You wanna talk about Mini Racks? Let’s talk about Mini Racks.
Project MINI RACK is a guide for miniature rack builds, for compact Homelabs, RF battlestations, and portable network racks. Watch the video announcing this project by clicking the image below:
I am not affiliated with the linked site.
I like the idea, but these types is minipcs are meant to large use environment cooling. Cramming them into a rack is definitely going to accelerate their demise. RAM and SSD especially. I’m not seeing any mention of this accounting for extra cooling.
Interesting thought. I’ll ponder this. I have several mini pcs that are all free-standing. I thought this is a neat idea, but now I’ll consider it from a new perspective. Thanks for pointing this out. I haven’t even clicked to submit the comment and already I’m having doubts.
You might have saved me some money.
Well if you go with one of the open racks, just account for the cooling and don’t bunch everything together like in the post. Cramming things end to end without active cooling involved is just asking for them to take thermal damage. If each individual item you put in has directional cooling (ingress/egress), identify where they are, and make space. Just getting a cheap slot cooler to put at the top of bottom of one of the open racks would probably be fairly okay as long as there is airflow to each device.
If you meant the RasPis, there are off-the-shelf cooling solutions you can use. Otherwise, I don’t see any mini PC.
I’ve also seen NUCs and Mac Minis in rack setups and they’d have fans, either integrated in the units, or in the rack fittings.
Last but not least, mini PCs don’t even generate that much heat, unless you’re overclocking the crap out of it.
I think I saw someone on one of the LTT CES videos that used a 10 inch rack for a pair of itx builds with high end gpus. It looked really neat, and had an open frame test bench vibe which looked like it could handle all that power and heat coming from the 2 machines