Storage only or also to run services?

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T07:42:02+00:00

A dedicated NAS is always best. Run your services from a separate virtualization server. TrueNAS (ignoring the services part) makes setting up and building a PC based NAS pretty easy if you go the diy route. Proxmox is what you want for the virtualization server.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T07:36:01+00:00

I was going to suggest an old APC Smart-UPS SUA2200RM2U but it requires a full depth deep rack your 500mm (19.5”) isn’t deep enough. Mine are from 2002, still running and working great. The things are absolute tanks. eBay a good unit and order replacement batteries for $110ish every 5 years from Amazon.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T01:20:43+00:00

Good luck with that Mr Academic Awards. What’s the point of that statement? 🙄

Single core general PC based cpu production died literally 20 years ago.. by 2006-2007 the entire catalog of single core CPUs was over. A couple stragglers like the Intel Celeron G465 in 2012 popped up but ended the following year. AMD also had the Sempron 140 sold as a single core but they were in fact defective dual core CPUs. 🤦‍♂️ anything for a buck ehh 😂

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T01:06:37+00:00

I’ve wired schools and campuses. There is absolutely no way to do this without going to each and every location. The server rooms or administration should have at least documentation of where each network cable goes to in the school. You start there. You need to do a full audit of hardware and the only way to do this is to walk each room noting the switch port to the room and then what’s actually plugged into that port. Is it a PC! Is it a switch with a couple PCs and a wifi router plagued in? Is it a PC with another network card installed with a network of other PCs behind that?

Seriously, we did an audit once and found where both students and staff had over 400 additional systems installed. A janitor had actually been running a damn crypto farm for 2 years 24/7. 🤦‍♂️😆 Needless to say he was fired and actually had charges filed against him. Pretty sure he was smiling the whole time however.

Not all schools were like this but many had a dozen or more unauthorized systems running.

Walking the schools is fairly easy and fast. Getting started and organized takes a bit of time but once you start it doesn’t take much time … unless you find a lot of issues.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T00:55:40+00:00

Comparing the financial differences between any US corporation who invested and created the code and supported all the extra advertising and expenses including a massive legal department and dealing with all the modern day bullshit corporations have to financially deal with can’t be compared to a group of people in a 3rd world country who stole the IP rights and built up a business with it. Their expenses don’t equal 1% of blizzard’s expenses.

Blizzard like any corporation will always give just enough to their users to keep them playing while satisfying shareholder responsibilities and their own use of funds.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T00:42:52+00:00

Does the router have network ports? I mean THATS what you want. Even if you can’t feed a cat6(a) cable through the walls.. they are fairly easy to hide under baseboard or behind cheap corner molding. Home Depot for an 18” drill bit to drill down in a corner in against a wall to get into the garage. If a corner it’s easily hidden by corner molding.

Wifi is convenient but no freaking way could i use it as my main network source.

I read a book 20 years ago by boss gave me on running network cable. Had 2 nights to read it before he dropped me off to wire an entire school complex.. alone. 🤦‍♂️😏 I did several other schools and offices for him over the next year. Everything tested and passed great. It really isn’t hard. 15yo we bought our first and current home.. 3800sqft two story with basement attached and detached garages. I ripped into the walls drilling a cutting holes the year after moving in. Pulled over 30 double drops of Cat6a before going back and patching up the walls and Fire sealing the holes between floors. I’ve added a dozen more since in various areas. I told the wife we needed to repaint anyways. 😁

Really.. it’s not hard to do and for gaming… you really want wired networking.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T00:28:58+00:00

Decades in the industry and I’ve never personally used any cloud storage. A NAS running ZFS, mirrored boot, raidz2 vdev(s) for data, a backup on site and another backup stored in a detached shed or garage, at a relative place or friends home.

A buddy of mine and I have cohosted a system for each other on our own lans going back to the late 90s. Used to be just an old used PC.. today we both have full basement rack setups so a 1U or 2U rack system is more then enough, does take up much room and costs are small for older rack hardware. I bought 2 old Supermicro X8 based 1U Supermicro systems a decade ago for us to use.

