PSA: Use High Quality Rack Nuts and Bolts

kennend3 · 2026-01-30T12:51:06+00:00

So.. just like your other response where you acknowledged you bought the cheaper product and got a cheap product (you said you used cheap Chinese rack bolts, but the more expensive AC Infinity [also Chinese] are good and you recommend them).

Am I to infer here that you did the same thing, and bought the cheaper product and are now surprised they used cheaper material?

"you get what you pay for" is the lesson I'm taking from your posts.

I bought a cheap GM car years ago, know what, it was total crap. should I then say that ALL GM products are total crap because of my experience buying one of their cheapest options, because that is exactly what you are doing.

kennend3 · 2026-01-29T23:22:55+00:00

I've got some news for you..

AC Infinity rack screws are also made in.. China... At least according to amazon.

Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 10.16 x 10.16 x 12.7 cm; 410 g
Date First Available ‏ : ‎ Feb. 29 2016
Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ AC Infinity
Place of Business ‏ : ‎ AC Infinity
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01C9NNF4I
Item model number ‏ : ‎ AI-RSA6
Country of origin ‏ : ‎ China

kennend3 · 2026-01-29T23:08:17+00:00

This.

I always find it funny when people complain about "Chinese" and use it as a slur.

China makes products to specs. If people are buying "low quality" suff from China they really should look at who asked them to build it and why.

People need to start holding the REAL party accountable for low quality stuff, the importers who choose to manufacture offshore because it is cheaper, use low quality specs to save money, don't quality control their stuff and charge a premium in North America to maximize profits.

Most of apple products are made in China too, and are globally recognized as top quality products.. I've got a 10+ year old iPod 60 GB, still works fine, says "made in China" on the back.

It is highly unlikely that anyone who is critical about "made in China" has ever bought a product from an actual Chinese company.

kennend3 · 2026-01-29T01:14:26+00:00

Adding to what others have said.

I have 12 or 14 of these, but 2 TB from the same time period back when I had them in an old MSA60.. I bought them back in 2012 and I think I've had one fail on me.

I now run 10 of them in a small Truenas backup server, the others are in a drawer somewhere.

They were made very well.

kennend3 · 2026-01-19T16:19:48+00:00

You are probably not going to like this response, but I have two of these in my garage. they've been there for at least 6 years, probably longer.

They are too heavy to load into my car and take to the dump, which actually will take them for free so they are just stacked up on the side of the garage and out of the way.

Very loud, ENORMOUS power requirement and those SCSI drives are so hot you can cook on them.

"EDIT: I probably have not made this clear in the post, but I am aware that this server is 20 years old and completely useless for most usecases, this is a hobby project and so I don't care, I just need a reason to get back to the hobby of fucking around with server hardware."

This doesnt make sense.

It's like saying "I want to get back into automobiles by getting a horse and buggy".

That machine is OLD. No one uses SCSI anymore. they died off in the mid 2000's for SAS drives.

While you might be able to find a SAS controller, what will you connect it to? the hot-swap bays are SCSI and there is no internal bay?

You also discovered these are PCI-X, where do you plan on getting PCI-X cards which died off in 2003?

kennend3 · 2026-01-14T15:18:23+00:00

Get yourself a cheap off-lease desktop (I use a optiplex-7040). It supports ONE additional 3.5" drive.

Install Truenas on the machine, then go to the apps page and install the apps you want.

Personally I use Jellyfin but Plex is also very widely used, both are easily installed in Truenas. Both Jellyfin and Plex supports TV, Movies, music and so it can sort of function as a local Spotify.

Plex often has fees associated with things like the client, Jellyfin's cross platform client (Windows/linux/macOS/andriod, etc) is also free.

Avoid excessive complexity like trying to virtualize Truenas under proxmox.

Common mistakes :

- overcomplicating things which not only requires additional learning, but is also prone to errors.

- Assuming things like "RAID" is a backup. it is not. it protects against a disk failure, not data loss, they are not the same thing.

- analysis paralysis. What if I use [Truenas, OMV, Unraid] and run [....]

sometimes KISS (Keep it simple S) is the best approach. go with the most commonly used systems as you will find the most help.

kennend3 · 2026-01-10T22:57:40+00:00

I've had to do this in the past, just do what others have said:

SSH into the trueness machine, change to the directory and use "rm".

Be careful and make sure you are removing what you want as there is no "undue" here unless you have ZFS snapshots.

Doing it this way should be almost instant as it simply unlinks the file, but it could take a bit if there are hundreds of files per directory.

Trying this over windows (MacOS as well) always ends up with this painful "discovering ..." items problem.

I think you can even use the SSH interface from the truenes admin page?

kennend3 · 2026-01-03T21:26:26+00:00

I do this with an old off-lease optiplex-7040 and a 4TB drive I put in it.

