Recent content by JossBrown

Just a couple of days ago I found out about the Radxa ARM boards. Almost there… almost there! 👍 As a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, I'd love some good ARM options. (I could always go the Mac Mini route, of course, but that would be a real janky NAS project. lol) And thank you: great info!

As for a gen4to3 switch, yes: manufacturers of those popular low-power NAS motherboards wouldn't add such a switch either. (For networking it would be great, though, because afaik there are PCIe 4.0 x1 to 10GbE chipsets: some newer NICs use those… ACQ?) As for the lane count: my hope is that the...

I've got a question… maybe someone can answer or correct me. Wildcat Lake will allegedly come with Darkmont E-cores as LPE, probably with 4 cores, in addition to 2 (or 1?) P-cores. In the news it is often stated that Wildcat Lake could be the successor to Intel's N-series CPUs. Maybe. Maybe not...

There is at least a way to partially circumvent the logout hook deprecation, namely with the events internally broadcast by macOS. There's an app called EventScripts, which can run (shell) scripts when certain events are broadcast, e.g. "Computer will shutdown". This probably does not work with...

So, to reiterate, my main questions would be: (1) Would the 5V from the Mac Mini's front USB port transmit via the passive hub through the USB-Type-A-to-Molex adapter cable? (2) Would this be sufficient to trigger the Add2PSU for an on or off signal (sent to the PicoPSU via 24pin connector)...

Yes, these are all traditional DAS options, and they are already mentioned in Michael's article, with pros & cons. Mostly cons, so he went on to create his own solution, and that's what my question is based on, which I think I've made clear. So the data setup, based on Michael's idea, is...

It would, of course, also be possible to forgo all the jank, and instead use a Launch Daemon that runs a small shell script during the Mac Mini boot process, which sends a network signal to a smart plug, which then turns on to power the PicoPSU and the whole storage setup. However, that would...

I stumbled over this article on how to use a Mac Mini as a low-power idle and efficient home server with external SATA storage. https://www.michaelstinkerings.org/mac-mini-as-a-low-idle-home-nas/ Using the Thunderbolt connectors with M.2 enclosures and M.2 to SATA adapter cards, is a nice...

On-site backup to HDD, either DAS or a cheap 1-bay or 2-bay. Off-site backup too eventually.

I figured as much. But does it mean precisely? Would it be as if the whole RAID was based on just five M.2 SSDs at x2 speeds? That wouldn't be great, of course, but actually still way enough for a dual SFP+ connection. Or would the single x2 SSD just lower the overall speed a little bit? The OS...

I stumbled across the Minisforum MS-01 workstation mini PC, and it might be a really good option for a small Unraid server using only M.2 NVMe SSDs. https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 Now, it only comes with three M.2 storage slots out of the box, one is PCIe 4.0 x4, the...

Thank you. Too bad, though. Would have liked those two SATA ports. 😉

One of the boards on my list for an Unraid build is the ASRock N100M as a low-power option. https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100M/#Specification Now, it doesn't have a lot of SATA ports, but you can expand it with various controller cards and M.2 adapters. One of the M.2 slots is a Key E at...

Addendum – maybe a possible workaround: instead of the Rocket 1104, I could buy the (more expensive) HighPoint Rocket 1504 quad M.2 NVMe. This one is PCIe 4.0 x16, and with bifurcated lanes on the board (see above), it would only receive x8 speed/bandwidth at gen4 from the slot, but that would...

Among other boards for a server/NAS build, I have my eyes on the Asus Pro WS W680-ACE workstation mainboard: https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-w680-ace/techspec/ It comes with two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots (CPU). The board is for 12th & 13th gen Intel Core...