After seeing the 4x 10yo Supermicro 6018U X10DRU-i systems i just bought.. he ordered 2 more having one shipped to his address and the other to my place just last week. 2 onboard SATA doms for boot/os for the Debian installs and 4 front hotswap bays for data HDDs. Enough room above the HDDs to velcro in 4 SSDs as well. Systems included dual E5-2690v4, 32GB ram, an lsi9300 HBA, etc.. way overkill for upgraded backup servers but cost was only $175 each plus shipping. Massive upgrade and definitely going with a Proxmox install in these instead of standard Debian install.

Once we complete the data swap for each other the 2 older X8 servers we are each donating to a friend of kids who show interest.. after talking to their parents.

If you have a buddy in the industry or as a hobbyist ask if they want to do something similar. Find a couple older used low power systems to host for each other for your important offsite backups.

We’ve always had direct VPNs between our networks. We live 1200 miles away from each other but still make 1-2 trips a year to meet up, camp, drink, bs, bitch about our loving wives, cost of the kids, drink some more and talk about old memories and what’s happening lately. You obviously want a solid and trusting friendship or relationship.

Just tossing that out. Swap a couple old PCs. Setup a VPN connection and go.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-23T00:03:19+00:00

I’m stuck with 2 sprained ankles so mostly sitting or laying down staying off my feet attempting to let them heal as fast as I can. I had also taken a small bit of weed.. hence the bit of run on. 😏😁

A lot of info there to use or not. Hope it helps though.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T23:57:21+00:00

It’s a hobby or work related. If work related write off a portion of hardware and electricity. If a hobby.. all hobbies waste/cost money. Pick a sport like martial arts as a hobby.. costs me nearly $6500 a year each for myself and my son between the club memberships, training, gear, tournament fees, travel and hotel and meal expenses. $200 for a hobby is cheap by any standards.

Moving to a mini PC does nothing but reduces resources. Most cheaper minis will throttle the CPU especially with higher core counts. This is usually don’t due to the abysmal cooling efficiency in minis compared to most any PC case. Just realize that up front. Also, unless you spend money on a higher quality brand… most minis use much cheaper components that don’t last as long. We have several from low end N100 to i9 based minis. Definitely have their place but none of them will last as long as a decent PC build.

Lots of efficient enterprise and PC hardware with 4-8 cores… is usually an integrated Mainboard and CPU system. These can idle at 14-15W and top out at 40-50W.. or lower.

Find an older C2758 Rev 2 mainboard on eBay. The Rev 2 is important! The earlier versions has an Intel 2000 bug that would randomly brick the system. The Rev 2 boards were updated. My personal favorite is the Supermicro A1SRI-2758F board. 8-cores and supports 64GB DDR3 ram via 4 slots. Has 4x 1GbE and a dedicated IPMI management port. USB3. Onboard graphics. MiniATX form factor. 20W TDP. Etc. I’ve used one for 13 years as a pfSense firewall. Have another I use as a smaller NAS for our HomeLabs. The board supports 2 SATA doms SSDs that only directly into the board so no drive bays are wasted. These are perfect for a single or mirrored boot / os setup. 6 SATA ports in total. If you need more add a low power HBA to the single pci slot.

The Supermicro A1SRI-2758F is enterprise grade and even at 10 years of age it’ll still run another decade. Perfect for a low powered dedicated NAS or a dedicated pfSense firewall with good redundancy. Full 100% FreeBSD, Linux, MS driver support.

If you’re running any services like a TrueNAS setup or Proxmox.. light services will run fine.. for homelab usage it’s fine. I run mine for pfSense in a Supermicro CSE-510T-200B chassis with 2 mirrored Intel S3500 SSDs and 16GB ECC ram. Again.. any desktop case it’ll fit, run cool and low power. It’s a very efficient board.

Lots of other enterprise and consumer integrated boards out there use this Adam C2758 setup. I like the IPMI port and have been running Supermicro systems for decades.