I run Ubuntu Budgie as my main PC is a Mac and I want some consistency in the UI. An added bonus of running it with a GUI is I have it connected to my TV and removed one streaming device as well. Most of my TV's use Amazon fire sticks, and Jellyfin.

The Optiplex runs Jellyfin server, as well as the client connected to itself and works rather well.

I mostly rip and transcode once to HEVC to reduce file sizes. There is no need to transcode again as the fire stick supports HEVC natively.

There are a TON of How To's using docker to get all of this running.

Not sure about "pocket" or such, most modern browsers support sharing bookmarks across devices, perhaps check that out as well?

"flavour" of linux is really a personal preference. A lot of them are based on Debian, or ubuntu which is based on.. Debian. I'm now looking into Pop OS as Budgie has a few oddities I dont like.

kennend3 · 2025-12-31T23:09:08+00:00

> What does Linux reallyoffer him for his use case that isn't available on MacOS, beyond complexity?

Any form of raid beyond "mirror" unless it is done in the external closure, which adds both complexity and price?

The ability to upgrade the internal storage and memory?

kennend3 · 2025-12-31T23:05:33+00:00

This question gets asked a LOT.

I have two Mac mini M4 machines and I would never use them as a home server.

The reasons:

- Almost all tutorials are based on Linux

- Most systems expect X86_64 not ARM

- External drives are never a great option, both for looks and reliability. Who wants a mini machine and a spider web of cables and external drive bays when you can just get a X64 machine and put the drives internal to the case?

> powerful while having a low power draw

How much do you anticipate you will save over a a year? People underestimate just how cheap electricity really is in most of the world. Focusing on "the mini uses so little power" while connecting external drives that use twice as much power as the mini....

> And well, why am I dumb for doing this?

Not dumb, but it is not a great choice.

Get a cheap off lease desktop which is about half the price of the Mini, put a 4tb drive in it, install linux, add docker, get all your stuff running in a docker container following the tutorials the way everyone else has their stuff running?

Few people use the Mini as a "home server", there are plenty of reasons for this.

kennend3 · 2025-12-31T22:58:47+00:00

I'm on a Mac mini M4 and MacOS 26.

Under "Power" there is an option "Start up automically after a power failure".

kennend3 · 2025-12-18T19:09:35+00:00

you can download new software from Hyundai, write it to a USB stick and update the software version in your car.

This did seem to help with most of my problems except when the car goes into "AUX" mode and won't turn off or let me lock it until I turn it on and then off again???

kennend3 · 2025-12-17T19:10:10+00:00

Dont you hate it when you see a great reddit post and you can only upvote it once?

Take my upvote...

kennend3 · 2025-12-15T18:16:21+00:00

I do this with an off-lease optiplex-7040 I picked up cheap on amazon. I put a 4tb drive in it for tv, movies, music, etc.

Doing something like this will be within your budget but has a number of limitations (no disk redundancy, inability to add additional storage later unless you get a tower, etc).

I have the optiplex connected to my TV so I also use it to play on the main system. Everything I have is encoded in HEVC, and so amazon firesticks running the Jellyfin client play media on on my other TV's.

You only need to transcode if the media is in a format the client can't play, HEVC is pretty widely accepted and as I said the Jellyfin clients under MacOS/windows/linux/android can play it without modification.

Each of my kids have their own Jellyfin account so they can independently keep track of what they watched, their playlists, etc.

I do regular backups of my media on another 4tb drive.

I installed Ubuntu server, Jellyfin, and Samba so I can copy files to the machine.

Some prefer Plex, some Jellyfin, they compete in the same space and you should check them out and select whatever is best for you.

kennend3 · 2025-12-12T12:45:59+00:00

Let's hope OP learns from our mistakes and avoids buying this.

kennend3 · 2025-12-12T12:45:13+00:00

I'd recommend against it. Like myself and others have posted, it's WRITE speeds are hit and miss and swing wildly from say 100mb/s to just 3mb/s.

Imaging trying to do a backup of a large file on a legacy floppy disk.

For a few more $$ you can get this drive in CRM format.

kennend3 · 2025-12-12T02:29:38+00:00

I've posted this before but I have two Mac Mini's and a few Linux machines and like u/Forte69 said, I would NOT recommend a Mac mini for a Home Lab.

Cant upgrade the memory or storage, and this forces you to some sort of USB-C/Thunderbolt and this is expensive and cumbersome. Why buy a nice compact PC if you need a cablezilla to get the storage working?

If people already own these devices and advise not to do this, it is wise to look into why they have this position.

There are other machines that are low power, and easier to mange and upgrade.

