Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

1:30 There is totally a difference between us and QNAP though. We allow it and will not deny the warranty.

[@hateWinVista]

Excellent.

[@UnknownEntity420]

🤭

[@llortaton2834]

lets not even talk about synology day zero vuln, a friend i know lost half his information to ransomware, pulled the ethernet just in time to save his most important data.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@llortaton2834 We definitely recommend maintaining good 3-2-1 backups. No software solution is 100% safe.

[@Nathan_Woodruff]

1:18

[@TechnoTim]

Huge fan of clustered mini PCs! 3 of them replaced a few "modern" 1u servers at a fraction of the power and dollar cost!

[@Mikesco3]

Really nice to see you here Tim!

[@derekp6636]

its technotim! yep a coworker convinced me to switch from my giant t5500 2 node setup to clustered mini pcs, much less heat and noise let alone the powerbill. Just grabbed a few newer nodes to build an additional docker swarm cluster out of.

[@theundertaker5963]

Hi Tim, Would love to see a video on how to set it all up as I have a whole bunch of them just laying around here doing nothing.

[@worldgate989]

And in 6 month's it will be something else to replace that.

[@scentilatingone2148]

Thx for the idea! I've been stuck wanting servers and a rack for the sake of having a server rack.

[@spiralout112]

Nice to hear there's finally some options out there for attaching disks through usb that are decent! Be awesome if you could keep us updated on this or get a mention on exactly what controllers are good.

[@admante]

Definitely interested in your roundup of enclosures. I've been looking to try to accomplish this but got scared off by so many different ways enclosures can bomb.

[@coolestrock2008]

same.

[@tom4296]

same

[@VastCNC]

Here for it as well

[@loicdupond7550]

Same here as well. Wanted to do exactly this but could not find out recommendations on which enclosures to go for as well as what is their power consumption

[@zushiba]

I built a home server out of a used ChromeBox Asus CN60. I threw a 256gig SSD & 16 gigs of ram in it. It is NOT powerful but it runs Pihole, Home Assistant, Uptime Kuma, Next Cloud, A MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project which requires her to host several images. We're running a Cloudflair Tunnel /w a $2 domain name that I bought on sale. All in it cost me a little over $60. Been rock friggin solid! I'm running Debian/CasaOS. It runs fantastically, performs great and sips power.

[@devemia]

I have the same unit, and my OpenWRT firewall is chillin' on it, 1 Gbe symmetrical. I also have a few equivalent specs units (Intel 1st and 2nd gen), and Ubuntu server rocks on them. All have 2 GB RAM and 32 Gb SSD or less.

[@Brian-bq9up]

I would love to see more content on this topic. This is precisely what I’ve been looking to do but didn’t think it was possible to hook up an external drive bay to most mini pcs as I was thinking I needed a PCIE slot for a sas adapter. This is a clever approach

[@mcwild11]

YES! This is exactly my project. Build resilient cluster from consumer HW. For home / extended family /small business

[@Radek125]

I've been running two of the 5 gig proboxes for my media for over 5 years. Besides replacing the fan and modifying the bays to increase air flow. Rock solid

[@Level1Techs]

It's crazy they haven't improved the front grill or fan since them IMHO

[@purplepioneer5644]

I was actually looking at their enclosures a little while ago so this info has been great, I was going to stretch to something a bit more expensive but I think i’ll give one of these a go alongside my OWC to expand storage/backup.

[@fabriglas]

Noisy? Could you run ssd in it instead?

[@UnderLoK]

I would definately like to see some more USB enclosures. I think most of us have had this idea kicking around since the mini-pc thing took off with Ryzen, but USB doesn't scream reliability at least to me. My servers here at home are ancient, one is a 920 and the other is a 2680. They will both run until the end of time, but that's boring... lol

[@MrMartinSchou]

Speaking of power usage - it'd be interesting to see a kWh per day/week/month/year comparison for these types of things for home usage - especially for things where you're expecting a long lifetime in the home.

[@davidgunther8428]

That would be use load dependent. Ithink hard drives are about 4-10W each. I mean, there's 24 hours in a day, so multiply by 0.040kW and get kWh/day.

[@eDoc2020]

One watt is 8.76 kWh/year*, so multiply accordingly. It's easy enough to use 10 instead, that also adds headroom or accounts for occasional light loading. So a system idling at 40 watts will probably use 400 kWh/year under home usage. *That's for non-leap years. Leap years are 8.784.

