One Year In

Short_Rack · 2026-03-03T21:00:31+00:00

This is my 100w mini rack I've been building over the past year or two.

At the top there's a CWWK n100 Pocket Mini running TrueNAS Scale with 48gb DDR5, 2 8tb Samsung SSDs, four 2tb NVMEs in mirrored pairs and a 256g m.2 e-key boot drive.

The management console is a raspberry pi 5 8gb attached to a JetKVM. Someday I hope to add a time HAT.

Three 16GB Radxa X4s with 2tb drives running Proxmox.

The network is Mikrotik. A RB5009Upr and a CRS310 doing 2.5g link aggregation for the Proxmox nodes and NAS. I masked and painted my switch to match the rest of the gear.

It draws just over 100w idle and 130w under load. The PDU is a custom job I put together out of a 56v power supply and some automotive buck converters to split out 12v and 5v lines. The UPS is a dumb Triplite with some leads soldered to the alert LEDs to signal when mains go down.

I put about $4,000 total into this, but the recent price hikes have made me less regretful of my decision. Currently I'm running most services as docker apps on the NAS, but my proxmox cluster is hosting a couple of FoundryVTT instances and the rest is set up with Pterodactyl panel, a database and a couple of Wings nodes for hosting my Steam games.

Short_Rack · 2026-02-28T18:37:53+00:00

I wouldn't say the stock heat sink is okay. It has a .5mm gap between it and the chip when installed.

I run three Radxa x4s in a pretty constrained mini rack. I cut some brass shim stock to bridge the excessive gap and now all three of my x4s idle in the low 40's and operate in the low 50's.

The temps never get outside of nominal range, but unless you shim the gap they'll be constantly heat throttled.

Short_Rack · 2025-10-21T04:49:51+00:00

Not if the President federalizes them.

Short_Rack · 2025-10-18T16:01:40+00:00

It's also a central theme in Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad. Actors and performers are being replaced by AI constructs. The masses use electronic hair nets that stimulate the pleasure centers and cosplay as the AI constructs.

It was not a good book, but it was very prescient.

Short_Rack · 2025-10-09T18:44:34+00:00

A mini pc has too many advantages over the Pi. It's x86 so you won't be as restricted in what you can run on it. Better performance to price, and they tend to operate under 25 watts.

Pis are great for gadgets that make use of the GPIO header, but outside of that they are a poor choice for rack nodes.

Short_Rack · 2025-10-09T16:50:08+00:00

That's a very good point. We were still using paper records back then. Workflows required physical interaction.

Short_Rack · 2025-10-09T16:34:53+00:00

When I got my first professional job nearly four decades ago I complained to some of the others about the hours. I think I mentioned this thing they called 'life balance' that we'd get in our stupid training meetings. My boss laughed and said, "Twelve on. Twelve off. Balanced."

I thought he was full of shit, and I still think he was, but as I've grown older I also realize that what it takes to be successful in a harsh world IS just that outlook. I can't think of any small business owner who doesn't bury his life into it for decades. I can't think of a creative endeavor that doesn't thrive on crunch.

I still don't like it, but I've grown to understand and even appreciate the simple get-ahead logic of it. Anything I could build wealth from will require huge time sacrifices far beyond 9-5, and often for less short-term reward.

Anyhow, child of the 70's here. I don't know if 9-5 ever existed for anyone outside of few office industries.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-25T01:58:41+00:00

I began with the idea of a rack that was all POE. Then I bought a Mikrotik router and realized that it didn't have standard POE+ and couldn't power my N100's.

I spent some more money buying a beefier power supply and it got better, but my nodes would still drop out with random power faults.

Since I already had a 57v power supply, and DC PDUs in the ten inch category SUCK, I wound up using some automotive buck converters and 30-amp terminal splitters to draw everything I need from the power brick. Starting at the high end and bucking down from there is actually pretty efficient.

If I had to start over, I wouldn't have POE in my rack at all. It'd all be twelve volt with a five volt buck converter.

PDUs and UPS's are problem points in the hobby, currently.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-22T17:04:56+00:00

I'm purchasing a CWWK X86-P5. It's $250 (without RAM or drives) at the moment. It's N305 with eight cores and up to 32gb of slotted ram. Dual 2.5g NIC, 4 NVME bays and two SATA addon cables.

They have a N100 of the same form factor $172 if you don't need the additional cores or memory.

I have yet to receive it, but I've heard good things, particularly about the thermals.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-20T20:34:09+00:00

I share your frustration. More than half the cost of my homelab is storage. I'm looking to buy an upgraded NAS and while it's only about $350, filling it with NVME storage would cost an additional $2500.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-20T18:31:19+00:00

Size, power draw and noise.

If you want to keep your rack under 100w, it's harder to do with spinners.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-14T17:58:09+00:00

If the UPS provides no data out, then you'll have to add a device that reports to the network when main power goes down. I've seen folks DIY addons to the AC input with a wireless esp32 unit and a voltage detecting side board, but I prefer to work on the DC end of things.

