Nathan Reynolds

I spent the last 90 days testing eight mini PCs across three real edge computing deployments, including a Home Assistant hub, a pfSense firewall, and a local AI inference node for a small manufacturing floor. The results surprised me in good and bad ways. One machine ran cool and silent for 67 straight days without … Read more

I have been running container workloads at home for the past five years, and the single biggest upgrade I made was swapping my old tower server for a mini PC. The drop in idle power, the silence, and the ability to tuck the device behind a monitor changed the way I run my homelab. That … Read more

I spent the last three months testing NAS enclosures in my own living room to find the ones that disappear into the background instead of competing with the TV. After measuring noise levels, running file transfers, and streaming 4K content, I’ve narrowed down the 8 best quiet NAS enclosures for living rooms you can buy … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months testing eight M.2 SSDs across three different mini PCs, including an Intel NUC 13 Pro, a Beelink SER7, and an ASUS NUC 14 Pro. The goal was simple: figure out which drives actually deliver on their speed promises when crammed into a case with limited airflow. The best M.2 … Read more

I built my first TrueNAS Scale server on a repurposed tower PC in 2019, and the electricity bill taught me a hard lesson about 24/7 operation costs. When I switched to a mini PC two years ago, my power draw dropped by roughly 65% while still handling four ZFS pools, Plex transcoding, and a handful … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight mini PCs to find the best options for running large language models locally. After running Ollama, LM Studio, and LocalAI across each system with models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters, I have real benchmarks and honest impressions to share. The mini PCs for local LLMs market … Read more

Picking the best budget CPU for a Proxmox home server changed how I run my homelab. After rebuilding my own setup twice and helping three friends do the same, I learned that the wrong processor choice bottlenecks every VM you spin up. Proxmox VE asks more from a CPU than a standard desktop install. Every … Read more

Upgrading the RAM on a Beelink Mini PC is one of the smartest moves I made this year, and I wish I had done it sooner. After running my SER5 MAX with the stock 16GB for about six months, I noticed Chrome tabs stacking up, video editing choking on 4K timelines, and virtual machines refusing … Read more

If your storage closet is starting to look like a server farm and your PSU is running out of SATA power ports, you already know the problem: a drive-heavy build needs more power connections than most power supplies ship with. I have been running multi-drive storage rigs for years, and I have burned through my … Read more

Building a quiet home server used to mean accepting a 1U rack chassis with screaming 40mm fans or settling for stock Intel coolers that whine under load. After spending three months testing coolers in my own homelab – which runs 24/7 with Plex, TrueNAS, and a few Docker containers – I learned the hard way … Read more