[@garydeluce464]

I had two of these exact Proboxes on an Asus C246 Pro running Stablebit Drivepool. I had 19 drives (8 in the proboxes, 3 on a cheap PCIe card, and 8 onboard SATA controller). This resulted in slightly over 200tb in Drivepool (plus snapraid). This Frankenserver ran everything for me and was a beast for years. The only issue I had was when Windows update borked the drive letters and I lost some media. All in all, these Promedia boxes drastically surpassed my expectations and ran reliably for years (on an UPS of course). I mention this because it WILL work but eventually I wasn't able to sleep at night and have since moved to a Synology NAS and a Dell R440 with ZFS in Proxmox. I still have these boxes and some 10tb drives hanging around. A friend of mine isn't doing well financially at the moment but desperately needs a NAS for his media business. Thanks, Wendell for illuminating this option for me. I'm going to donate one the proboxes and some drives and build him a NAS. All he'll have to buy is a NUC.

[@axonn101]

I was considering this mini-pc home server route but looking at places like the homeserver subreddit felt like a flood of information that made it look like this was not the route to take. Hearing the reasonable upsides and downsides in this video it honestly sounds like this is the right choice for me. If I can get a decent external USB enclosure for 3.5” drives I can hopefully stop using pCloud and instead just look for a cloud service to back stuff up.

[@thepeakoflife]

Looking forward to the hard drive enclosure videos. I’m running 2 minisforum HX90 home servers. One is a back up. I fitted 64 gb or ram, 2 4tb SSDs, and a host 1tb m.2 drive in each server for the past year. Incredible performance just would love more storage options.

[@BoopyTheFox]

Dude i have exact same setup, but just for 1 of them

[@Technopath47]

I was considering doing EXACTLY this to replace my current 4U server chassis which ended up never actually being put in a rack as my plans for my homelab changed (and the chassis ended up being kinda not great). Thanks for covering this!

[@spigs1690]

Wow are you me? I’m basically in the same situation as you (4U chassis ideals fell through). I was originally considering something like one of those Topton Aliexpress boards for a downsize, but this video is making me reconsider. This seems more economical.

[@knghtbrd]

I actually had this older enclosure of this type that exposed four eSATA ports. It was older enough that it was not specified to be SATA 3, but since there was very little in the way of electronics in there, it worked for four 8TB drives, which is what I had in there for years. Good box. I don't use it anymore because it can't seem to handle drives that are 14TB properly. Power demands are just too high I think. I'd love to see just a good external drive box. Or really any good solution for just handling a stack of drives. Data hoarder gonna data hoard.

[@malifestro3319]

I've actually been doing this with the 8 bay version labeled as 3.1 gen 2, Same diff, for years. My implementation was prior to Unraid ZFS support, so it is quite a unicorn. Since then Truenas and Unraid have made great strides and I have considered starting over. But you all know what kind of work that is. Needless to say, I am waiting for the right device. I would really like to see Minisforum, Beelink, or someone develop a cool 5 enclosure to handle 3.5s while still giving room for 2 NVMEs and 2 2.5" SATA SSDs. This device would build an amazing off the shelf Unraid home server capable of running your nas, plex, and home server. Stuff it with a nice processor of course. I am sure there would be quite the audience!

[@camberwellcarrot420]

I bought this exact Mediasonic about a month ago, mostly based on Wendell's lukewarm approval of it, and have it connected to an old HP Prodesk on which I installed Openmediavault (new to me), sharing out 4 hard drives which I moved out of an old tower PC, mostly for Plex which I have running on an N95 mini PC (running LMDE) which was dirt cheap and works great for Plex. It's been a solid solution, running the drives in the Mediasonic, and I also connected two WD Elements external drives to the Prodesk. S.M.A.R.T all works and the drives themselves are identified properly with serial numbers and everything else. I'm pretty happy with it so far. Thanks for the info and half-hearted recommendation Wendell! 😉 I'm glad I didn't spend more.

[@david.godlewski]

Which model? I just got the HFR7-SU31CH and I'm having issues creating a ZFS pool with the drives in the enclosure - I suspect because it's the RAID compatible model. Curious what your experience is!

[@kuro68000]

We are at an awkward time now where NAS is moving towards solid state, but still need HDDs for bulk. Very few options exist for 2.5" and NVMe drives. An (m)ATX size case, no space for PSU as you will use a Pico, and a front full of 5.25" bays (for 2.5" and 3.5" hot swap modules) would be ideal. The only thing like that on the market is currently not available anywhere.

[@Geo64x]

3D print it!

