ASRock A300W mini-STX Personal Cloud/HTPC

I was building an A300 HTPC when I learned about unRAID from a YouTuber I follow (battlenonsense), so I figured why not both? 

Updated May 27 2020: new dislikes. 

 

The ASRock A300 is a barebones kit that utilizes an AM4 mini-STX board that can run Ryzen APUs.  There is space for two NVME drives on the board and two 2.5" drives underneath the motherboard tray.  It measures 6" x 6" x 3" and runs on a 120V AC adapter.  Overall, the build came out to less than $250 before drives. 

 

As someone with zero experience with NAS, the purpose of this build is to learn unRAID and consolidate media scattered across my cloud services and old backups.  The first thing I'd like to figure out is how to install a VM to run Windows 10 and run it as an HTPC as originally intended (I think I need a processor with more cores?).  I'm a longtime fan of SFF, so I plan to stick with 2.5" drives for future builds. 

 

OS at time of building: 6.8.3

CPU: AMD Athlon 3000G APU (3.5Ghz dual core CPU w/ Vega 3 integrated graphics)

Motherboard: ASRock A300 mini-STX

RAM: 8GB DDR4-2400 (one slot free for upgrade)

Case: ASRock A300W Barebone

Drive Cage(s):

Power Supply: 120V

SATA Expansion Card(s):

Cables:

Fans: Noctua NH-L9A

 

Parity Drive: 2TB Seagate FireCuda 2TB SSHD, 2.5"

Data Drives: 2TB Western Digital Blue 2TB SSHD, 2.5"

Cache Drive: N/A, first upgrade

Total Drive Capacity: 2TB

 

Primary Use: personal media server, future HTPC

Likes: footprint, noise, convenience, price

Dislikes:

• Lack of expandability: does not fit 15mm height 2.5" drives, limiting hard drive size to 2TB until unRAID officially supports SSDs
• Poor cooling of drives: bottom-mounted HDDs hit 56* during the first parity.  Luckily, the case is so small and light I moved it atop the exhaust of my air purifier and temps dropped to 34*.
• Notebook-style SATA cables: thin and uninsulated, so you may get UDMA CRC errors if you don't arrange them well.  Less convenient to replace in the future. 

Add Ons Used:

Future Plans: install Windows 10 VM, PLEX, move up to larger chassis

 

It's currently running its first parity check.  I'll get these up eventually. 

Boot (peak):

Idle (avg):

Active (avg):

Light use (avg):

 

Edited May 27, 20206 yr by burakkusabasuva