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Comment by jdboyd | Hacker News Reader

Since most NUCs don't take 3.5" HDs, I assume you mean attaching via USB3?

You should be able to get a Thin Terminal device for about $100US with USB3.0 and gigabit ethernet and/or wifi. With a little shopping, you may even be able to get one with a low profile PCIe slot for similar money. A few examples of such machines are the HP T5740, t520 or t620. Dell/Wyse also should have acceptable options.

Choosing a Thin terminal should cost far less than a NUC while being much more capable than a raspberry pi for not much more money (a raspberry pi 3 still needs a uSD card, a case, and an unusually powerful USB PSU).

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Most (many?) nuc users use the mini-pci flash storage devices. My NUCs (I have 3 of the skylake ones with 32G of ram) have 250G Samsung SSDs and those suckers just scream.

I setup freebsd on mine and have the internal nvmex4 ssd's as caches and external usb3 jbod towers holding the spinning rust.

Its nice, though the performance of usb3 is... less than optimal the fact that I can saturate gigabit ethernet means I don't care too much. Local compiles are crazy fast though.

That sounds like a pretty nice setup. I'm running a small (3 node hopefully 5 node in a few months) kubernetes cluster to dogfood things for my own home use. What do you run, some sort of a NAS with them?

Yep, I just run nfsv3 and samba4 on it to share things out to my internal network.

Its plenty fast for all my needs, though nfs over wifi is... slow in general its fast enough to not care a whole lot. I have a few bhyve linux vm's running that just go straight to the ssd's so they're silly fast with like 3g/s read speed or whatever. Its more than enough for all my home needs.

Looking to do something similar and was worried about compatibility for the disk enclosure. Mind sharing which one you went with that works with freebsd?

I use a skylake nuc for my lab server. Spins up VMs just fine although you have to run Fedora (vs RHEL/Centos) for full hardware support as some drivers are only in the 4.x kernel.

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