[@kuro68000]

@@Geo64x I've thought about it, but it's not easy. Laser cutting might work better too.

[@JamieStuff]

I had one of the older 5Gb/s Probox units on my home server (Unraid) a while back, connected via eSATA. It would run fine for a few days to a week, then randomly go offline. It turns out that the default setting on that unit was when all drives were spun down, after a certain amount of time (30 mins?) the box would shut off. The solution (which was not listed in the manual) was to disable "power sync", so it stayed on even when the drives were spun down.

[@Gryfang451]

Speaking of longevity, I've been running two HP N40L Microservers forever. One PSU finally gave up the ghost. It was a backup to a backup, but I still feel sorry enough for the old guy that I may replace the PSU. They were running FreeNAS, then TrueNAS core. They are over 10 years old, and have had 2 or 3 generations of hard drives, memory upgrades, but other than that, no much. They just kept working.

[@TheBaldOne]

I've been running NUCs as servers for a long time now. They're awesome for low power/medium performance for my needs. I have 2 full servers running at home in "normal" hardware and 2 remote NUCs running UnRAID (I know it's overkill but I like to have the webui and community applications easily available via VPN). I've been toying with the idea of getting a 3rd NUC with enough storage to create an onsite cold backup storage, that USB storage box seems really interesting, I have to check it out. By the way, I use the term NUC loosely here as none of them are actually NUCs but Gigabyte boxes, etc..

[@johntang9173]

doing exactly same thing with a older NUC+a 4 bay USB; mainly for non-critical media storage and BT :P. Really a low cost and low power solution good for myself running on Openmediavault. With support of docker compose I am able to explore more usage quickly, too.

[@angry_wizard]

This is exactly what I did. Bought a generic N100 Mini-PC and hooked it up to a Yottamaster 4-bay enclosure fitted out with 12tb Ironwolf drives. Threw Ubuntu on it, installed ZFS and put the disks in RAIDZ1, even put a 2.5" SSD into the mini-PC as a cache. Makes for a mean little Plex server for me, my partner, parents, siblings and best friend. Whole thing cost $1400 CAD (that's around $1000 USD).

[@magran17]

Hi from Victoria 🇨🇦

[@LuxStroy]

It upsets me that there are no compact cases for 2.5" HDD/ssd. I would like such a DAS with two 8TB SSDs and connect it to my mini PC

[@tuliof]

I bet the HDDs made the bulk of the cost

[@rudysal1429]

I have an older Lian li case that is MITX and I can fit 5-6 HDDS, really 5 because I don't feel the 6th would very enough airflow. My biggest issue is finding a better upgrade to an amd 3200g and asrock motherboard that is affordable and has either 2.5gb ethernet, pcie 16x that maybe can be split into two for a 10gb nic and hba card.

[@angry_wizard]

Mini-PC was $180, enclosure was $200ish so yup. @@tuliof

Hi! Can use an old PC case as well with the mini pc there instead of the PSU and the pcb of the enclosure. More options for expansion, cooling and connectivity.

[@trapexit]

Problem with multiplexed USB to SATA adapters is stability. Almost always if one drive is reset they all reset. My preference, if sticking with USB, is using individual usb - sata adapters connected to a solid hub. I've not looked but it would be nice if there was a 3d printable case that would allow drives to just slide in.

[@mrdizz1e]

Thanks for sharing this. What do you mean by “solid hub?” Just a USB hub? Powered vs bus-powered? Or something more specific?

[@trapexit]

@@mrdizz1e A good quality powered hub. Not some random no name job.

[@_sneer_]

When it comes to power usage my i7-9700 with 2x8GB DDR4, 1 sata ssd, PCIe LSI megaraid with 2xHitachi enterprise HDDs in RAID 1 for data, uses about 52W most of the time. I am running Slackware with manually installed Nextcloud and docker containers: Invidious, portainer, prowlarr, transmission, heimdall and some other stuff. When I am downlading torrents and using nextcloud at the same time it may go just over 60W. Pegged about 160W. Whole setup didn't cost more than 300. You don't need expensive and newest stuff for your home server. I have plenty of resources left for more services if I need them.

[@davea6037]

This has been my solution for a local hosted game server and NAS for a couple years now. I went from a Xeon x99 m-atx build, to a simple beelink 5600h w/ 32gb of ram and a 4 bay enclosure over usb c 3.0 connection. I don't do daily or weekly backups, but I use the raid on the enclosure for vaulting important content. It was cheaper than my x99 setup, and about 1/2 the size, not to mention x99 xeons aren't exactly peppy these days, the 5600h is way, way faster. It always blew my mind that diskless NAS's on amazon and online with like atoms and celerons were going for upwards of 300-600$. My mini-pc running as a headless was less than 400$ on sale, and it came with that 5600h, 32gb of ddr4, and a 500gb nvme drive.

