In a previous post I wrote about how I setup NixOS on my Terramaster F2-221 instead of using the included TOS provided by Terramaster. This in itself was quite simple as the NAS contains Intel J3355, a standard X86_64 CPU. However the NAS only has 2 SATA connectors, both of which were being used for the 4TB hard drives, so I had to resort to plugging in an external USB SSD for storing the operating system. This quickly became a little annoying to make room for this external SSD behind the NAS and make sure it’s always plugged in when something is moved around in the shelf where I keep it, so I wanted to see if I could come up with a better solution.

I have an old whitebox server sporting a Xeon E5 (v1) that I’d like to get rid of. It’s running a handful of VMs on Proxmox. Most of them I can get rid of by moving their services to Kubernetes, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my NAS VM and Plex server. The latter you can easily run in Kubernetes but I’m not planning on having particularly powerful nodes and I need transcoding.