Nathan Reynolds

I have been running ZoneMinder on my home lab server for the past four years, starting with two cameras on the front porch and gradually expanding to eight cameras covering every entry point. Along the way, I have tested Reolink, Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, Anpviz, and a handful of lesser-known brands to find the best camera … Read more

My Synology DS920+ drove me crazy for three months before I cracked it. The constant humming from four spinning drives made my home office sound like a beehive, and the resonating vibration traveled right through my wood desk. After testing 8 different anti-vibration mounts for NAS hard drives over six weeks, I finally found solutions … Read more

I run a homelab with six NVMe drives running 24/7 across Proxmox and Unraid, and I have learned the hard way that thermal throttling is not optional. My first home server build used bare M.2 drives without heatsinks, and within weeks I watched temps climb past 75°C during VM migrations. Performance dropped by nearly 40% … Read more

Powering a 10-inch mini rack is harder than it looks. Most rack mount power equipment is built for the 19-inch standard, which leaves home lab enthusiasts scrambling for compact 1U options that actually fit. After spending months testing gear in our own mini rack setups and digging through Reddit threads, GitHub issues, and community forums, … Read more

I built my first homelab in a cardboard box, and my second one sat on a wire shelf behind my monitor, with cables spilling out like spaghetti. When I finally moved everything into a 10-inch mini server rack, the difference was immediate: quieter fans, easier access, and a setup that actually looked like the homelab … Read more

I built my first homelab server in a Fractal Design Define R5 chassis and ran out of drive bays in about 14 months. That is when I started hunting for the best disk shelf options for budget homelab storage builds. After testing eight different enclosures across two months, swapping fans, breaking a backplane, and rebuilding … Read more

I have spent the last three months running two, three, and sometimes four LLMs side by side on compact boxes in my home lab. The shift in is clear: the question is no longer whether a mini PC can run one model, but how many models it can juggle at once without falling over. The … Read more

Picking the best workstation GPU for fine-tuning small models has become one of the most consequential decisions in any ML engineer’s setup. I have burned through three cards over two years chasing that sweet spot of VRAM, tensor core performance, and price, and our team has now tested eight contenders head-to-head for fine-tuning 7B, 13B, … Read more

I built a Frigate NVR setup three times in the last year, and the single biggest decision is which NPU accelerator for Frigate you pick. Get it right and your CPU sits at 15% even with eight 1080p streams. Get it wrong and you’re stuck watching your dashboard peg at red. The “best NPU accelerator … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months running Home Assistant Voice on every mini PC I could get my hands on. After burning through eight different boxes, swapping microSD cards, and listening to a lot of robotic Piper TTS responses, I have a clear picture of which low-power AI box actually delivers for local voice control. … Read more