[@Eridescent]

I did something like this for years - small form factor PC with all four drives of my storage attached through the same USB 3.2 enclosure. It wasn't ideal, but it definitely worked.

[@MarvinLjungqvist]

Great spark of ideas, have been looking to overhaul my home serverstack to a more energy friendly and smaller footprint solution and this hasn't been on my mind at all. Love this outside the box ideas for us willing to push the boundaries of what's possible. ❤

[@walterbartek6830]

I just got a sabrent 5bay 10g, DS-SC5B, instead of the meadiasonic. connected to a um480xt. would love to see you get the sabrent in for testing. seems like a pretty solid enclosure but its like 40% more expensive edit: didn't make it to the end, you mention running more than 1 enclosure. the sabrent can supposedly daisy chain. there is a yottamaster that has similar functions too.

[@dktol56]

Same enclosure attached to one of the (four available) 10Gb/s USB ports on a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 Mini with an I5-8600T and 64GB RAM. Just barely started testing with three WD 14TB enterprise drives, using Debian 12 and different storage scenarios with mdraid, lvm, or zfs. I'm impressed that the individual mounted drives and enclosure go to sleep properly when I suspend to RAM, then spin up, ready to go, when I wake the system up - no hangs or black screen. Now, will this still work when I combine the drives with zfs?

[@ter0x]

I wonder if that model when there is a blackout recover the last state of energy to avoid activate it manually

[@cosmolotov]

I was so keen to try something like this out myself that I bought a (what I thought) was a good looking 5-bay enclosure to try and use it with a mini PC I had. Problem was that the enclosure abstracted away the serial numbers of the connected hard drives, which meant that using software raid would have been very risky since it wouldn't be able to reliably distinguish between the different hard drives in order to maintain the raid configuration.

[@Nedski42YT]

A compact and inexpensive 4 drive array that is small enough to sit on TOP of a 4x4" NUC sized mini-pc is the Sabrent DS-4SSD for ~$90. It has a USB3 5 Gb/s interface. Put in four 8GB 2.5" SATA SSD's and you'll have a nice little Plex server. The only negative thing I know about it is the fan noise. The airflow design is bad. My solution was to drill more intake holes and remove some of the unneeded internal bracing structure. If I had a 3D printer I would redesign the case.

[@7MBoosted]

I really wish the likes of ASRock and BioStar still made m-atx imbeded motherboards with decent pcie connectivity at a reasonable price. Being able to put together an N100 or N300 machine with an IT mode SAS card and a 2.5gbps nic sound like the makings of any extremely cool DIY power efficient NAS.

[@26Macdylan]

I loved the videos about the synology camera setup. Any advice to have a home server with the hardware you showed + good camera/storage solution? Keep up the great work!

[@aspzx]

One question I have with USB enclosures is how do they handle sleep mode? For example, can the operating system put the drives to sleep when they are not needed and wake them up when they are? Also, I'd love to know which models you _don't_ recommend because unfortuntely the Mediasonic 4 HF7-SU31C that you show here is not available in the UK yet. Which enclosures should I be trying to avoid according to L1T?

[@stephengentle2815]

I’m looking at the Terramaster D6-320 for this kind of setup. I had an Intel NUC 11th Gen, replaced it with a 13th Gen and the 11 will become my new home server.

[@wikingagresor]

Wendell, one use of such system is to build a base for a 'van assistant', a lightweight and power-efficient computing server with security monitoring capabilities.

[@GSP-76]

Ive been using mini pcs and 5 drive bay to run my Plex server for years now... it's been rock solid.

[@SwirlingDragonMist]

I feel your style and expertise adds allot to this space, mostly what I see are reviews of iterative commodity junk made by hammers and cycles, and what may be familiarity bias covering just one platform.

[@Okand2]

I've been using a NUC7i5BNH as my home server since late 2017 and it's been great. Thus far the 250gb nvme m.2 ssd I started with and the 1tb sata ssd I've added is enough. No idea if the usb 3.1 is worth bothering with as you warn though.

