Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by opan on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:16PM (#42741481)

Low power device to leave on all the time, particularly for people who don't leave their clients on all the time. Like a router, but more versatile (although with a better OS on it, an actual router may do the same job).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by toprerules on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:24PM (#42741590)

You can buy a Synology NAS for less than the cost of this rack and it will do everything this rack can do including running containers. You can build your own NAS and run Unraid or FreeNAS or what have you for even less.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by numpad0 on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:49PM (#42741883)

Or you can have that in a "rack" aesthetics and pretend you run a datacenter. The end result is negligibly different.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by Arrowmaster on Friday January 17, 2025 @06:56PM (#42744508)

As an owner of a Synology NAS, it's woefully behind on updates. The kernel is 4.4 and the docker version is probably two years old. Yes it works good for a beginner one system does all solution but you quickly out grow it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by nordsieck on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:20PM (#42741544)

I feel like an m-series mac mini would be a really good fit for that - plenty of juice for when you need it, but very low idle power draw. The small size (especially for the m4 version) is an added benefit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs by walterbell on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:49PM (#42741876)

M4 Mac Mini will be a good low-power LLM (e.g. photo semantic search) NAS once Asahi Linux supports USB/Thunderbolt storage.

[ Parent | on HN ]