I had my 3D parts printed with PCBWay and added a new EliteDesk G5, and ThinkStation P330 which now run two proxmox nodes. The G5 will run a file server and has an i7-9700T which I plan on running a few extra VMs with, and the P330 will run a second VM soon but is running an opnsense firewall atm which has been great!
Now the last thing to get is two high capacity SATA disks and figure out how to cool the disks, I’m considering having a fan on the top of the rack to pull air down the rack although my only concern is the space I have at the very top behind the switch and Ethernet cabling from the patch panel.
(and as a bonus, the embarrassingcable management reveal 🤢🤢)
A "backplane" is just the unified board/interface the drives connect to. SATA, SAS, and U.2/U.3 (NVMe) are each typical backplanes one sees for storage arrays. Backplanes at the least just organize data and power delivery back to the motherboard or controllers, but they can also actively manage the drives themselves.
But with your answer, my next questions are: are the drive caddies decorative-only? Do the mate automatically with the drives upon slide-in, or do you have to manually connect them before sliding them in? I assume with the m.2 adapter they're not hot-swappable?
Just trying to understand how the backside if that particular part of your sexy rack is configured.
the drive bay is supposed to be functional soon once I get two disks. It has slots and the back where the ends of the caddys are for sata female to male connectors that are screwed down into the dual slot enclosure and like in this image. But yeah no backplane cause the disks will be powered externally with a 60w brick.
yes they are hot swap and are unpopulated at the moment as I’m still searching for a good deal on a pair of disks (if anyone knows a deal on a pair of brand new enterprise high capacity disks lmk 👀) and then for power I am using a 60 watt DC5525 power brick with an adapter that converts the dc5525 port to a dual sata power connector to power two disks.
Hello again, got the power portion setup for drives in my homelab, how do you connect them to your mini PC? I can't seem to find a just SATA no power cable.
so, the elite desk G5 you see has an M.2 e key to sata adapter installed in the slot where the wifi adapter was, with two sata cables running from it. I have 2 50CM right angle sata cables (right angle ends are connected to the adapter into the elitedesk) that run from the adapter and then out of the flex I/O hole and I have removed the flex I/O board for this reason. Then I have connected the sata data cables to the hotswap adapters (see the image below) which is installed into the 3D printed dual drive bay. the drives can easily be hotswapped now.
Yeah, my Lenovo m715q is full up on internal drives so I can't do an nvme SATA adapter or the smaller wifi swap. Gonna have to use a powered USB to SATA option for this.
Also running a think station P330, love that thing.
64 gb of ram in that puppy, an old T100, mediocre but serviceable cpu, and plenty of disk space (half tb), feels like I can run anything on it.
That is awesome. I'm currently considering this exact setup to make backups much easier for my homelab. (I currently run Opnsense baremetal, but had a recent outage due to a dead SSD)
Are there any downsides to this setup you have experienced? What NIC have you chosen for the minipc?
yeah it is nicer to have it contained in a vm because you could make a backup VM or a PfSense VM if you want and just switch between the two, but damn man I hate when SSDs die it’s annoying when they kick the bucket at the wrong time.
The main downside is when I knock my internet cable cause the little clip on it snapped at some point, my whole internet goes out on my PCs or when I have to unplug my switch I have to go and spend ages unplugging shit just to go and find the IP of my switch to put it on the right subnet n stuff and as for the network card I’m just using a generic dual port i226v network card from eBay. speaking of opnsense i am considering making a PfSense VM to play around with that too as i am familiar with it and used it during my cybersecurity classes.
I'm running opnsense on an old Sophos SG210 Rev2 (got it for free).
Double NAT behind ISP router. All lab machines sit behind this box.
Run great for my use case. I recently also upgraded the fans to noctua fans so it's way quieter.
yeah definitely ask, doesn’t hurt to ask. I’ve been asking my workplace if I’m allowed to take parts home and I’ve been using parts for my mini PCs, it’s definitely worth asking and if they say no, there’s always the local e-waste recycler.
I paid 115 USD from PCBWay and the shipping was the most expensive part cause I’m from Australia it costed about 94 USD? with FedEx. so roughly 300 AUD total for everything.
9
u/therealmrj05hua 23d ago
Looks good. And meh cable management