[@EminemLovesGrapes]

Checked it out in the EU amazon. 450 euros for the enclosure. That's a no. Probably nded to find a deal somewhere else or use some other brand

[@purplepioneer5644]

I actually did something similar but using an entry level M1 Mac Mini that has served me well for a few years now. With a 4 bay OWC enclosure I picked up cheap (way cheaper than normal, like $150-200 iirc). Before anyone piles on about the price of a Mac Mini, I was working for Apple at the time and was on my way out. Used my employee discount and a $300 employee credit to lower the price of the Mac Mini to $250 or something after tax. Might have been even cheaper. It replaced a 2008 dual xeon Mac Pro i’d got on ebay for $200 back in 2016. Lightyears ahead in terms of speed and it sips power compared to the dual xeon beast!

[@johnmijo]

I've been using the Terramaster USB storage units for a few years now, there is an occasional hitch that seems to require that I power cycle the device, leave it powered off for a minute or two and then power it back on and then all the storage devices show up once more. Basically one or two of the drives on the unit seem to disappear from the drive list unitl I do this. I've got three of these units and all purchased at different times and all have experienced this behavior.

[@XxMicroNinjaxX]

Heya Wendell, I spotted that you're using the Elgato 4K60 Pro at 8:13, have you been able to get it working within Linux at all?

[@sqlazer]

My current NAS setup is a mini pc I bought off amazon, an "AWOW AZ51", N5105/8gb/dual-2.5gbe machine. I run Windows 10 LTSC as my "server" os. I have a couple WD Element drives attached via USB 3.0, and Stablebit Drivepool doing all of the mergerfs style heavy lifting. I run most of my network services on other machines, but this one handles all of my file tasks. Backup to Backblaze, runs a VM running Proxmox Backup Server, etc. The only thing on this file server that isn't "file dedicated" is a plex server, only because the N5105 is actually pretty darn good at low power transcoding. The rest of the machines in my homelab are small proxmox nodes. I'm very happy with my entire system

[@NelsonMinar]

Really helpful video, I'm trying to build this exact thing but am having a hard time finding a reliable USB enclosure. Unfortunately the Mediasonic Probox you talk about seems to not turn itself on again if power is cut and restored. Some enclosures have physical rocker switches and will turn back on.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

So when can we expect the Level1Tech USB disk boxes? I have tried a bunch of USB enclosures and the most stable and reliable has been to use single enclosures with asmedia controllers

[@Battlekell]

Hi Wendell, thank you for the great video. Could you elaborate on the ECC part? I thought the mobile non-pro Ryzen processors didn‘t support ECC memory and it doesn‘t look like Minisforum specifically support it either, does it? Also, I think their new BD770i Mini-ITX board in combination with the Supermicro CSE-721TQ-350B2 chassis could be a very nice cost-efficient combination.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

The only ECC you can get on these things is the on-die ECC of DDR5 dimms, of course

[@marcogenovesi8570]

Afaik the only "small form factor" PC that does support ECC is the Asrock Deskmeet x300 with a PRO APU

[@Battlekell]

@@marcogenovesi8570 Exactly, the 5600H he showed only supports DDR4, though - adding to my confusion.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

the box with the xeon is a NUC Pro 9, a NUC9VXQNX or something like that

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@Battlekell for those he is saying "you can do without ECC" which I know sounds bad for us ECC fans but for most people is going to be fine

[@txijene]

I've got 3 Dell Optiplex 3080 Micros running side-by-side I got for $100 a piece from a local business. i5-10500T CPUs, 1TB SSDs, 64GB DDR4 (I had purchased new storage and RAM) One running Windows Server 2022 to play with AD, IIS, NFS, DNS, and similar One running Proxmox for playing with VMs and Containers and creating an "unlimited" number of other softwares, apps, and tools. Another that acts as a host in the domain so I can play with GPO and MDM solutions Very small amount of space that these things take up, I have essentially zero redundance right now though. Working on that...

[@fenturi]

I have 2 miniforum PC's and I have that Mediasonic HF7-SU31C, but the best I have found is TERRAMASTER D6-320 6 bay USB 3.2 Gen2 I also use a dell Optiplex 5070 with a low profile 10gb nic and the D6-320 as a fileserver. I used this over the mini's because they are only 2.5 gb networking.

[@thestreamreader]

What is the power usage on this?

[@PCvideoGAMES1400]

I would be interested in that as well, I have ordered a different 4 bay 10 gigabit enclosure for testing, however it draws 11 watts with the fan off and all 4 drives in standby, which is pretty disappointing, at this point I am better off using an ATX board and power supply instead of a mini pc for my home server.

