Nathan Reynolds

If your Mac is bursting at the seams with project files, RAW photos, or 4K video, you already know internal storage upgrades aren’t cheap. The honest answer for most Mac users is external storage, and the best USB-C DAS for a Mac storage setup gives you desktop-class capacity with transfer speeds that actually keep up … Read more

Our team has spent the last 90 days testing 10 different 8-bay JBOD enclosures with ZFS pools running on TrueNAS, Proxmox, and Ubuntu. I personally deployed each unit across multiple ZFS configurations including mirror vdevs, RAIDZ1, and RAIDZ2 arrays to see what actually works in production. If you’re searching for the best 8-bay JBOD enclosure … Read more

If you’ve ever lost a drive and lost everything with it, you already know why people search for the best 2-bay DAS for a simple mirror backup. I run a 2-bay enclosure on my own desk for exactly that reason: every photo, project file, and video render writes to two drives at once, so a … Read more

Running out of SATA ports on your motherboard is a common frustration when building a NAS or expanding storage capacity. I’ve been there myself, staring at a fully populated motherboard with drives stacked on my desk, wondering how to connect them all. A SATA port multiplier offers a solution, but choosing the right one requires … Read more

I built my first home server in a cramped microATX case with exactly four SATA ports, then spent a weekend trying to cram a fifth drive into a system that physically could not handle it. That frustration is exactly why PCIe SATA expansion cards exist, and after running eight different models across TrueNAS, unRAID, and … Read more

I ran Pi-hole for two years on a hand-me-down Raspberry Pi before deciding it was time to upgrade my whole setup. That meant testing the best SBC for running Pi-hole across five different boards, measuring power draw with a kill-a-watt meter, and counting how often the FTL engine missed a query under load. Pi-hole is … Read more

Six months ago I watched a Raspberry Pi 4 in a control cabinet hit 70 degrees Celsius and quietly die. It had been running for 23 days straight, pulling Modbus data off a flow meter in a chemical plant. The replacement board lasted four weeks before the SD card corrupted. That incident sent me down … Read more

Building your own NAS used to mean buying a $400+ enclosure from Synology or QNap. I built my first single board computer NAS four years ago out of a Pi 4 and two old laptop drives, and it has been running backups and Plex ever since. That little box taught me more about SMB shares, … Read more

I learned the hard way that a stock Pi 5 throttles fast under load. During my first 24-hour media server test, my CPU hit 85°C and stayed there until the SoC dropped to 600 MHz. That is the day I started hunting for the best SBC case with active cooling for a Pi 5, and … Read more

I have been running a home DNS ad blocker for over six years across four different SBCs and a thin client, and I can tell you this: the single board computer that runs Pi-hole (or its cousins) barely breaks a sweat doing it. A DNS filter resolves a lookup, checks a blocklist, and either returns … Read more