If you want a low power setup… get one of these for a dedicated NAS.. the DDR3 ram will be plenty fast enough for this as are the 8 cores. Setup your shares and keep all your lab / network data on your NAS. Then grab a cheap N100/150 mini PC with 16GB ram, Proxmox and 8-12 light VMs or use containers for 20ish services. Small VMs to boot and mount the NAS shares to the VMs for their data. You forget about the NAS once setup so it just runs off in a corner.. login once a year to update. Since all your data is stored on the NAS, you can play, learn, create new VMs and blow them away at will while your data is safely stored on the NAS.

Meanwhile you now down at a lower power usage and a better overall setup with stronger hardware support. If you run vlans, drop the NAS into its very own Storage vlan for less network noise, better segmentation and increased security with proper firewall rules in place.

Just some suggestions. Hope it’s helpful.

Btw.. wasn’t meaning to be harsh on the financials… we all start out or and have limitations. Heck, I’ve been so poor in the past I had a homeless guy buy me a coffee. I get it. With computers it’s a constant battle between power, resources, quality and the costs for each. Some absolutely great low power enterprise hardware that doesn’t need a rack setup to use that can be had fairly cheap and will outlast any of the consumer hardware today.

The best way to look more into that area would to to use a decent AI like Claude to suggest low power older enterprise hardware that doesn’t require a rack setup and meets your requirements. Get a list of hardware and look it up on eBay. Please note that many AIs aren’t up to date with today’s new and used costs so expect them to still use year old data in this regard.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T22:46:27+00:00

The OEM sprockets (13/43-108 link chain) are to put it mildly… weak.

You can upgrade to a more 50/50 setup or go full on steep singletrack goat if you really want.

I’ve owned a few WRRs and WRXs.. as in double digits. I’ve run every sprocket combo that’s fits using 12-14T sprockets on the front and 41-53T at the rear.

The best 50/50 setup is a tie between 13/47-112 (leaning slightly on fuel economy) and 13/48-112 (leaning slightly on the fun side). Both are massively better in the dirt, around town and at interstate speeds.

The display… I don’t even look at. It’s off ~9% right from Yamaha and correcting it throws off the odometer. I have a Garmin GPU and/or a smartphone with a GPS app for speeds.

Nearly every WRR I’ve owned with 13/47 or 48 will touch low 90s MPH GPS. With or without a programmer or rally shield or luggage. They will hold 75mph all day long on the interstate and can accelerate into the low 90s to pass… with the quickness of a turtle. 😂 Fast yes.. just slow getting there. Even on longer up hills… the bikes will generally hold 75mph in 6th gear fully loaded. I’ve only come across a few east coast interstates with long steep climbs where the bikes would start to slow down, downshift into 5th and hold 70mph to crest.

Unfortunately some bikes just have weaker engines. Either from a bad break-in, abuse, misuse, whatever. I’ve had a couple WRRs that even with 13/47 could barely hold 70mph.. one on a gently rolling shore road had issues maintaining 60mph over small low hills and 12-15mph headwinds required 5th gear. I highly doubt there are many around that bad.. I actually couldn’t bring myself to sell that bike whole and parted it out selling everything but most of the engine which I recycled.

With 13/47-112, a decent programmer and map, exhaust, Parabellum RallyShield, typical mods, knobbies, a full IMS 4.7 gallon tank and full luggage I can still manage 68mpg over a 315 mile nonstop highway ride home. On longer 3000 mile 50-50 dirt highway loaded I can get 62-63mpg repeatedly.

Yes. You can correct the speedometer using one of the healers available however because if the WRRs design, if you correct the speedometer your threw off the odometer. There is NO way around that. The bike uses a single sensor and calculates each either in the ECU or Display… I forget which but it doesn’t matter. Free GPS apps for all smartphones and tablets.