[@vedranart]

Running Proxmox on my HP Elitedesk with i5 and 32GB RAM. Under proxmox I'm running: - Shinobi CCTV for 5 IP cameras - Portainer under which I run a wordpress site and some other services - Cloudflare Tunnelling so that I can access my services via my domain - Home Assistant - Open Media Vault for sharing folders and syncing files with my backup server - using 2x2TB NVMe via USB-c for this Second mini PC is Intel NUC Skull with i7 which I use as Proxmox backup. And this setup runs for me 24/7 without a problem and I still have a lot of CPU power left.

[@airman_85uk]

The one with the thunderbolt would be nice for some fast external SSD and daisy chain HDDs. It starts to get messy though

[@zachb4047]

I have been considering building my own 'enclosure' with a Topton MoB and then getting a mini PC to access it all over NFS and do all the heavy lifting.

[@marble_wraith]

The most recent minisforum boxes i saw on their website are only using Radeon 680m graphics (RDNA2) which means no AV1 hardware support which is a must have IMO if you want to make the most out of the space you've got. Suggested alternative: Bee-link GTR7 or SER7 both have Radeon 780m (RDNA3) graphics with AV1. Servethehome did some reviews recently. Other then that, my biggest annoyance is miniPC's chassis and cooling aren't designed with desktop fans in mind. Most enclosures have a surface area of around ~120mm. And yet instead of using a 120mm desktop fan (which is also more accessible in terms of market) often they're designing proprietary solutions to use some flavor of shitty laptop blower fan... which who knows if it'll be available in a few years.

[@LA-MJ]

Bkmrk

[@rudysal1429]

It would be amazing if the community could fund some sort of mini device with some form of connection that could have sff8088 or whatever the ones are for a box like a DAS that would allow better connectivity and upgradability. Kind of like that hdd box but a modular system so you can add one or more depending on the setup and cost.

[@davidgunther8428]

Minisforum has a 7940hs based UM790 box. It has integrated RDNA3.

[@marble_wraith]

​@@davidgunther8428nice find, their menu system is weird to navigate

[@radiantfairy4079]

Hi there. Do you have an updated video about this? If you don't mind, please share the amazon links for the suggested setup.

[@lifeHacker42]

Looks like this is available outside the US but for huge shipping markups. I'd love to see a follow up with more options that are more available overseas

[@MarkRose1337]

There's an appealing opportunity at 2:33

[@joshuawaterhousify]

I use a Minisforum HM80 for mine; 2.5Gb eth, 2x2.5" drives, 8c/16t. I threw 2x8TB SSDs in it, and 64GB RAM because I was running out of RAM for what I was doing on it. I'd look at this as the next step forward, since I'm running out of RAM, but I'm running low on storage, so the timing in this is great. That said, with my main rig running and the Minisforum not being easy to 10Gb-ify (main rig is 10Gb capable), the question is whether I complete my full size server I've been slowly working on (still need a cooler, RAM, and PSU), or whether I put together another smaller, still portable system I can still move for LAN parties and do my full sized one later (Zimacube review? I know one channel is looking at something in one, but I'll always be happy with more data and opinions on things like this)

[@MarkConstable]

I've got a HM90 Minisforum node with 1x NVMe, 2x SSD (all 2TB) and 2x 2.5GbE. 2x NVMe would have been ideal but with Proxmox/ZFS on the single NVMe and Ceph on the pair of SSDs, it's been an excellent node (once I got a pair of replacement SSD cables as they're rather fragile). Just missing a decent USB-C to 10GbE connector... let us know when you find one, Tim.

[@IngwiePhoenix_nb]

Looking for more JBOD stuff! My super old DiskStation - SATA-II, not -III - is really hitting it's limits, and my NanoPi R6s is doing the best it can but ... yeah, 5.10 kernel and the devs are kinda ... eh. So I am looking to create a better home network! Also, I am a little worried about shredding my microSD cards in the NanoPi, lol. Best-case scenario, I can build a mini-cluster with two SBCs, one of them linked to such a storage enclosure and acting as the NAS, whilst the other one runs miscelanious services. Would be so much neat-er. ^^

[@20quid]

4:08 Wolfgang's Channel did a similar build with a LattePanda but found that the USB connection was preventing the CPU from entering its lowest power states. Was that your experience with these mini PC's or are they still able to idle at their lowest wattage?

[@fitlikeaglove7396]

1:33 Yes, I want 5 Drives + 10w compute idle, But make it 30w so I can put it in HA it / cluster it. How can the USB storage be shared so 3 mini pcs can access the storage? Seems like the path might be network 10Gbit based but that get pricey because the storage has to get it's own compute and now we're basically running janky SANs for a darn homelab. Hope to see some progress on the local USB network and using ceph! That path seemed a lot more attractive to me.