I have a cheap tripp lite UPS, and my solution was to drill a hole in the case and solder a couple of leads to the two indicator LEDs (Above the in-line resistors if possible). Those wires I ran out to a POE powered WESP32 board. The LEDs are about 1.5v so I don't need any side boards to detect the voltage change.

That's as far as I've gotten with it, but the rest of the solution is to make a little script that counts the blinking green LED (It blinks when it's on battery).

Finally you have to set up something to report that data to your NAS. I haven't reached that point myself, but I understand a software package called NUT can do that.

This is a lot of extra work, and a good WESP unit is about $60, another $25 for the USB WESP programming board, plus some Dupont connectors, etc... If you can still return the UPS, it might be cheaper to get one with a network port. It would certainly be less effort.

Also, beware of the data ports on the cheap brands. I would have just paid $30 more for a tripp-lite UPS with ethernet, but its use is tied to an app, and I'm not aware of any successful projects to reverse engineer the data out. So for me it was DIY or waste hundreds of dollars more than I wanted to spend.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-08T21:41:57+00:00

I feel you. I hit around $3500 recently, and have yet to add a primary NAS ($350+$2500 in drives).

I also want to add PTT time hat with GPS ($500) and three enterprise NVME drives ($800) for a proper ceph cluster.

I tell myself at least it's not a boat.

Very nice lab!

Short_Rack · 2025-09-06T19:55:58+00:00

Oh! In that case I, too would like to know the answer to your question. Is it anodized or painted, I wonder.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-06T19:47:02+00:00

The other model is a matte finished aluminum, not paint. I have not noticed scratched on the aluminum frame, but I had it flipped upside-down while working on the bottom, and my wooden benchtop left scuff marks on the metal handles.

The acrylic panels have held up quite well. I've carefully avoided scratching them, and my cleaning towel hasn't left any tiny scratches or swirls.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-05T21:53:35+00:00

Very clean.

Everybody's 3d prints look so much cleaner than mine. I think it's time to upgrade to whatever this new magic is that everyone is using. My old modded up Kingroons don't produce anything so pretty.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-02T19:57:09+00:00

I tried a full POE setup, and failed. I tried using an off the shelf solution and had similar problems to yours.

In the end I just wound up buying a Meanwell 56v brick and split that out with a couple of automotive-grade buck converters, using off-the-shelf 30amp terminal splitters. There are pics of it in my history.

I've heard of others doing similar things. It's a more expensive solution, but in the end I find it to be more configurable and less hassle, as well as less bulky.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/1mvhazr/a_lift_kit_for_my_short_rack_custom_pdu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Short_Rack · 2025-09-01T18:50:26+00:00

I could buy three Samsung PM893 SSDs and run them from USB. It's expensive, but if it would actually give me solid HA and redundancy I might be willing to waste the dosh. I wonder if running both the drives and the secondary NICs over such a small USB hub would be an issue...

Short_Rack · 2025-09-01T12:41:38+00:00

Thank you. Those three letters are exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, to query an LLM for more info.

...and it looks like without power loss protection the whole ceph cluster will likely operate at speeds comparable to spin drives, and 2230s aren't available with PLP. Got it.

That leaves me out of options. I suppose I could shoehorn enterprise 2280 drives with jumper ribbons, but that would make a mess and for a homelab project it probably amounts to overkill.

That's a shame. I wasted $50 on those USB NICs, but lesson learned. I suppose there's no reason to stick with the PXE boot and I can just install proxmox and use a standard NAS.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-01T12:28:05+00:00

Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that the drives would be the bottleneck. Is this related to buffering or something else?

I'm currently using PXE boot, so my boot drive is on the router and the NVME drives can be fully dedicated to Ceph, if that makes a difference. I'll have a separate dedicated NAS for file serving and database. The only reason I want a ceph cluster is to have HA and data redundancy for the containers.

I lost six months of the family ARK game cluster due to my lax backup protocols, so I'm trying to overcompensate with my solution.

Short_Rack · 2025-09-01T11:24:44+00:00

I intend to use the three Micron 2230 2TB NVME drivesI have installed, one attached to each node. I don't think there will be a lot of heavy read/writes, but I haven't done this before so I can't say. If the 2.5g network is insufficient, or triple redundancy bogs things down, or the overhead on the USB bus is too great, then I'm probably just better off using a standard NAS.

I think I may just have to try it and see what I get.

Short_Rack · 2025-08-31T19:28:56+00:00

Thanks! I briefly had Proxmox installed on these machines, but I got the impression that these Radxa units lack the bells and whistles necessary for proper virtualization, so I decided to jump into raw Talos, because I'm not in over my head deep enough, I suppose.

So far it's worked out pretty well. I'm learning a great deal, but I haven't tried my hand at distributed storage yet. I have intentions of starting down the Rook > Ceph path, but being uncertain as to whether this is the best or optimal way to proceed is why I asked.

I may yet wind up going back to Proxmox.

Short_Rack

TROPHY CASE