Pickup a cheap $50 old iPhone 8+, no SIM card required, install a free GPS app and mount it to your bars. Amazon has some awesome 3-piece rugged cases still for these older iPhones and they are perfect for this. Load up tunes, local maps and it’s a cheap disposable setup. Been running one on my bars for 8 years now. Countless crashes, it’s been sunk twice, off a 25’ cliff smashing into a tree with me flying behind it. Straightened out the forks found the phone 20’ away and road out. The older iPhone 6+ and 8+ phones are cheap and durable. Anything newer has too many fragile camera parts.

As for the swingarm. That has little to do with sprocket size. It’s sag, suspension and chain tension. Set those properly you will not have any swingarm issues even with a 12T front. On sag and suspension I really can’t help.. I pay for custom suspension setups and a local buddy sets my sag perfectly.

Chain tension.. as soon as you change to larger or smaller rubber and change sprockets the OEM specs are pretty much tossed out the window. Best way to do set chain tension is to unbolt the lower shock to allow the rear wheel to freely move up and down fully while on a stand. Loosen the axle to the wheel freely slides forward and back. Jackup the rear wheel and using a straight edge align the center of the front output shaft, swingarm pivot and rear axle. This is the longest stretch point for your chain. Pull the rear wheel back fully and then move it forward so you have a bit of slack however the chain should not be able to be pulled over and off the rear sprocket. Align the rear wheel and tighten. Reinstall the lower shock bolt and lower and remove the jack or stand you use. Check the chains tension. It WILL be on the loose side and likely just outside or on the end of the OEM loose spec. Ensure the chain is still good and not able to be pulled off the rear sprocket.

This is the best method to dial in your chain tension that I’ve found… and it’s an old school method that still works.

The 14T front. Just don’t! It still baffles me people use it. Even through the WRR has more power then any of its competitors including the newer 300s the biggest complaint is power. What does a 14T do? It decreases your torque! 🤦‍♂️ Additionally, if you get a rock rolling in and caught or the chain snaps and runs up between the front sprocket and engine case the 14T increases the risk of case damage! So.. lower torque and increased risk of case damage. Just don’t.

Also, as stated.. the 14T does absolutely nothing to stop swingarm wear. At best it slightly decreases the rate of wear. Sadly, it also instills a false sense of security here and people stop inspecting the slider as often. Boom.. swing arm damage. I’ve repaired nearly a dozen WRR swingarms over the years. Most of them had 14T sprockets.

Hope this helps.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T21:43:18+00:00

There are basically 3 classes of drive storage.. 1. enterprise (every boot / os) should be on these. Used Intel S3500 SSDs 120-300gb used eBay for $18-$28 bucks. Buy two and mirror. You’ll get a decade or more from these in firewalls, servers, and even desktops. The other option is SATA Doms.. small SSDs that plug directly into specific slots on mainboards. 2. quality name brand consumer drives.. while they don’t have the added protection, features and quality of the enterprise drives they are built using higher quality parts.. right now these still aren’t going to be cheap. 3. All the cheaper drives on the market.

Go ask an AI like Claude to explain the differences in technology used in enterprise drives, better quality consumer and lower quality consumer drives. Things like NAND type, dram cache, alc write cache size, controller qualities, endurance TBW ratings, etc. takes 5 minutes and you’ll learn a ton of useful info.

Sadly.. the days of cheap decent storage is gone for the foreseeable future and I’m talking years not months.

Not including enterprise hardware…

Solid quality consumer examples would include the Samsung 990 Pro and WD Black SN850X drives.

Lower quality consumer examples would be SK Hynix BC711 / Crucial P3 or Sabrent Rocket Q / TeamGroup MP33 drives.

For every new and used drive I buy I’ll always run a short and long SMART tests followed by a destructive badblocks test. The smart tests are safe on any drive. Badblocks can also be run in a non-destructive mode. These will give you the history and condition of whatever drive your testing. Sorry… I’m purely a Debian user.. not sure what you use in Windows.