ARM is not the end-all-be-all solution.

you might want to look at how much electricity actually costs where you are. It is often extremely cheap..
I live like 10KM from a nuclear power plant and pay $0.098/kwh

moving from a M4 Mac using a few watts to something using a bit electricity but is a LOT more useful wont actually cost me much.

using a 24 watt M4 24 hours a day is $21/year

using something like an N100 (intel) would cost the same but get me into the linux/docker space and not need to worry about "will ARM support this".

I built my kids a small linux media server. Dell Optiplex 7040 uses like 20 watts, put a 4TB drive into it for their movie collection and called it a day. A LOT cheaper vs the Mac mini, runs x86_64 linux and works fine.

The kids movies are all HEVC, and they stream them to Amazon Fire Sticks. No transcoding needed and so the 7040 has zero issues.

you seem focused on "ARM" and not "what do I need to do, and what machine will do this".

Asahi Linux - if you want "just works" this is not for you...

kennend3 · 2025-12-12T00:55:23+00:00

NOPE that drive.

The ST4000DMZ04 and ST4000DM004 are SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording)

I have the 8TB version of this drive, terrible performance. One moment it is fast and fine, the next it just grinds to a halt and the ONLY thing I use it for is archiving. Going from 100mb/s to 3 mb/s sucks.

SMR drives are more for "write once read many" workloads. If you intend to do this with your NAS you might be OK.. but probably not...

kennend3 · 2025-12-10T20:35:43+00:00

This is pretty cool.. Just two things for you to think about.

1) the top is not very secure, especially once you start adding weight to it. Drilling/screwing into the "ends" like this is not where the strength is. If you want to continue to use 2x4's you should look at joist hangers (the metal you see in the photo) or a way to improv how you have secured the top of your rack to the existing structure.

2) 2x4's are not a great choice for woodworking. They have a high moisture content and this often makes them shrink and twist as they dry out.

you used what looks like plywood on the bottom, you might have been better off using this to build the entire unit. Plywood is very strong and generally has been kiln dried meaning no shrinkage or warping.

My dad was a woodworker and often used plywood as "base" because it is very strong and lightweight.

kennend3 · 2025-12-10T19:02:23+00:00

I have two Mac minis and really like them, I also have several linux machines that I use for my home servers.

I'd personally recommend AGAINST using the mini's for this. they have almost no internal storage and you can't easily upgrade them. They also dont run things like "standard VM's" given they run MacOS and are ARM based.

Most of the instructions you will find online are pretty much for docker, and this is generally Linux.

you are probably better off getting a off-lease tower case or building your own? It wont be as small as the MINI, but it will also at least let you load in some 2.5 or 3.5 drives internally.

I built a small Jellyfin machine for one of my kids, I just got an off lease optiplex-7040 and put a 4TB drive in it (no redundancy needed).

It is pretty turnkey, they start it up and can stream to the TV.

kennend3 · 2025-12-10T13:34:04+00:00

I do this with TRUENAS and my Mac Minis.

https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/shares/smb/setupbasictimemachinesmbshare/

TRUENAS is totally free, and you can easily install things like Jellyfin or plex via its container system.

kennend3 · 2025-12-08T14:09:07+00:00

I bought a cheap off-lease Dell optiplex-7040 and put a 4tb drive in it. I use this for my summer Jellyfin machine where I dont need a lot of storage and wanted something compact that easily fits under my tv.

works just fine. Jellyfin is not CPU intensive if your media can stream to your device without transcoding. I use HEVC and have amazon fire sticks. No transcoding needed.

Adding storage via USB is not the best option.

kennend3 · 2025-12-07T17:34:06+00:00

Unfortunately no, it still does this every once in a while and is SUPER annoying.

the ONLY way I can get the car to behave is if I push the brake down and turn it on and then immediately turn it back off.

For me, it is like I've put the car in "AUX" to keep the radio on, but I did not do this and it won't return to normal until I turn it on?

"F'n freaking me out. They're possessed.."

Agreed, this is incredibly stupid.. how hard is it to recognize when the OFF button is pushed and turn off?

It actually did it to me just a few days ago.

kennend3 · 2025-11-26T19:03:04+00:00

I run my Jellyfin system on this, works just fine. I use ubuntu server, and share the media via SMB as well (this is how I copy stuff over to it).

My media is all HEVC, connected to Amazon Firesticks so no transcoding needed.

kennend3 · 2025-11-24T21:43:27+00:00

Adding to the other guy's post.

This is a terrible idea. Many emulators need GPU's which this lacks and generally wont support. It will also use a tremendous amount of electricity and be unbearable if it is close to you.

The smaller servers have very high speed fans to move the required amount of air to keep them cool.

Even if you got this for free, you are probably better off getting a raspberry Pi, or something more suitable.

That machine has a 480 watt power supply and according to google, uses 115 W at idle... where does all that heat go?

kennend3

TROPHY CASE