Hardware assembly
UDM
The UDM was pretty much just plugging it in, downloading the phone app for initial setup, and done. Later we’ll need to look at consolidated monitoring and backups, but we’ll take care of that after everything’s set up.
Intel NUC
The NUC was likewise a breeze to assemble. Open it, slot in the memory and the hard drive, close it. Done. Not much to say there. Proxmox installation was similarly straightforward. The same monitoring and backup timelines apply here too.
NAS
It’s been something like 6 or 7 years since I’ve assembled a full desktop. It’s always interesting to see how hardware has progressed. NVMe is new to me, and things have gotten notably… bling-ier than they were, but the majority of the tech is fairly iterative.
The assembly of the NAS was understandably more involved than the NUC. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes, each with a variety of mounting brackets, extra screws, instructions that cover multiple models, etc. I can see how someone new to this could easily get lost. All-in-all, it went pretty smoothly; It just took more time than I would have liked.
Apologies for the poor photo. I couldn’t quite be bothered to move out it over place once I had it where I wanted it.
The hiccups I ran into during the build:
- The ASUS Prime Z390-A has two locations an NVMe drive can go, but only one supports SATA.
- The NVMe mounting screw is small surprisingly difficult to insert. A magnetic screwdriver would have really helped. I think it took me around 40 tries to get that damned thing in. The tweezers helped a little.
- I should have verified the number of spare SATA cables I had laying around. The motherboard came with three and I had to take a quick trip to the neighbourhood computer parts store for a few extra.