[@richkovach]

Thunderbolt 3/4 for further stability and headroom? Something like the OWC ThunderBay boxes (the non-raid ones). They can daisy chain too as a bonus :)

[@LA-MJ]

Bkmrk

[@FragEightyfive]

Hey Wendell, thanks for sharing your views on this sort of setup.I had been looking at this or one of the 4 or 8 bay appliance solutions from Synology, but will probably be going mini-PC + enclosure route now. I have been trying to get my parents and wife off cloud storage, and since my parents live somewhat close, I will build 2 miniPC NAS's, so we each have a local and off-site backup, super important stuff backed up to a cloud (but this reduces cloud requirements from $10's/month to $1's/month). MiniPC is cheaper since I will be building at least 2 identical setups.

[@PhonePhreak3z]

I can't till I'm in the position to be able to build a small home server/NAS.. One day, hopefully. Awesome video!!

[@MichaelSmith-fg8xh]

What do you think that costs? How much storage?

[@Looki124]

had a friend use a 3d printer to make a new case to turn his beelink ser6 pro into a nas, used a M.2 NVME SATA 3.0 Cards to add 6 sata port and the os on ssd connector i still dont know how he powered the 6 disk but apparently it runned fine

[@themomorain]

6:49 so you are telling me this mini pc can run home assistant?? that would be so awesome?!

[@bryce2113]

Any suggestions for a similar low power (maybe even lower horsepower) equivalent that is rack mounted? I'm currently using an HP DL380P Gen8 as my backup server. It works great and I have only one complaint--power usage. I've since resorted to powering it down and running my backups just once a month. But since I can't get WakeOnLAN to work correctly it has been a manual process and I've been doing it far less often than once a month. The server is only going to be running backups for my main server, PCs, and Macbook.

[@HakimElGhazouani]

I considered the external hdd bays for my setup,but I ended up removing the enclosure on a 11th gen Intel NUC i5,and put it inside a small itx case and 2 x 14tb drives onto a nvme SATA board 😂 It's working great! And I even have a single 1tb nvme drive as cache. Idle is around 22w 🎉

[@thestreamreader]

please share full setup details. like what itx case etc.

[@solo_phi]

+1 for the full setup plz

[@jenesuispasbavard]

Any suggestions for home security cameras and software for locally hosted video storage? I have a TrueNAS box sitting here that I'm looking for more uses for.

[@SlowPCGaming1]

What about combining the two USB 3.x Type ports to effectively function as a single 10 Gbps port? The Minis Forum SFF computers usually have two USB 3.x ports on the front and as many (or more) on the back.

[@chromerims]

Of myriad videos from so many tech creators, this topic is the one we've been waiting for. 👍 Can't wait to watch this later on.

[@solocamo3654]

When I retire my i9 10900 / 64gb ddr4 3600 / Intel Arc A380 ( in a Rosewill Thor V2 EATX case) based home server I'll definitely consider the future versions of this. Thanks for the information as always.

[@neccros007]

Whatever happened to that Supermicro mini tower you got from Micro Center??? You said you were going to do more videos on it but haven't seen any

[@4bstr4ct]

you said you had 60TBs raw in that USB enclosure. On the amazon page for the product you highlight, it says that the enclosure does not support PWDIS drives. Did you do the pin 3 trick? It seems most 20+TB drives are going PWDIS (sata 3.3), so i ask you. Perhaps we need a video on dealing with PWDIS when it comes to large drives and enclosures.

[@TheRsxer63]

I purchased the minisforum i9 and would like to have a external drive storage with a SATA, and thunderbolt (for comparisons) . I will be trying Unraid (I already own), and trunas.I currently have 10 hdds (from 12TB to 20TB), and would like to have 1 or 2 drive enclosures. What would you recommend? I want to keep the enclosure cost total under$1k (prefer around $400 if reliable). I am using this for Plex.