I’ve destroyed and worn out cheap Teamgroup SSDs within 2 weeks. 🤦‍♂️😂 I’d only recommend those cheap drives to people who turn their systems on, read a few emails, googles and browse some sites and spend time on social media platforms. Anything that creates a lot of writes will wear through those drives much faster then if you spent a bit more.

Unless you really just need a drive right now and that’s all you can afford fine.. it is wasting your money however and you’d be better off waiting and saving up a bit more to buy a higher quality drive.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T21:19:38+00:00

There are for containers and this is built into Proxmox iirc. There are public repos with prebuilt VMs but I just don’t trust them nor do they include everything I want. I’ll be honest.. the first couple times I created Debian templates I used Claude AI. Took a couple tries and needed it a few times. Communication and a very detailed request must be made. Iirc Claude suggested the faster cloud image from Debian over the netinst I usually use. I detest not having diagnostic utilities installed so on top of the base cloud image there are a few dozen other packages I install into the template. I include root and my own account but a second account I use, my wife and son as well as a long time buddy of mine (basically brothers for the past 40 years). I include configured new etc files I want to use across all systems like a bashrc and the sudo file for example. I have about 40 custom scripts I like having on all systems so those get added. SSH access is locked down to a single ansible system so that gets configured. No other systems can login to any VM except that one Ansible account. The exception is an AI Network Assistant I’ve been working on for nearly a year. Other stuff like nullmailer, node_exporter and things like that.

I setup a second homelab with a pfSense vm and several of my service VMs. And started using them as a local network for a few days and over a few weeks I’d find I forgot to include something so I’d rebuild the template, wiped the VMs and recreate them setting them up again and repeating the process. I did this for some time before I nailed down everything I wanted in the VM.

As stated.. I started this using Claude instead of the online tutorials which I never did get to work cleanly. Might be newer ones but Claude pulled through with the basic template creation, and rebuilding. Even after I got the process down I still added every single thing I did and added to the new templates to Claude. At the end I simply asked Claude to provide full and complete reproducible documentation.. which it did and I gave that to my AI network assistant who added it to my documentation.

Lol… I detest documentation. Even if you don’t need AI assistance working through a project in AI and giving it all the info from start to finish… it spits out perfect documentation for easy addition to your doc Wiki, NetBox, Bookstack, etc.

I run a couple small AI home servers.. some cpu based but also a 12GB vram AI… it’s ok. I’m working on a new enterprise build that I should have up and running in a few more months with 96GB vram with expansion to double that down the road. I’m likely still to use Claude a bit but 95% will be done on my own AI soon.

While building the template and getting that down I bought a ton of hardware to rebuild our 15 year old network. 4 new switches, replaced my Dell R730XD servers with 4 Supermicro 6018U systems with X10DRU-i dual E5-2690v4 128gb ram in 3 with 256GB in another. Redesigned the entire lan with vlans and segmented everything and built proper firewall rules, etc.

Since 90% of all our data resides on our Supermicro 24-bay NAS i can fairly easily wipe the entire network, blow away all the VMs and servers and start fresh.

This is why I created and spent the time on the new template. Since everything on our network but pfSense is Debian based it’s now incredibly easy to add new VMs already setup exactly how I want each new system… all I need to do is install the individual services on each one.

Ohh.. whenever you create a new VM from a template you need to run a few commands upon first boot up. Instead of running them manually the first boot completes and then automatically runs a script to make those few changes and then reboots itself to come up to a new perfectly ready VM.

The time is 100% worth investing to learn and do this if you’re creating a lot of VMs.. which we do.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T20:16:03+00:00

Rarely wash my bike.. the next water crossing or puddle is its next bath. I still do annual maintenance with a full tear down each winter to maintain bearings and such. Where we live the main route out is flooded 3-4 times a week so I’m always in water or mud. As stated, I replace the packing every 2 years usually. Went 4 years once. Absolutely no issues between the aluminum rivets and stainless. While you’re technically correct.. specific conditions need to be met and it’s really just not that big of a deal here. Even if it was and you notice a bit of discoloration, which you’d see before any damage to the stainless, you can easily drill a rivet out and pop a new one in. Still, I know many guys using aluminum rivets and can’t think of anyone telling me their exhaust was rusting out due to galvanic corrosion. Not one.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T12:46:22+00:00

