• 11 Dec, 2025 *

I’m almost there. Or, am I?

Great I’m doing home lab memes now. (insert AI disclaimer here - this is not real)

So this is a continuation of my home lab adventure, see the previous post if you care to read some preamble, but it’s not necessary to utterly savour this post. Previously, I was able to secure two Seagate Ironwolf 4TB drives that were on a pre-black Friday Amazon sale, and now just recently on Cyber Monday I secured another two 4TB Ironwolf drives off of Best Buy’s unbelievable and broken website.

For the Best Buy purchases I ended up having to place the order for each of the drives separately and then pick them up in person (ew). I don’t particularly hate Best Buy but I used to work there a long long time ago and showing up for Cyber Monday in-person gave me some unsettling flashbacks.

This has been a long time coming, and so far, a pretty hefty investment. Picking out the hard drives is / was the easy part though. Picking an enclosure and more importantly a machine to use these drives with is the next set of hurdles.

One part of that has also recently been solved for me though. Originally I envisioned myself having to purchase and modify a mini PC or go the DIY route and shove a bunch of old tech off of FB Marketplace into the big bulky old computer case that is currently gathering dustmites and spider hotels in my garage.

Before settling on this I remembered that my partners sibling happened to have a passed down mini PC that they weren’t using and didn’t know much about. It had been sitting under their bed for the past 4 months. I didn’t think it would be powerful enough for my homelab needs but boy oh boy was I wrong. If anything it’s honestly a bit overkill....

Enter the Intel NUC Enthusiast Edition: PHANTOM CANYON!

Can your homelab play RDR2 at 60FPS on High? (not sure why you’d want this)

The Intel NUC series was a series of mini-ish PC’s that I had never heard of before now. The NUC line seems defunct in now (?), but when these mini-ish PC’s released there was a lot of hype around them. The particular one I’m working with is the Intel NUC 11 "Enthusiast Kit" or the NUC11PHKi7C (this really roles off the tongue). It’s also called the "Phantom Canyon", it has a Punisher-esque blue glowing skull on the top of the case (it’s actually RGB with the software installed) and the boot screen has a white skull with glowing red eyes, so you know it’s got some spooooky preformence. It turns out this thing has a fucking discreet Nvidia 2060 in it, an Intel Core i7-1165G7 at 4.7 GHz with 8 threads and 16GB of RAM! Huh??

Image supplied by The NUC Blog

My last GPU on my gaming PC was an Nvidia 2060 Super. It was a great card and it played every game I could throw at it on my old Windows installation (I use Linux now btw). Sure it would dip under 60 FPS sometimes at 1440p, but it was a beast at 1080p for most titles. The fact that a 2060 is packed into this Punisher cablebox looking motherfucker astounds me! The GPU will definitely be a little overkill but goddamn, Jellyfin will have no issue transcoding multiple 4k streams and I’m sure I can find some other uses for it.

It being a mini PC still begs the question though: how will I connect 4 hard drives???

I could buy some cheap-ass enclosure, but everything under $300 seems to have a high probability of being built with poor materials or just straight up corrupting data like 50% of the time. No thanks!

There’s tabletop semi-enclosures too, but most of them are fanless or have super loud fans. This makes me... not a fan.

I could build my own enclosure. The jank factor may be higher with this option, and there would be a lot more wires, but at least I can build it for my own purposes. It’s still a mini PC so there are no additional SATA or e-SATA ports.

I found a way around this though! It has an additional internal NVMe slot, and with that I can add a x6 SATA adapter for $30 - $40. The catch is that I have to still power the drives somehow. So I’m thinking of using one of those external SATA power adapters. Powering them on and off with the system might still be an issue but we’ll figure that out somewhere along the way.

Note: "Compatible devices - Computer"

Then, you know... I have to still choose a software environment which is another full can of worms. Before I proceed with a hard drive enclosure I could probably test out some stuff out. I currently have my eye on TrueNAS Community Edition for stability and community, but ZimaOS interests me for it’s noob friendly GUI interface.

I’ve seen a lot of Redditors in the home labbing community shit on ZimaOS / CasaOS, I guess for their simplicity and the for the company, IceWhale Technology, building the OS more specifically to run on their hardware? Could just be a hint of homelab elitism but I will test it anyways. Proxmox is highly under consideration too, but it feels like a lot for a beginner like me, especially with no hands on help. I might give Proxmox a try once I get my homelab sea legs. I do eventually plan on having a full time job outside of home IT work... so if I can set something up that is reliable, scalable and just works I would be very happy.

Right now, I just want to do the following with my machine:

• Store all my docs, creative media, assets, photos and backups
• Host a Google Photos-like image manager
• Run a Home Assistant server so I can manage all my home smart devices
• Jellyfin server to watch my media
• Tailscale to access my stuff securely and remotely
• ARM to rip and backup my DVD collection automatically
• Host Kiwix for Wikipedia offline
• NextCloud services (maybe)
• Pi-hole (if I can configure it properly)
• A Minecraft server (maybe)

So yeah, that’s my update. I would like to thank my newly diagnosed ADHD (spoiler) for providing me with this home labbing hyper-fixation - new blog post coming soon about this. See my previous post here if interested. I guess I could also thank the failing democracies of many governments around the world as well, but I’d rather not.

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#ADHD #homelab #learning #linux #tinkering