Not so much looking to build a PC as buy one, because I’m lazy these days. My old one is forever old and filled with randomly upgraded parts and HDDs. I’ve also got an old and under performing NAS for Plex. Looking to turn my current PC into my new NAS, and buy a mini PC for my new rig. (I don’t game on PC anymore).
The problem is, I want one(ish) large capacity drive on the mini PC. Not 100% tied to a mini PC, just like the idea of being minimalist on this rig.
Any suggestions? 2 monitors. Not much else special.
Maybe an external drive? Or drive bay? Speed isn’t critical on the large capacity.
Thoughts?
Well the first question I’ll ask is how much storage do you want. 2 x M.2 slots can give you 16TB total, but you’ll pay for it.
If you have an external drive or a drive bay, doesn’t that negate the purpose of a NAS?
Eh, I’d say $1k for the setup, so probably not ssd’s. The nas is just for Plex.
I’m actually stuck on sailing the high seas and running Plex. For whatever reason split tunnel, Plex, and my VPN do not get along, so it just seems easier to run to separate machines. Acquire stuff on one, host it on another. I guess I could just keep the storage all on my old box, but I’ve been burned on hard drives dying…then the back up died while copying to the new drive. So I just want hard drives everywhere now.
I could probably also figure out a VM, but that seems like a whole thing as well.
Could you run Tailscale? That way you can still use your internal IPs and just whitelist the tail scale subnet.
You can put multiple shares on the same SMB for Plex. So you can use SMB and also Plex at the same time.
Mini PC and high storage density do not mix too well unfortunately.
Running off a USB bus is fine, but with that, I would still run it through the NAS. That way you can still access the files while aboard.
First, join [email protected].
Next, you can build an APU-only build with some pretty small ITX cases that basically can only fit an ITX motherboard and a flex PSU. You’ll have all the capabilities of modern CPUs and 1-2 slots for m.2 drives. Unfortunately, ITX builds can be expensive, depending on what you buy, and your part options are more limited. If you can wait until Christmas, computer parts typically have their best sales around then (not Cyber Monday).
If you don’t care about future upgradeability, there’s some interesting mini PCs I’ve seen that sometimes have replaceable hard drives and/or RAM, and they can be a little cheaper. I don’t remember any specifics, but they’re out there.
This looks like a pretty good solution. I’ll scout the out.
Thanks
I think we might have different definitions of minimalist, but have a look at a Raspberry Pi 500 (or a pi 5 if you want to keep your own keyboard) and an external 3.5inch USB hard drive. I am pretty happy with a 400 and would use it as a nettop/netbook.
I haven’t got my hands on one, bur I remember reading it can do two 4k monitors.
In that setup youx could keep the os on the microsd and also get a SSD for a high speed work area, copy to HDD when finished with projects.