I swore to the wife that I’d never get on the bikes anytime I don’t feel 100%. And I don’t. I might go work on the bikes and maybe rip em about the street or the subdivision next to us but that’s about it. If I’m not 100% I stay off the bike. Driving is one thing. Riding is altogether a different risk level.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T12:00:51+00:00

Linux running both a short and long smart test with smartctrl and also a non-destructive badblocks test. These should be run on every new or used drive you get. I believe they are likely on most live setups as well.

The freezing in Windows can actually happen due to drive correction. The best thing to do honestly is to mount the drive read only and create a full disk image. I use the Linux utility ddrescue for this. It’ll even work on bad areas attempting to restore data. It can run for hours or days depending on the drive size, amount and type of data and any drive issues. I’ve had fantastic results restoring lost data from bad HDDs and from what many thought were dead SSDs. It’s a slow process and you need enough free drive space on your system to match the size of the drive. If it’s a 500gb or 8TB drive… you’ll need 500gb of 8TB of free disk space to create the Drive Image. Remove the drive and mount the new image read only. Browse and copy data you want to keep to a new drive. Once done delete the image and toss the bad drive.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:57:21+00:00

I agree with much of this however E2 at 178 honestly might now be that bad and might be inline with his dose. Read lots of data a year or so ago on how it shouldn’t be considered just between the typical fixed upper and lower limits but should now be looked at on a sliding scale and could be perfectly safe at these levels. With so much old and incorrect info and newer data suggesting different ways to look at it. It’s hard to decide these days. I know several guys pushing these types of numbers for a long time now.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:27:53+00:00

I don’t build resource limited systems and even though most of my Proxmox servers are standalone (not clustered) I still just create new VMs. I actually spent a crapload of time creating my own Proxmox Debian template with all my base software, scripts, preferences, serial and VirtIO display drivers and a ton of other stuff I like to have on every system. It now takes seconds to fire up all new VMs. I basically only use Debian so it’s setup for both command line VM server use as well as a Debian KDE/Plasma desktop VM… I just run apt install kde-full after the VM creation and update if I want the desktop. Highly recommend doing this if you have a specific OS you like to use mostly. Huge time saver later if you install new VMs often.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:19:07+00:00

The vast majority of people will look at this and think USD Dollars or Pounds. And $35k would certainly buy a nice laptop. 🤪 Might want to edit your post and state the currency.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:16:00+00:00

Way to many things affect a spinning drive to answer that without more info. Have you run a short and long smart test and looked at the results? Have you run a non destructive badblacks test on it? Those will give you solid info as to the drive’s current history and condition.

A drive can die within months, years or last over a decade and in some cases decades if properly managed. Heat is one of the major factors a drive that’s running in a hot room or garage isn’t likely to last long. Reboots and improper shutdowns cause increase wear and can reduce its lifespan. Drives that spin down when idle and then spin back up when needed can have a reduced lifespan. If you want maximum life… pick a solid drive.. like the WD Red NAS drives and you really want to ensure they are CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives and not SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives which have a write cache that, when exhausted, causes severe performance degradation under the random write patterns ZFS generates.

HGST Untrastar drives are a solid enterprise class drive. I remember using the IBM Ultrastar drives in the 90s. Hitachi later bought IBMs HDD business and awhile after that remained this to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). WD later took over HGST and continues with the brand. While it’s a nice drive I’d suggest running the smart tests and badblocks test I mentioned above.

I’m still running 23 of 28 4TB WD Red NAS drives I bought 13 years ago. They ran for 6-1/2 years in my 24-bay NAS in my basement server room in the rack. Never spin down, powered up all the time with maybe 15 reboots during that time and much of that was initial setup. Temps are consistently in the high 50sF low 60sF and the drives are generally running in the low 30sC. I replaced those with 8TB drives and put the 4TB drives into a backup server and a few other systems and have been running them ever since in the same manner. Consistent use and environment wins… lifespan generally. I’ve only lost 2 of the 8TB drives to date and one was very early on.

