Analogies always have flaws. I struggled to come up with a good analogy for piecing together a homelab from a collection of mini PCs, USB hard drives, and USB SATA enclosures. I keep coming back to LEGOS. They were one of my favorite toys when I was a kid, and my friends and I most definitely referred to them as LEGOS.

The flaw in my analogy is that mini PCs don’t come in standard sizes. They’re usually a little narrower than USB hard drives. They don’t stack up perfectly evenly like LEGO bricks, and they don’t snap together with a satisfying click.

This is a bit like 19-inch server rack for your home

Some people want a 42U enclosed server rack at home, and they want to fill it with big, heavy, loud servers. Some of us use the phrase “cosplaying as a sysadmin” with some affection. If you want to have a big, loud rack at home, then I completely support your decision.

I’ve been responsible for enough rows of server racks. I don’t need something big and loud at home. I try to keep my home office as quiet as I can.

There are some popular 10” racks, but they fall way short of a real server rack. There isn’t all that much stuff that you can buy that fits correctly in a 10” rack. You will either be wasting a lot of space, or you’ll be crossing things off your list because they just don’t quite fit.

You can stack quite a few mini PCs on top of each other before they get too unwieldy, and if you REALLY need to add one more to the stack, you can just pile one more on top.