RAM and SSD sizes before the sales start.
Upgrading the network: 10GbE, PoE and Wi-Fi 7
Networking gear is the category where buying now often beats waiting. Our Black Friday networking deals page covers 17 picks across firewalls, switches, Wi-Fi 7, 10GbE cards and PoE. It calls a deal only when a listing sits at or under its buy-below price. Its main warning is about markups, since a sold-out item can come back from a reseller at a higher price.
At $191.80 the MikroTik CRS310 is at the lowest price we’ve logged, and it pairs well with the MS-A2’s SFP+ ports. Its buy box is an importer selling an EU-market unit, so check the power plug and warranty path. The Grandstream GWN7672 ships without a power adapter, so budget a PoE+ injector if your switch lacks PoE+. One row moved against us while we built this hub. The TP-Link TX401 10GbE card was $60.00 on the networking page and is $69.00 now, so it no longer counts as a deal. Small items bounce by a few dollars a week, which is why the target matters more than the headline.
Buying NAS enclosures and hard drives
Storage splits in two this year. Enclosures get real Black Friday cuts, but the drives inside them barely move. Western Digital told investors it was “pretty much sold out for calendar ’26”, and nobody discounts stock they don’t have. Our Black Friday NAS and hard drive deals page counts a drive as a deal only when it returns to its September price.
NASCompares listed the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus at $594.99 last Black Friday, and it costs $632.98 today, so $600 is a fair line to hold. For the disks, compare cost per terabyte before brands. The hard drive price tracker ranks 49 listings by dollars per TB and flags CMR versus SMR. The SSD price tracker does the same for 41 NVMe and SATA listings, which helps if your NAS takes M.2 cache drives.
Picking Home Assistant hardware
Smart-home parts are the easiest call on this page, because most of them don’t drop. Our Black Friday Home Assistant deals page re-checked the picks from 17 of our buyer guides. Radios and sensors held their price, and the swings showed up on bigger devices: a robot vacuum, a tablet and a smart lock. Buy the small parts now and save your patience for the expensive ones.
The Nest Thermostat at $79.00 is down from $99.99 and under its $80 target. The SONOFF Dongle Plus MG24 is $35.90, the price we’ve logged at every check since September 28, so waiting for a cut that isn’t coming only delays your Zigbee or Thread network.
Tracking prices before Black Friday week
Four trackers do the watching for you, and each one shows a cost a sale banner hides. A price per gigabyte or terabyte lets you compare a 2TB SSD with a 4TB one without doing maths at checkout:
- GPU prices: lowest new price versus MSRP for 15 cards
- SSD prices: dollars per TB across 41 SATA and NVMe listings
- RAM prices: dollars per GB across 155 DDR5 and DDR4 listings
- Hard drive prices: dollars per TB across 49 NAS, enterprise, surveillance and desktop drives
If you need memory in the next three months, buy it now rather than hold for the sale. DDR5 desktop memory sat at a median $17.21 per GB on the October 30 snapshot. A Black Friday discount is a percentage off that inflated base, not a return to last year’s prices. If nothing is broken and you want 64GB or more of DDR5, the RAM tracker’s advice is to wait and watch the 2x32GB kits instead. If you’re thinking of waiting past November, read our outlook for RAM prices in 2027 and the explainer on why RAM and storage prices increased.
Timing Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Black Friday falls on November 27, 2026 and Cyber Monday on November 30, with Thanksgiving on November 26. Amazon had not announced its 2026 sale window by October 31. Slickdeals predicts a Black Friday Week from November 19 and a Cyber Monday event from November 28 to 30. Amazon started its sale on November 21 in 2024 and November 20 in 2025, so expect most price moves in the week before the 27th.
When a listing changes during the sale, a few checks keep you from paying a “deal” price that isn’t one:
- Compare the price to the “Buy below” column, not the strikethrough
- Check who sells it: Amazon, the brand store or a reseller
- Confirm the condition says New, not Renewed or Used
- Match the exact variant: capacity, RAM and storage
Of those four, the seller check catches the costliest mistake. When a popular item sells out at Amazon, the listing can switch to a third-party seller charging more, and the Buy Box looks the same. A new seller plus a higher price is a markup. In that case, open the category page for that item, since it usually names a second pick still in stock near its target.
