from Hacker News

Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

by ferriswil on 1/17/25, 3:08 PM with 43 comments

• by toprerules on 1/17/25, 6:09 PM

  The one thing I don't understand about these Pi based mini-racks is why you would build a home lab that's less powerful than your client devices. My 24 U rack exists precisely because I want on demand, large amounts of compute/GPU for compiling, transcoding, encrypting, etc. and the cloud is too expensive. If you're going to make the investment into any type of home labbing, why gimp yourself with devices that can only run small services you could run on a single old desktop using containers?

• by dchuk on 1/17/25, 6:43 PM

  I have zero need for a portable raspberry pi cluster but damn is this cool anyway.

  Also, I learned about this device from this post and immediately bought one for my existing home server remote access: https://jetkvm.com/

• by walrus01 on 1/17/25, 6:12 PM

  There are a few pseudo standards for "half width" 1U devices, one of the more notable vendors is mikrotik which makes devices that can be mounted as two units in 1U.

  https://mikrotik.com/product/rmk2_10

  looks like this: https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/rb_images/2242_hi_res.pn...

  I wish there was some kind of firmly defined standard for exactly half of a 1U width so that different manufacturers' devices could be attached together.

• by roflchoppa on 1/17/25, 6:42 PM

  It’s the storage factor that is appealing to me. Gone are the days of 4 devices sprawled in the closet…

  Holy moly these are getting expensive 1k for something that goes in the closet is wild.

  This was posted a while back, it has some good resources.

  https://loganmarchione.com/2021/01/homelab-10-mini-rack/

• by rahimnathwani on 1/18/25, 8:05 AM

  It's interesting that he linked an inexpensive "260W GaN USB-C Charging Station".

  It's less than $30 with a coupon, which seems to good to be true.

  A look at the Amazon 2-star reviews suggests it has good build quality but can only output 75W to 100W total, not 260W as advertised.

• by rcarmo on 1/18/25, 9:39 AM

  This is cute, but there should be some kind of affordances for wall mounting or hanging it inside a closet. The emphasis on portability is… OK, I guess, but unlikely to ever be relevant for most people doing homelabs.

• by disambiguation on 1/17/25, 7:35 PM

  This feels kind of like a miniature train model, but for data centers. It's cool and all, but it offers neither storage, compute, or networking in a way that I would consider paying that price tag.