[@gruntlord6]

Literally just went this rabbit hole and ended with the same conclusion! You did end up with a better enclosure though so I'm returning mine and getting this one so I can truly saturate my drives

[@iDork56]

I've been using three 2012 Mac minis in a Proxmox cluster for a couple years now. They're all connected with Ceph and use less power than my Ryzen 5 3600 did with unRAID. Highly recommend for low power, core dense computing for moderately cheap! EDIT: It's lovingly called "the Mac Stack" or "the Stackintosh"

[@frankwong9486]

I have q um480xt ,puchase when discount The only problem is it getting hot when sustained loading , the fan curve is lazy and not ramp up, the nvme and 2.5 ssd inside the case getting baked like 70C+ and some drive may started to kicked in throttle and slow down Current workaround is open the bottom and put the whole thing on a 12cm usb fan

[@MRPtech]

I have been running proxmox on 12th Gen i7 NUC and it is perfect for me. 4 - 5 VM, couple LXCs and it sips kWh. It is overkill for what I use, but you can say it is future proof to have nuc with 9TB combined storage, 64GB ram and 1260p i7 CPU.

[@TheKrnGl]

I'm in the process of moving my unraid in fractal r5 to m720q tiny + probox 4-bay usb-a (i think the 2022 model). We'll see how it goes but I've been tired of unraid's limitations for a while now, and maybe mergerfs + snapraid will serve me well. A lot of people online poo-poo on USB (especially the unraid crowd) so I'm glad this video is correcting the record.

[@kenzieduckmoo]

"Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?" this is literally the dream scenario i thought of when TrueNAS Scale first announced

[@jodajackson4489]

There are also some nice 8 bay external RAID enclosures that will connect to a NUC like computer too. Probably in the ~$350 range

[@legion3343]

"This one is the least bad... " aye that was how I felt when I was looking at these USB implementations before I just gave up and went the traditional route.

[@Alan-yg6gv]

This was incredibly useful thank you!!!

[@johnpaulsen1849]

I agree with the USBC 10Gb adapters... You have done the kvms. Any thoughts on this?

[@zeal514]

This works well. I wish I went with this originally. I have a N5105 NAS board. I think imma make it a TrueNAS server, to exclusively manage my HDDs and SSD clusters. I have 1 NAB6, but I plan to get a 2nd one, this way I have 2 Proxmox servers, and the shared storage in a cluster. Then eventually get a 3rd 1 if I really want for HA. Or just focus kubernetes. Either way, it's really efficient. I'd likely have a external backup drive to back everything up.

[@rudysal1429]

@level1techs would it be possible for a community lead or assisted partnership with a company like minisforum to build one of these nuc type boxes with 10gbe NIC, a SFF8088 or some connector that can be connected to a hard drive DAS or box like the one you showed but designed as a modular unit. 4 and 8 box ones and possible have enough for 2x 8hdd boxes to plug in and the 10gbe. Maybe also a 120 or 140mm fan instead of those annoying laptop fans. Feel like that would be a nice market for people who want storage but start small.

[@masaharumorimoto4761]

Thanks, I was looking at that exact Mediasonic model, I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole, I just want 4 extra drives for my laptop.

[@meco]

How trustworthy is raid over USB tho? I personally use an m.2 HBA with 5 (there's an asmedia one with 6) SATA ports to my external hard drive enclosure

[@wyattarich]

Fantastic video, thank you! I wonder, what is the point of the 'sync' buttons? Will they fry an array if you push it randomly? Can they be easily disabled (cut cable) if so?

[@TradersTradingEdge]

I have exactly this configuration, but with a RasPi 4 8GB with OpenMediaVault. It's perfect for me, because I don't need a super fast Ethernet. So, super low power consumption, very low pricing for RasPi & the storage case. And OMV has Docker too, so I can use it for soooo many things §8-) Thanks for the great Video.

[@lemonbrothers3462]

What are the good controllers for USB sata and nvme adapters? would love a video diving into that

[@Mishanw]

What’s do you think is the best deal for 2024? That’s great for power and potential for running multiple VMs on proxmox ideally with ECc?

[@SeentySeen]

@Level1Techs can you run a miniforum UN100D for a small micro business just to access files for the business on laptop or remotely on mobile for simple file storage? Instead of using Dropbox for example? Thanks

[@BrownieX001]

Is there a forum link that has suggested hardware configs?

[@xani666]

my NAS uses i3-3250 which is 11 years old CPU, you don't need more for just serving files, unless you're a video editor or something

[@screamingiraffe]

3 Zimaboards and an Asustore Pro 12 48TB running ESXi8 works well, I highly recommend both Zimaboards and the definitely the asustore.

[@KuroiPK]

Theirs some mini PCs with dual m.2 couldn’t you just use the second one as a cache drive to speed up those USB C HDDs?

[@lshallo106]

How about low idle power with more than the normal 20 PCIe lanes? EPYC idle is like 100W. Don't know about EPYC 8004 though. I'm really struggling with that..