Tyler Morgan

If your NAS feels slow when multiple users hit it at once, or when Plex is transcoding 4K to three devices simultaneously, the answer almost always points to cache. I’ve spent the last three months running a Synology DS923+ and a TrueNAS scale box through real workloads, swapping in different SSDs to see which ones … Read more

If you have ever stared at a “disk full” warning while trying to back up a 4K movie collection, you already know why data hoarders obsess over the best high-capacity hard drives. Our team spent the last three months testing 10 HDDs ranging from 14TB to 24TB, filling them with game libraries, raw photo archives, … Read more

I built my first home lab with a full-size tower server that sounded like a jet engine and pulled 180W at idle. That was five years ago. Today, my entire lab runs on eight small-form-factor N305 mini PCs scattered across two shelves, drawing under 80W combined. The Intel N305 has quietly become the sweet spot … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight mini PCs running TrueNAS SCALE and Unraid in my home lab, and the results changed how I think about NAS hardware. Most people assume you need a full-size tower or a pre-built Synology to get serious storage performance. That is no longer true. The best mini PCs … Read more

I spent the last three months running local LLMs on every mini PC I could get my hands on, and I want to save you the weeks of trial and error I went through. If you are hunting for the best mini PCs for local AI and LLMs in , this is the breakdown I … Read more

I’ll never forget the first time I sat next to a fully loaded fanless mini PC and heard absolutely nothing. After years of building PCs with spinning fans, whirring coolers, and that constant background hum, true silence felt like a revelation. A fanless mini PC is a compact computer that uses passive cooling through aluminum … Read more

Looking for the best mini PCs for pfSense firewalls? You are not alone. I have been running pfSense at home since , and the hardware question comes up almost daily on r/PFSENSE and r/homelab. The short answer: you do not need a rackmount server. A compact mini PC with an Intel CPU, AES-NI, and at … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight of the best mini PCs for OPNsense routers in my home lab, pushing them with gigabit fiber, WireGuard VPN tunnels, and Suricata IDS/IPS workloads. The results surprised me. Some fanless firewalls that looked unbeatable on paper struggled under VPN load, while a few less popular options punched … Read more

Your ISP-provided router handles basic NAT and a thin firewall, but it can’t stop modern threats like outbound command-and-control traffic, IoT botnet infections, or lateral movement from a compromised smart bulb. After our team tested 10 dedicated firewall appliances over six weeks across two home networks, we found the real difference between consumer-grade NAT and … Read more

I ran Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4 for two years before the SD card finally gave out. One corrupted card, three days of troubleshooting automations, and I was done. I switched to a mini PC and never looked back. After testing roughly a dozen models over the past year, I’m convinced that the … Read more