This seems like a question that could be easily answered with math, but there is a big problem. This question has a lot in common with the Fermi paradox, because there are so many important numbers that would need to...
Read the post →There is a serious problem with the question in the title. It all hinges on what you feel qualifies as a NAS or a homelab. We could serve a README.MD over WebDAV on an ESP32 and call it a power-sipping...
Read the post →I don’t know if I am really properly beating on this thing as hard as I can, but I am doing my best with the hard drives I have available!
Read the post →That title should be longer. I don’t want to exclude 4-bay and 8-bay USB SATA enclosures, but I didn’t want to waste so many extra words in the front of the title!
Read the post →When I first migrated my virtualized homelab stuff from my old Debian with KVM and virt-manager to a mini PC running Proxmox, I knew I would want to eventually have some sort of cluster manager. It didn’t take long before...
Read the post →I was over at my friend Brian Moses’s house for pizza last night, and as soon as I walked in the door, he handed me one of the NanoKVM units that he bought during Sipeed’s crowd-funding campaign. I ate my...
Read the post →I was supposed to buy one power-sipping Celeron N100 mini PC to replace the aging and inefficient AMD FX-8350 in my homelab. That is what I did at first, and it worked out great. My Intel N100 with a single...
Read the post →I saw the refurbished Minisforum UM350 on Amazon for $155, and my brain immediately started tingling. Geekbench 5 says that this older Ryzen 3550H is a little faster than an Intel N100, though the spec sheet implies that it may...
Read the post →This really depends on what you mean when you say that a Celeron N100 mini PC isn’t enough. If an N100 mini PC isn’t powerful enough, you can spend a bit more on a Ryzen 5560U mini PC that is...
Read the post →Identifying bottlenecks is a skill that many of us struggle with. Learning to pinpoint bottlenecks is important, and learning which bottlenecks to ignore can save you a lot of money.
Read the post →I am writing way too many blogs about mini PCs lately, so I definitely wasn’t planning on publishing this. As I was staring at the graph, I just thought that I had to write about what I was seeing.
Read the post →Was it ACTUALLY cheaper to buy a second mini PC than to upgrade the RAM in my existing N100 server? It depends on how you look at it.
Read the post →I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house with incandescent light bulbs. In those dark days, we had multiple 60-watt light bulbs in every room. Not 60-watt-equivalent bulbs, but bulbs that actually consumed 60 watts of...
Read the post →If you came here looking for a parts list for an extremely power-efficient NAS build, you are probably in the wrong place. I have just been running tests on my own N100 homelab server using a power meter, and what...
Read the post →I have had Proxmox running on my Intel N100 mini PC for at least a week so far. It hadn’t been doing any real work until I migrated my first virtual machine over from my old homelab server last night....
Read the post →I expected to write this blog AFTER all my virtual machines were migrated to the new hardware, but I am impatient, and I am recording enough interesting data that one big blog post would likely be really, really long.
Read the post →Am I trying to win Brian Moses’s DIY NAS 2023 giveaway?!
Read the post →I have been excited about the Topton N5105/N6005 motherboard ever since Brian Moses sent me a link to it while he was pondering his DIY NAS build for 2023. I literally haven’t been this excited about a motherboard and CPU...
Read the post →I am excited! I have been working toward this goal for quite some time. As I am writing this, I am migrating data off my server’s old RAID 10 onto a single 14 TB USB hard drive. I should be...
Read the post →I am sure there will be somewhere around 2,000 words by the time I get done saying everything I want to say, but I most definitely will not make you read them all to learn the answer to this question....
Read the post →The short answer seems to be yes, but why did I decide to write about this question today?!
Read the post →I’ve been referring to this as the buddy system for a while, though I might be abusing the term a little. Last year, I bought a Raspberry Pi and a 14 TB hard drive for around $280. I loaded it...
Read the post →I didn’t think the low-level details of my virtual machine server’s disk configuration is a terribly interesting topic, but I get asked about it quite often, so I figured that it might be time to document it!
Read the post →So, you’ve decided that you want to build your own NAS. I bet you’re investigating hard drive prices and your options for RAID levels. At least, I hope you are!
Read the post →What have Pat and Brian been up to lately? To find out you can check out the latest episodes of The Butter, What?! Show
Read the post →My NAS is a virtual machine hosted on my home KVM server. My KVM server has a RAID 10 array composed of two 4 TB drives. This gives me a measly 4 TB of usable disk space, and I can...
Read the post →When I built my homelab server in 2015, I built it with future upgrades in mind. Since it was acting as my home NAS, room for more hard drives was important, and I chose a case with plenty of 3.5”...
Read the post →UPDATE: Even though this post is six years old, plenty of folks are still visiting it. I am still using this hardware, but at some point many years ago I swapped the Ryzen 1600 motherboard and CPU into my desktop,...
Read the post →Last year, I built a reasonably fast and energy-efficient server to host KVM virtual machines in my office. I included a pair of 240 GB Samsung EVO 850 solid-state drives. That gives me a fast RAID 1 for the operating...
Read the post →UPDATE: I used this hardware for two years. It was a fantastic build, and it performed exactly as I expected it to. The AMD 5350 and 5370 processors were fantastic little chips, but they’re not in production any longer. That...
Read the post →The automated backup strategy that I’ve been using for the past three or four years was very solid, and it served me very well. I was using rdiff-backup to perform daily backups of my entire home directory to local storage,...
Read the post →A good backup strategy is very important. Most people only own a single hard drive at any given time and they will never think about backups unless they are unlucky enough to have that hard drive die on them. I...
Read the post →Lately I've been wanting to replace the hard drive in my laptop with a nice fast second-generation Intel X25-m. Unfortunately, my disk footprint is just a little too high to comfortably fit on the disk I want to buy, so...
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