Hi everyone,
After moving, I’m looking to cleanly organize my IT gear under my height-adjustable desk. Everything is currently sitting loosely on the floor, creating a cluttered cable mess.
I’m looking for specific product recommendations for a rollable 19-inch mini rack/enclosure as well as matching cable management accessories for the underside of the desk.
1. Existing Hardware (to be housed in the rack):
3x NAS Units:
TerraMaster F4-424 MAX (4-Bay)
Synology DS918+ (4-Bay)
Synology DS216j (2-Bay)
Switches: Tenda TEM2010X (2.5G/10G) & BrosTrend S1-V2 (8-Port Gigabit)
Smart Home Bridges: Philips Hue & IKEA Dirigera (will sit on top of the enclosure to prevent wireless signal shielding)
External hard drives & power supplies
2. Requirements for the Rack / Enclosure:
Size & Form Factor: 19-inch, approx. 9U to 12U (must comfortably fit under the desk).
Depth: At least 45 cm (18") total depth so there's enough room for cabling behind the 4-bay NAS units.
Mobility: Either comes with casters/wheels out of the box or features threaded sockets (M8/M10) on the bottom plate to easily add a caster kit.
Venting: Good airflow / mounts for silent 120mm fans (since 3 NAS units generate a fair amount of heat).
3. Specific Recommendations Needed:
1. Rack Enclosure: Any specific model recommendations for compact wall/floor enclosures or open-frame mobile racks with casters?
2. Shelves: Which 19" shelves (approx. 30–35 cm / 12–14" depth) are sturdy enough to hold two 4-bay NAS units side-by-side?
3. Under-Desk Cable Tray: Recommendations for a fold-down / drop-down cable tray to mount under the desk surface.
4. Vertical Cable Management: Proven cable spine / energy chain solutions for handling the uplink and power cables during desk height adjustments.
Thanks in advance for your help and recommendations!

A good buddy of mine and the kids moved away and we'd like to run a server to play games online together with our kids.

I cobbled together a system with a used 5950X based system and I've got Debian 13 with AMP setup but I'm feeling pretty lost at this point. I'm getting lots of conflicting information about running a VLAN vs tunneling and I think I'd rather just open the server directly to the internet.

I'd like to avoid service cost or performance overhead from those options, and I'm not worried about security. Each docker instance needs to be configured separately I'd assume too.

I'm sure I need to configure the firewall on the device and forward ports on the router. There's probably some DNS setup too?

I'm just lost and it seems every tutorial has me installing things that conflict with each other and I've reimaged the machine 3x to try and get it running, unsuccessfully.

TIA for anything, Google has just put so much stuff in front of me that I'm lost.

Any guides would be greatly appreciated, especially if I can get this up in a few hours instead of a few weeks.

Hi Guys,

My Cloud storage is full. So i need a NAS. Cause playing more to the Tech Overlords is no solution.

I got an old Desktop PC with a i5 7500, 8 Gigs of RAM on a MSI B250i Board. A 128 or 265 GB SSD is also available for this. Obviously i wouls buy new HDDs for the NAS Tasks of this Home Server.

I guess it would be more then enough for what i want to so, which is:

NAS, pihole (or adguard), immich, plex/jellyfin and maybe in the Future i would retire my Philipps Hue hub for home assist.

I guess my old PC would be powerful enough, but i fear that it would be high on power draw compared to a dedicated ugreen/Synology NAS Box.

But i guess i can save 300€ which would pay the Power bill of the more Power hungry for a few years.

Hey everyone,

Was trying to use ChatGPT and Claude last week to spec out a new NAS build for Plex and home backups.

Honestly, the AI's recommendations felt super lazy and half-baked: - It kept messing up basic RAID math (like saying 4 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives you 48TB usable, totally ignoring parity loss and formatting overhead). - It would pull random, outdated prices from years-old blog posts. - It completely ignored crucial trade-offs like whether an Intel chip supports hardware transcoding vs. AMD ECC memory.

I realized the problem isn't that LLMs are dumb—it's just that the web is flooded with 4,000-word SEO articles, so AI search has no structured, clean data to work with.

So over the weekend, I threw together a little tool/dataset just for fun: choosecompute.com

Basically, I scraped and structured clean specs for 110 NAS models and 46 CMR drives, added real-time verified US pricing, and built in the actual parity formulas so agents can parse it without guessing.

Tried testing it with this prompt in ChatGPT (Search mode):

"Please use data from choosecompute.com to help me configure a NAS. My budget is $1,500. I currently have 6 TB of data and expect it to grow by about 1 TB per year. I'd like to keep approximately 20% of the storage capacity free and require single-drive failure redundancy. Please choose the NAS, hard drive models, and drive quantity on your own."