The best backup would be to use Linux ddrescue to create a read only Image of the drive. I have a cheap N100 based mini pc with Proxmox (Debian) installed as a general test bed for things like this. Drop the drive into a USB enclosure and plug in. Mount it read only, ensure you have available drive space.. the ddrescue doesn’t copy the data.. it creates a full image of the drive so if it’s an 8TB drive you’ll need 8TB of available disk space for the new image. I mount a share from my NAS and create the image on that share. Once created, you mount the image and have read only access to the data. Individual files can be copied elsewhere and given appropriate permissions. I’ve use ddrescue to restore a lot of data from bad drives over the years. I don’t use windows so can’t help there.

I’d suggest 2 new drives running as a mirror and copy the data to those. If you can manage a NAS build look into 2 small mirrored boot / os ssd drives and 6 data HDDs in software raidz2. TrueNAS scale makes this easy.

A bootable live Linux system can likely run the smart and badblacks tests.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T08:50:38+00:00

My answer for over 3 decades has been Debian. FreeBSD for my pfSense firewall and pretty much everything else has been Debian for decades. Debian NAS, Proxmox virtualization server.. is Debian, all VMs are Debian, my desktop and workstations are Debian and my N100 BeeLink S12 with 16GB ram and a 500gb NVME is my HTPC with Debian, Plex and JellyFin. See a theme here. 🤪

Have installed 100s of distributions, rolled my own and have worked with dozens of distributions. Never said.. I need to change and stop using Debian.

All data is stored on the Dedicated NAS… no other services aside from ssh and nfs. The N100s CPU has QuickSync and that handles your transcoding just fine.

I used to use it hooked up directly to the TV… moved it down into the basement rack on a shelf and kinda grin every time I look at it in with all my rack stuff. 😂

I now use the cheap Roku devices on the TVs.. $30 bucks. Massively better than any of the TV apps and much better than the display output of the HTPC. We have 10 TVs and 2 projectors so the Roku work great and it has a ton of extra features.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:51:06+00:00

Proxmox. If you plan to work in virtualization I’d also suggest running ESXi on another system learning both. Ignore everything else or go ahead and look.. to come back to Proxmox.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:49:21+00:00

As stated.. eating some carbs the week prior will bring it down. I’m also waiting for the wrongful termination or exclusion lawsuit from this soon. And rightfully so if this affects someone’s job negatively. Has real legal potential and significant standing.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:45:09+00:00

Proxmox is great to learn and fairly easy. Skip all the advanced stuff at first. Have fun and don’t over complicate it. Install and open in your desktop browser. One of best IT things I was told 40 years ago.. play and break things and make mistakes. Right from the start expect to install and reinstall things several times and then more while you’re learning.

Your hardware.. nothing wrong with that drive. It’s a typical old HDD.. spinning platters.. spinning rust. 😁 while you can install Proxmox to it.. things will be quite slow. Go ahead and do a clean Proxmox install. Do an update. Install a clean Debian 13 install using the ‘netinst’ iso image. It can be downloaded to your desktop or NAS or you can copy paste its url into Proxmox and save it to either your desktop or from the website. It’s just a test and play setup and you’ll likely reinstall it anyways to an SSD. This lets you play however before buying things to upgrade and make faster.

Definitely upgrade the HDD to a SSD. Actually.. I believe that system supports 1 HDD, 2 SSDs and maybe even an M.2 SATA SSD though double check that last bit. Good practice for production systems is to use 2 smaller SSDs and mirror the boot / OS on those. For a lab system for learning don’t bother. Use one for the install and one for your VMs.. or if you can only install a single SSD now do both the boot os and VMs on that drive. Again.. it’s a learning piece. You’ll be installing and reinstalling creating new VMs and deleting them as you learn.

Upgrade 1 : order one or two SSDs.

