Who remembers Shuttle XPCs? This thing is basically the same size but based on standard mITX form factor. This U-NAS case is bloody close... Also stores files and backups VM host, a few SSDs in there for speed Waiting for two SFF-8087 cables and dual + quad port NICs. Don't ask...
My latest NAS is going back to the eBay seller. Bought it as a 2gb RAM unit and it's only 1gb and can't be upgraded.
@Byron C - looks like that ACQ113C 10G NIC isn't automagically detected like the ACQ07 NIC, in TrueNAS Core at least. Scale looks like it detects it but the web ui isn't accessible. Still playing - will report back In other news, that board might be nuts - According to the BIOS, the USB C port is Thunderbolt enabled USB4 . However, I don't have any TB devices any more so I can't test this yet.
That could just be a poorly-configured BIOS. They might use it on different SKUs but not customise the BIOS for each SKU. Or it could be that this cheap board really does have TB/USB4
Now with added GPU for AV1 encoding. I've also put the CPU in Eco Mode (40W limit) and turned on the RGB because why not. Now I really need to sort out storage an an actual case.
So added a few drives to my VM host. Six 850 Evo, Crucial M4, Crucial BX500 Methinks there's an oops or two or many Edit: there we go. Janky cables
OK, so I've had a fair bit of trouble getting the 10G port on my MW-N100-NAS mITX board to play nice with TrueNAS. I started casting the around internet, looking for other options and found out about ARC Loader. This can, pretty much, turn any PC into a Synology NAS. No, it isn't Xpenology, which I kinda liked, but it produces similar results. The downsides of Xpenology were the faff to install the system in the first place, the convoluted update process and the fact that you had to run it from a USB stick. ARC Loader makes the installation a lot easier and can update directly from the Synology site - I made a point of directing to Synology for the .pat file when building the system just to test this. ARC Loader does share the need to run from USB, or so I thought. Just for gits and shiggles, I dropped a small nvme drive in a USB caddy to image the loader then put the drive in an m.2 slot on the board. It Worked!! It's up and running using a bunch of old 1 and 2 TB SSDs in SHR and can see and use both 2.5G and the single 10G onboard NICs. Of course, using an m.2 slot for the OS means the system cannot see that slot for a storage pool or SSD caching, limiting me to one slot, but this is just a test - I have an old Intel 40GB SSD that would work just as well for an OS drive, freeing up both m.2 slot for future use. I haven't tried hooking it up to Synology's system to enable remote access, because fuq that, but it is supposed to be indistinguishable from a regular Synology box. Colour me happy, so far.
Good day all, Not sure if this is the correct place to post this or not so apologies if it's not. I've just ordered a refurbished Dell R730XD to use a business / home NAS planning on using HEXOS on it initially. The boot drive being mirrored SSDs and the storage being a ZFS2 setup with 5 x 6TB SAS HDDs that i can expand as needed. Has anyone got any advice for setting up HEXOS (looks fairly simple but was wondering if anyone here has done it and knows of any issues). Also does anyone know of a decent / reasonably priced vertical mount for a heavy 2U server (preferably available in France), looking at a few on Amazon but the weight seems low, I do have the option of making my own from angle iron and welding but seems a bit of overkill if there are some reasonable options available. Power here in france is a lot cheaper (and despite living in the middle of nowhere more reliable) than the UK and we have a 6KW solar installation so the power consumption of the system at idle isn't as big an issue as it would be otherwise. Back up for critical files will be offline HDD, reciprocal arrangement with a friend in a different country plus really important current files in either icloud or one drive. Power will be supplied via a UPS.
IMG_0775 by andrew8200m posted 16 Mar 2025 at 09:00 The server and the switch are likely to be pulled out in favour of an Ubiquiti Nas Pro with a bespoke 2U platform to house 3x Mac Minis with an IP kvm (undecided which or how to tackle this). I don’t get what I need out of the server and to “upgrade” it’s GPU and CPUs will be a board out and DRAM job costing north of around £2k… 3 minis and a KVM will give me more than even an 9950x3d with 9070xt could do. It’s a shame the new studio is as expensive as it is… similar performance to 3 entry level m4 chips from the m3 ultra is CPU, yet more power than the M4 Max. As for the GPU, more power than an M4 Max out of 3 minis due to how the AI engine is integrated and not far off the base m3 ultra. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks as this al gets migrated out and the new stuff in.
TEAM, I need advice. I've got data dotted across systems around the house and I could really do with centralising a lot of it into a giant media box for each system to be able to access depending on where i am in the house and what I'm doing. this sounds like a nas but i know sweet **** all about building or configuring one. i know you can get off the shelf synology ones but like hell am i paying the better part of a grand for an empty 4 bayer, ive 10u's of space left in the media rack for it to go in but what do i stick in it? im not going to be transcoding stuff with it nor is it going to need 10g, something that cheap to idle but with connections for a lot of hdd expansion in the future, is it true you can now mix hdd sizes or does it still need to have identical drives?
I just bought a cheap rackmount case with a bunch of 3.5" bays and filled it with leftovers from my last upgrade, plus a RAID card. Something like this:- https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/s...5x-internal-35-bays---480mm-depth-lc-4480-wh/ (Standard ATX mobo & PSU. Yours tomorrow for under £100 inc shipping)
If you need space for expansion I recommend an expansion shelf like the EMC KTN-STL3, it's 3U high and can hold up to 15x SAS or SATA HDDs. They come up cheap on eBay from time to time. You can hook it up to anything with an external SAS card and don't need much processing, anything 6th gen intel or beyond does just just fine. You can also daisychain them if you buy multiple so no need for multiple pcie card until you hit 256 HDDs! Dell servers of that era are cheap as chips and not too power hungry. I'd recommend an R530 or R540 if you need PCIe expansion, these come with 8 bays as standard and generally an HBA adapter you can flash to be useful with most NAS OSes As for OS I recommend TrueNAS just because the community is fantastic and it's on linux now and most are somewhat familiar with that.
tbh id prefer to stay away from enterprise gear, they're often not the most power efficient I've found plus my rack is in my kitchen with all my A/V gear.
You'd be surprised re power efficiency of the Rx30 series and onwards. But as for noise I wouldn't want one in my kitchen! They're quiet enough to reside in my utility room but not exactly whisper-quiet. IanW's solution would work well in your case, you won't need a lot of processing power but any software RAID like RAIDz that NAS OSes use does like a good chunk of RAM, at least 64GB in cases of 8+ HDDs I'd say.
If you value simple/“no nonsense” setup, it might be worth looking at the current pricing and feature set for HexOS. It’s not finished yet, but it is based on TrueNAS Scale so it has a pretty solid foundation. Frying an egg with your CPU was supposed to be a joke, you weren’t meant to take it literally… And now I’ve made myself sad, because I remember just how old that joke is, and when someone posted photos of them actually doing it…
Troubadour, on the old OCS forums! I remember he used a stack of 2p coins as a heatspreader and tinfoil as a pan.
And I’m hoping that doesn’t prove to be a bad omen, ‘cos he’s also invested in Framework and so far I am liking the cut of their jib
