Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.
I’m more interested in multi-bay enclosures, but as you said, the chipsets tend to be kinda crappy. And that’s what makes me hesitate to use these mini PCs, my use-case is for a NAS, but these enclosures are kind of expensive and seem to have pretty poor components.
So for now, I’m using larger cases to hold the drives. But it takes up a lot of desk space, so these mini PCs are very attractive, if I can get a compact external enclosure to work.
Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.
I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/
I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.
Yeah, I’d need to run cable if I moved my machines to a closet, and I’m putting that off. I do plan to do that though, so maybe someday. :)
Yeah I ran ethernet everywhere when I bought my house and it’s fantastic. Multi-gig everywhere!
I’m also never fucking doing that again because the builder of my house must have gotten a fantastic fucking deal 120 years ago on 2x4s, because they decided to do a narrow cross-bracing between studs on every damn wall, so I had fucking rock-hard old growth 2x4s to drill through every 14 inches or so in every damn wall I was running cables on.
Killed several hundred dollars in drill bits and other tools (broke a few fish tapes!) getting this shit done, AND it took like a month to get finished and then the walls patched where I had to cut into it to see what in the fuck the drill was hitting.
But yeah, ethernet everywhere is great!