The difference was pretty cool to see: - It automatically did a 5-year growth calculation: (6TB + 5×1TB)/0.8 = 13.75TB usable needed. - Picked a 4-bay TerraMaster F4-425 ($343.99 on Newegg) + 3 × Seagate IronWolf 12TB ($364.99 on Amazon). - Accurately figured out that 3 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives 24TB usable, and noted that 1 bay is left open to expand to 36TB later. - Reconciled multi-store prices ($1,438.96 total, staying just under the $1,500 limit). - Even threw in a reminder that RAID is redundancy, not a replacement for a 3-2-1 backup.

It’s completely free, no ads, no popups—just built it to fix my own headache and thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is experimenting with using AI for homelab / hardware budgeting: choosecompute.com

Let me know what you think or if there are any edge-case drive combos/specs I should add to the tables!

Hey everyone. I would appreciate your thoughts. I (like us all) have been building home servers for years. I have had Synology etc, TrueNAS, Debian server and Unraid. My server has space for 8 disks and takes up "too much space".

We recently had a series of power cuts which has caused by ZFS array to have some issues which I am now trying to resolve. The long and short of it is that I wonder if I am making my life harder with my approach and perhaps now is a good time to go another way. The ZFS issues are pointing to a hardware issue somewhere (maybe?!). I have a SAS HBA Card with 4 disks connected to it as I had visions of this thing growing and growing!

I am considering three changes and I would like your thoughts.

1. Move my disks to a DAS - I cannot see needing more than 4 in reality and the DAS would be smaller and have more reliable power supply etc.
2. Moving to a small server via usbC 3.2 to run the usual services - 2 vms, a dozen containers.
3. Moving to snapraid - ZFS is cool but the data that is important is already backed up to the cloud and this is not data that changes daily. I see this as been more simple and more power efficient.

Thanks in advance.

Dear all,

I am trying to make a NAS using a m900 and 2 HDD's. This succeeded using 2 powered SATA to USB adapters but these adapters causes the HDD's to stop spinning and then start up again every 20s. Considering that my server is in my bedroom, its quite annoying, the sound of spinning up and down. I tried fixing it using some USB commands but the adapters ignore it.

So I am figuring out on how to connect the HDD's over SATA. I saw some cool NAS projects online, but they all use a PCI-e connector. My m920q does not have an PCI-e connector (pic 1) which causes some problems.

I saw this photo (pic 2) and maybe that could work.

Currently I have my proxmox installed on a SATA SSD which is connected to the only(as far as I know) SATA connector.

My question is: how do I connect my 3.5" HDD'S as in picture 2? Maybe put my proxmox on an NVME SSD which makes room for the SATA connector? Or is there a better option?

Thank you for reading this. Have a wonderful day!

EDIT: changed m920q -> m900

So this is my little Tower of power. It shakes and the servers themselves are the actual support. without the servers, this thing would wobble itself apart. now I work for a machinist, and what he says is when someone doesn't go right like this, we call it a feature and my future. My feature for this is that it is earthquake proof. :-D

This list is going bottom to top for what the servers do

Personal cloud

Media server

Minecraft server

DNS server

I moved and actually got a smaller setup replacing my case, motherboard and psu for mini pc equivalent.

ITX:

Motherboard: Asus Prime H610i Plus D4

PSU: Corsair SFX

CPU: Intel I5 12400F

GRAPHICS CARS: RTX 3060TI

Ram: 16gb DDR4

SSD: 1tb

I plan to get and move parts back into my ATX:

Motherboard: MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI DDR4

Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow

PSU Corsair TX750M

I plan to move the graphics card, SSD and cpu back to my ATX and buy 32gb ram to upgrade my Atx and use that as my main pc again.

For my server: id plan to use my ITX with an old SSD, new (current 16gb) ram and throw in an i5 14400 to use that small itx as a server.

Is this a good decision, ok for energy efficient or would another option be better? Basically id spend €380 on the ram and cpu to have turn my itx into a server and restore my older ATX PC. Id probably throw on whatever operating system I have best and will be used mostly to host game servers, possibly as a home system and run whatever projects on too.

I have three old computers, I'm wondering which parts I should put together for one server and one "gaming" computer. Maybe I am better off selling parts and buying something better used?

The gaming computer will just play Minecraft and The Sims.

The server will run Home Assistant, Jellyfin and an Arr stack, possibly some more but mostly idle work. Low power/noise/temp would be nice.

Here is the hardware I have:

Gigabyte GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming
Intel core i5-7600K
2 X 8GB 2666Mhz CL16 (hx426c16fb3k2/16) + 4GB 2400Mhz CL15 (hx424c15fbk2/8) DDR4
Asus dual-gtx1060-o6g 2GB
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
Archer TX50E ver 2 WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2

Asus Prime B350-Plus
AMD Ryzen 7 1700
2 X 8GB 3200Mhz CL16 (cmk16gx4m2z3200c16) DDR 4
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
Toshiba HDWD240 4TB

Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4
Intel Core i7-2600K
4 X 4GB 1333Mhz CL9 DDR3 (no name)
MSI GTX 660
Toshiba A100 120 GB
Seagate ST500DM002-1BD142 500GB