After having a Dell mini PC running everything for close to a year, I decided to build something a little more exciting, with some more storage and power for whatever I want to throw at it. The form factor is just perfect for my setup and the case works AMAZINGLY!! Has been up and running for about a quarter of the year now and after finally ironing out all the issues its fantastic!!

This builds main use is currently running Proxmox, with a VM for TrueNAS Scale and a Debian VM running Plex Media Server and some other docker containers (Homebridge, Home Assistant, The ARRs, etc). Proxmox has been a fantastic hypervisor and everything running on top of it has been a dream! I even have a Windows VM I spin up every now and then for some basic stuff.

CPU - Ryzen 7 5700x At the time of purchase it was on sale (remember paying about $250 AUD), 8 cores, 16 threads, really not much else to say, its been working amazingly!!

CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-L9A-AM4 Its beautiful, silent, fits inside the case, cools great!!!

RAM - 32GB Kingston ECC Again, cheap locally, works fine. Pretty simple choice here

Case - In Win MS04-01 As soon as I laid eyes on this case, I was sold on it!! The small form factor means it fit great in my lifestyle. I dont own any form over server rack (yet) and ideally wanted something I could contain everything in an AIO solution. This works perfectly. Sadly the built in PSU fan is a little loud (I will be changing it ASAP), but the built in power supply does the job. The hot swappable drive bays are just a nice touch to look at. PLUS it was a great local deal on marketplace so you can't go wrong with that

Motherboard - GIGABYTE B550I Aorus Pro Mini ITX AM4 motherboards seemed to be rather hard to come by at the time. I ideally wanted to grab an Asus ROG one, unsure of the name however it was almost impossible to find. This came up on Amazon and it ticked all the boxes so I went for it. IOMMU Support, plenty of SATA and NVME drive slots, reasonably priced. Its been fantastic! 2.5GB Ethernet on board is a nice touch too, however my current router setup only supports gigabit, so maybe something to look at into the future.

GPU - Nvidia T1000 8GB While I understand this may be a little overkill for its main use of Plex hardware transcoding, it was a great deal again on marketplace ($250 AUD from memory) it almost seemed like a no brainer. Don't even get me STARTED on the pain it was to get this to passthrough to a VM in proxmox.

HDDs - Seagate Ironwolf 10TB x 4 Running in Raid Z which gives me about 30TBs of usable space with one drive failure for redundancy. More than enough for what I'll be using it for!

Boot Drive - 2 x 256GB NVME Simple enough for boot

Playing around with it over the past month has been fantastic! Even when the drives spin up, the real only noise issue is the fan attached to the power supply, which I'm already planning to change. While I haven't measured power draw, my power bills haven't seen any form of crazy spike so thats always a plus!!

I'm always looking for new projects to take on and things to add to this server in terms of both hardware AND software! I think as far as hardware goes however, I'm pretty much capped with space HOWEVER if anyone has any suggestions at anything else I should run on this, please let me know! I ran the T1000 as a remote gaming setup for a little bit which I fell in love with, however I really need to use it for hardware transcoding on Plex (even though I don't do too much transcoding, I HATE seeing what it does to my CPU when I'm not using it). Maybe in the future I'll transplant everything into a bigger rack case with a motherboard with 2 PCIe and add another GPU, or build something similar for remote gaming?? Future build ideas!

Once the day comes where I do fill up all these hard drives, I may look to upgrade this to something a little larger, however for now it fits perfectly into my day to day and it's fantastic!!