The article sure mentions 💩a lot.

I also didn't think much of them, but when I compare this with off-the-shelf Synology or QNAP (in the consumer-grade, like I'm building), the Celeron is a beast :)

Yes, in fact! Two main reasons.

• I wanted low-power, this is mostly gonna sit in the closet and serve files around. Even ARM CPUs like the RasPi can do that. But I didn't want it to be too weak, in case I wanted a simple service or two, this still has extra oomph. This isn't too powerful, but it is a 64-bit x86 CPU.

• I also wanted some ports. This has 4 SATA ports. It's supposed to be a NAS. It has a Gbit ethernet - I don't have a Gbit network at home so this is good enough for now, and I can expand it somewhat. It has USBs, expansion slots etc.

• those two combined resulted in a few selections, AsRock's mini-ITX boards with integrated CPUs are quite good choices in this space.

• I wanted low power consumption. I could have gone with a slightly stronger ‎J5040-ITX perhaps, but it's also using just slightly more power.

• it's also cheaper, the mobo with the CPU cost me 120€. The j5040 I mentioned would be a bit more - not a lot but still noticable.

• I wanted silent, and this board and CPU is passively cooled. If I had money, I would get SSDs for storage as well (less power, less noise) but it's a LOT more expensive.

I know there are other CPUs in this space but in the end you have to pick one so I did.

How did you find it for cable management?

Yes, the specs say less then 5W per HDD. Even if I had older and hungrier disks at 10W each, it's still good. The CPU is consuming about 10 watts, the rest of the board, let's say another 10. Even if I fill all six HDD slots that the case has room for, I think it would work.

Good thing I'm not gonna run Chrome on this :)

Well, look at these few things:

1. Modern CPUs, even Celerons, are powerful. People are driving a lot of workload even on ARM CPUs, and this is a proper 4-core x64 CPU. I mean, look at your phone, it's most likely doing a lot of full-hd media, right? And it's doing just fine.

2. Most commercially-available Home/Small Office NAS systems, by Synology, Asustor, QNAP and others, they have either CPUs in this class, or weaker, ARM CPUs. I'm not gonna be sitting at this box. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops around the house for work - this is gonna be mostly storage.

3. My planned media management workload is a bit different than media processing. I mostly want to serve files around, maybe transcode something in the background. I don't plan to watch movies off of this (yet). I have a 4-core Hetzner VPS that is similar in power to this, and it's driving something like 4-5 docker containers and still serving all the files.

I think it's gonna be fine, but we shall see.

I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.

But it's still pretty small, it's nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)

I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it's good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.

And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)

Yes, it didn't inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it's actually a tiny PSU, it's essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)

I've ran into Drone CI about a year ago and I like it. I wanted to self-host something simple next to my gitea instance, and after a few hours I had it mostly set up. And in the course of a week I had it all figured out, I don't bother with it any more.

It's basically hands-free operation the way I have it set up, works with my gitea as said so I'm happy.

No, I only saw it later. I wish I made it either more skewed or straighten it up.

This is not post-processed though, SOOC.