Mini Rack: with Xeon ITX NAS

[RustyBrakes]

Thank you Jeff for putting together this community! I feel like I've found my people.

My aims with this rack were to cover the needs of my small apartment and provide a small test bed for learning:

• Wired connections for access point, PC, printer, TV
• Pi 3b running Pi Hole
• Pi 4b running Home Assistant
• ITX NAS with 6x SSDs (resulting in 3TB pool)

But most importantly it had to be wife approved. This meant blacking out all LEDs keeping the footprint as small as possible, and making the front look as clean as possible.

The Rack

I went a little crazy with patch cables, because I feel that it's part of the server rack experience

I use a Tapo P304M power strip which is Matter enabled and has energy monitoring. All power bricks are hidden away in the basement

Software Dashboards

Unraid server (all SATA SSD in ZFS array)

Home Assistant dashboard fed by Tapo energy monitoring and Pi Hole integration

Planning Process

I had a lot of fun using draw.io to plan out my rack. For the first week I just got my basic parts in as seen on the right. Then I used that as a transparent background on the rack diagram to make sure I had the dimensions correct. I think we could actually make a shape library for this community to use, with standardized sizes for common equipment.

[geerlingguy]

Love the planning on this one. A lot of power in this rack too!

[wesuru]

Looks great! What HDD enclosure is that? An ICY BOX?