zearp/Nucintosh

NUC 8 as Homelab/server/NAS/etc.

vardumper opened this issue · 1 comments

Hi all, It would be great to have a discussions section, here. Allow me to ask some questions in here, anyways.

I am thinking about turning my NUC8 into a home server/nas and am wondering what others would recommend to do. I already have the memory maxed out at 64GB. I am planning to install Proxmox and TrueNas, run VMs, Portainer for Docker, replace Cloud storage/Photos/etc. and basically have a playground.

I am not sure which route to go with storage. 1 SATA port and 1 NVME slot isn't much. I want to keep power consumption low.
I think I got three options:
1) put only an NVME and a big SATA SSD and not worry about RAID/Mirroring/etc.
risk of data loss
not really an option

2) put 2 (SATA) m.2 drives into a RAID Adapter for the 2.5" Slot.
Screenshot 2023-12-20 at 10 53 08
more heat
cap drive speed at SATA III
so, unraid and truenas seem to highly discourage HW RAID and promote ZFS

  1. get a m.2 to 4x SATA adapter and hook up a ICY DOCK 5.25" bay for 4 2.5" SATA drives and put HDDs. Do you think the NUC would be able to power 4 drives if I connected the external drive bay to the onboard (J) SATA power connector?
    Screenshot 2023-12-20 at 10 50 41
    Screenshot 2023-12-20 at 11 01 23
  • pretty costly
    could I do RAID 5? it will be ZFS RAID
    I'm taking this route, actually

The Bios has some RAID features, as well, but I guess it's just Software RAID right? Like a little helper tool to set up the RAID array. Does it sound like a viable approach to mix NVMe and SSD drives with different speeds into a RAID array?
Am I missing other options? eg: external 3.5" bay with additional power adapter on Thunderbolt?

Feel free to close this.

Running silently with 6 SSDs, one external boot drive for proxmox. 5 internal for data pools. I removed a fan and LEDs from the drive enclosure to keep lights and noise down to a minimum.
IMG20231230173815.jpg

IMG20231230173509.jpg

So while I did loose the only m.2 slot, I think it's quite a cool repurposing of the NUC. I did run into some "power" problems when using HDDs instead of SSDs which is a bit weird as the sum of Amperes required by the SSDs is actually higher than the 0.55A of the HDDs