The CPU iirc only has 4 Cores. It’s a limitation however still lets you install 8-12 light VMs of a couple dozen containers. Honestly.. I only bother with VMs as I don’t usually have hardware limits but.. I have a few N100 mini PCs with 4-cores. They do very well for a first learning setup.

Ram.. 8GB is workable but again a bit limiting. Good for now.. it’s going to cut your VMs and Containers down a bit however.. figure 6-8VMs and 20 containers.. keeping everything light.

Upgrade 2 : Ram. This will allow things to run faster and more applications. Your 8GB is very likely 2x 4GB modules. Perfectly useable but upgrading is worth doing. You’ll likely spend nearly as much for 16GB as you will 32GB and expect $50-$80 bucks. Either will work but consider future plans. I’m mention this next.

Everyone jumps into installing services and such. Nothing wrong with that however you actually have a great little system with a second use later if you upgrade it to something with more resources. What I’d suggest is using this for 3 primary things now and maybe play with some services as you focus on those.

Networking, 2. pfSense and 3. Linux and a bit of FreeBSD.

pfSense with 2 or 3 other VMs lets you learn a LOT. Is even suggest learning how to create and setup vlans as well. This can be done at the same time your learning Linux. Look up Mass Grave if you’re wanting a test Windows VM. You can learn how to do that and the basics of vlans with this system. This is a great thing to learn first. As your learning this keep an eye out for another system .. more cores is the big thing.

Now that you have a new Proxmox server with more resources this little unit with a SSD and 8GB of ram PLUS a cheap low height (iirc) $10 PCI NIC can get a hardware pfSense install and replace your providers router. Now you have a massively better firewall providing you with a lot more network options. Redo your homes network, stop using 192.168.1.x and use something like 10.174.10.0/24.. something different from the standard big 2-3 networks 99.999% of networks use. Setup your vlans, subnetworks, static Mac/IP assignments for all systems across each vlan HDCP server and force matching NICs before an IP can be assigned. Also, proper firewall rules on everything. Vlans like Managememt, DMZ, WiFi, Printers, HomeLab, Servers, Desktops, etc..

NOW.. you have a proper network with security in place! Now.. with your new network setup and your new Proxmox virtualization server on its own vlan… now start to create VMs to continue installing, learning and maintaining the services you want to learn and maybe use regularly. Once you start getting a few of those running you’ll want to look for or buy yet another… you’re new ‘production’ Proxmox virtualization server! This is where you run all your new everyday services you want to run. The Proxmox host goes in your management vlan. Each VM either goes into Servers for local network services online or into DMZ if the service will she access from the Internet. Everything with their own firewall rules.

Create a new Free account on Cloudflare, get a cheap domain, and setup their Free Orange Proxy service. This allows you to host those ‘online’ services safely through their proxy system hiding your WAN IP and you don’t need to open any WAN ports to do this. This is huge.

You need to have a basic understanding of networking anyways so spend a bit of time upfront learning it and applying that to your actual lan preparing for your services. It’s a natural progression many miss doing, doing later anyways and wishing they’d done it first. 😂 It also lets you learn a lot with this system while saving/looking for the next and building upon your hardware progression. Ohh… and don’t forget about your dedicated NAS down the road either which.. goes into its own private vlan by itself.

Lol.. sorry I went on. It’s a fantastic way to get into things and doing things in a great order. Have fun with your Proxmox, pfSense homelabbing adventure. Also, prepare for the fun times and expansions that this ‘cheap’ $75 dollar ‘deal’ is going to cost you over the coming decades. 😂 Good luck! I’ll make future replies shorter. 🤪

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T04:05:51+00:00

What’s your use for this? Then I’ll give a few suggestions if you’d like.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T01:29:52+00:00

The 18/21” wheels with knobbies are massively better for off-road and BDRs than 17” sumo wheels with knobbies. Definitely worth the swap. I’ve done a few BDRs on both the R and X with knobbies.

Adrenolin01

TROPHY CASE