• 115 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes, would be nice to post a follow up post with your setup once you build it.

    I went that route two three months ago and eventually bought a second hand Lenovo Thinkcentre PC. Installed two NVMe SSDs for VMs , 1 SATA SSD for booting Proxmox and a single 12Tb HDD for media storage and one of the VMs is TrueNAS.

    I played in the BIOS to enable everything possible to lower the power consumption and disabled some interfaces I am not going to use. So overall I paid a bit over 400 Euro for everything with 2x32GB RAM and the CPU is 8th gen, meaning I can use it for hardware encoding and decoding of h265.

    The problem with my setup is that it is not much more extensible than that, as it had only one m2 slot, so I bought a PCIe to m2 extension card to fit the second m2 SSD.

    The data I will store on the HDD is mostly media, that’s not critical, and I have a cloud backup for my more important documents automated with an rsync job. But I was also playing with the idea to build a proper NAS for a while.


  • There are plenty of Chinese manufacturers that are manufacturing NAS-centric motherboards that come with built-in processors, like Topton, etc, just search AliExpress for them. You might also consider buying a motherboard with ECC support.

    Regarding the case Jonsbo has really nice cases, but they are a bit on the more expensive side. But there are plenty of no name brands also on AliExpress offering sturdy NAS cases, one example https://a.aliexpress.com/_mqCnPiL. The Pico PSU is great, and very power efficient, but ultimately what PSU you pick would depend on your case choice. Personally, I wouldn’t go with the case from your link and the outside drive bay.

    Some inspiration for you: https://youtu.be/Jr5MjhgPz_c


  • I was looking for a micro LED monitor a couple of months ago, but the technology is still not mature enough and everything on the market simply wasn’t good enough. OLED is great for TVs not so much for productivity monitors, micro LED should be perfect for monitors, but still a couple of years away from the mainstream.












  • No, by CPU is an odd choice, I meant for the i7-6700K. The Ryzen CPU is quite recent and very powerful, and energy efficient. Again, for a multimedia system you need a big case like the Define one and lots of SATA ports and bays. The Intel one checks the boxes, but you need a better processor or alternatively an external GPU, like the Intel Battlemage to have hardware encoding acceleration.

    The mini PC is nice but not suitable for multimedia machine, as it lacks the SATA ports and bays. You can use it as a router, like OPNSense.



  • Why are you buying a rack when neither of your machines are rack mountable?

    What is your use case, what are you using the big PC and the small one? Why Unraid and not TrueNAS Scale for example.

    If you are planning on using the big machine for multimedia, be aware that the i7-6700K doesn’t support hardware encoding/decoding of HEVC and the CPU is not powerful enough for live 4K software transcoding.

    This CPU is quite an odd choice though, it is 10 years old and in my opinion extremely outdated. Get at least 8-9 gen, that at least have this running.