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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • That’s silly. A motherboard with a free pci slot (I think x8? Been awhile), a cheap hba with the associated sas cables, and literally any case that will hold the drives. You could strap them all to a board if you wanted

    Obviously you’ll need cpu and ram. Make sure the power supply is beefy enough to cover the amount of drives you plan to use and preferably get a good quality one if you plan to run it 24/7. I do think it’s worthwhile to get server grade hardware as it holds up better to long term 24/7 use but it’s not necessary. It’s also absolutely fine to go entirely used; my whole build was all ewaste and was maybe $300 minus the drives (which added much more). And my build was frankly overkill for a nas but I also run VMs and do some local llm stuff. If you just want to serve files for like Jellyfin/plex you really don’t need much, an ewaste pc from like 2015 will probably do the job spec wise (though increasing ram a lot can help significantly especially if you do zfs)

    I have a 15 drive nas. My drives are sata but my hba is compatible with sas drives. I use an lsi 9300-16i and I have read of people using it with sas arrays just fine. If you shop around you can get it with cables for like $40-50 used (maybe more now since inflation fucked everything and you need the less common cables). Be careful because there are lots of counterfeits.

    Also be mindful of cooling, the card runs HOT. I added active cooling to mine with a 3d printed bracket. If you’re only running 3-4 drives you could also get the 9300-8i which is cheaper and runs cooler, but has half the drive lanes so you’re limited in terms of future expansion.





  • Oh I didn’t mean larger like that, I meant width wise. Standard rack width is 19 inches so if it’s one of those specialty racks that’s narrower that thing I said about repurposing an old 1u/2u is pointless because it won’t fit. Doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use this rack, just that that idea is no good.

    4u is fine unless you want to expand down the line. Networking gear and stuff. However if it’s a narrow rack I don’t think there will be much to put in it for those purposes? Depends on your goals. I have a larger rack but I also have my whole networking stack in it, switch, poe switch, ups, router, nas, etc.

    I would consider posting on the unraid forums. There may be someone who has used similar hardware and can give guidance on how they approached the setup. The benefit of unraid is ultimately that the support community is very solid


  • How do you connect the drives? Looking at specs there’s only one sata port (which I don’t actually see anywhere, but it says it is there, although using it slows the second nvme lane)

    USB connected drives in a raid array are not ideal. USB connectivity is not as solid as a direct sata connection and a drive suddenly disappearing from your area, especially parity, is quite a headache

    No pci slot so you can’t add an hba for more sata lanes either. You could do one of those nvme to sata things but I’ve heard bad things about the reliability of those.

    If it’s free though I def think it’s worth finding a way to make it work. The specs are more than enough for unraid and usually those tiny pcs are pretty power efficient, which is nice. But that’s the issue to work around, connecting the hard drives reliably.

    WRT what to put them in it could be anything really. You could get a cheap broken 1 or 2u server case where someone’s pulled the motherboard and powersupply, rig something in there to hold them all. Should be more than enough space for 5 drives and will probably have cages for at least 2-3, maybe all 5 if you get lucky. Might even have hot swap ones. Dunno if this would fit though, that rack looks small and I couldn’t get the specs to load, is it full sized or a tiny one?

    Could also see if there’s some kind of 3d print thing. There’s probably a 3d print thing to rack mount that mini pc.



  • On device isn’t always ideal. I don’t use immich because i don’t have a large photo library. But I do use komga. Nextcloud can sort and manage epub/pdf like komga but as poVoq said, the specialized solution is superior

    This point is where on device app is not the ideal situation, for me at least. These apps exist. Tachiyomi and the resultant forks can import a local library. And frankly even a somewhat massive local library can fit on a cheap SD card

    The point of the server is portability. With this I have portability across my devices. My library, reading status, metadata, etc is available on all devices. I can read a book on my ereader, close it, the status is synced. I can pick up from my laptop and the same thing occurs. I can pick up from my phone, download the book to my device, and keep reading while I’m away from home. If I wanted to I could open remote access to my server and avoid the need for downloading the books but that’s a whole thing

    I don’t think it would make sense to run a server solely for this but it’s a service that doesn’t take much in terms of resources and I read a lot.



  • A clone of 12ft.io but the old version before they got into beef with the New York Times and kneecapped it. It doesn’t work on every single article with a paywall but it works on the overwhelming majority (including New York Times articles)

    And it doesn’t really count because I knew I’d use it but komga+komf+fmd2. I list it though because I didn’t realize I’d use this stack so much. I can now read with my phone, my laptop, my ereader, etc. tachiyomi/mihon works, reading progress is synced, and I never have to visit one of those garbage manga aggregation sites ever again


  • The headphone cable is excellent for sure and I will never ever buy another set of wireless headphones again.

    I have one set of wireless earbuds (Sony XM3) for when bigger headphones are impractical and for the price the battery life is shit. After roughly 2ish years of moderate use the battery life is cut noticeably and after 3 they barely last 30 minutes. Thankfully changing the battery is fairly simple (go sony!) although the battery used is a weird proprietary cell that cannot be purchased through legitimate channels and is fairly expensive (boo sony). But whatever, $30 on batteries is better than tossing earbuds that cost $250-300 a few years ago.

    That said I have moved on from phones with headphone jacks. I still have a few sets of proper ass headphones that are pretty nice. If I want to use them with my phone I don’t fuck with dongles, I have a Qudelix 5K DAC/AMP. This allows me to use my wired headphones with any Bluetooth thing really. The only thing that could improve it is a user replaceable battery, and they made that: the Qudelix T71 although I haven’t tried that. And frankly I’m pretty sure I can figure out swapping the battery on this whenever it croaks. I’ve sourced and changed a lot of batteries in my time.

    It’s not as nice as my proper setup for listening to flac or vinyl but it’s pretty indistinguishable aurally for the most part when listening to flac on my phone (vs flac on my home server via my better dac/amp which again is pretty aurally indistinguishable unless you’re a buttsniffing audiophile type. And if you are I dare you to double blind test it)