Comment by opan
19 hours ago
Low power device to leave on all the time, particularly for people who don't leave their clients on all the time. Like a router, but more versatile (although with a better OS on it, an actual router may do the same job).
You can buy a Synology NAS for less than the cost of this rack and it will do everything this rack can do including running containers. You can build your own NAS and run Unraid or FreeNAS or what have you for even less.
As an owner of a Synology NAS, it's woefully behind on updates. The kernel is 4.4 and the docker version is probably two years old. Yes it works good for a beginner one system does all solution but you quickly out grow it.
Or you can have that in a "rack" aesthetics and pretend you run a datacenter. The end result is negligibly different.
I feel like an m-series mac mini would be a really good fit for that - plenty of juice for when you need it, but very low idle power draw. The small size (especially for the m4 version) is an added benefit.
M4 Mac Mini will be a good low-power LLM (e.g. photo semantic search) NAS once Asahi Linux supports USB/Thunderbolt storage.