Mini-Rack Part1 - Requirements and choosing a rack

If you’ve seen mini-racks online already, you’ve probably seen that there are quite a lot of options. Some people buy their racks pre-made and ready to go (minus a bit of assembly), some people choose to buy the parts and assemble themselves. Others are much more DIY - people have built mini-racks out of wood or even entirely 3D printed them!

For me cost was a significant factor, and while I was considering either 3D printing a rack from scratch or building one, I knew I probably couldn’t make it as strong or as nice as one that was bought.

Requirements

My requirements were simple. Minimise cost while satisfying the following:

  • At least 6U space
  • Durable enough to be picked up and carried without much thought or care.

These may seem like odd requirements, but here’s my reasoning.

  • 4U wasn’t going to be enough, but 8U seemed a bit excessive.
  • I’m someone who tends to break stuff, never deliberately but I’ll inevitably mishandle something or be holding a screwdriver in my hand and just happen to perfectly short out a power rail and fry something.

So, what do I intend to put in this rack?

  • Wireless Router (1U)
    • Some of you will probably laugh at me but yes, this router will be almost all of my home network. I intend to use it for my fiber broadband, backup 4G, VPN ingress, and my home WiFi/LAN. It will probably host a few other small services but I don’t plan to do media servers on it.
  • Desktop computer (2U)
    • Why a desktop? Because I’m interested in small form factor and portability. I would like to be able to take this rack with me and for it to function without any issues.
  • NAS (1U)
    • This part is fairly crucial as I intend to backup all of my photos/data/documents etc from other devices to this NAS. I do have plans to use LTO as long-term offsite backups just in case everything else goes wrong
  • UPS (1U)
    • If power goes out (which it has a few times in the past year), I want my network and devices to stay online. Take a look at this to see what people have found

As you can see, this adds up to 5U used rack space, and as it turned out this is how much space I’ve used so far.

Finding a rack

If you look online, likely one of the first results you’ll see are the DeskPi Rack-Mate racks. These come in a variety of sizes including 4U,8U,12U and the slightly odd TT model. No 6U though, and the 8U RackMate T1 is over $100 even before shipping (to the UK for me).

So I had a look on amazon and after a while I came across Tecmojo who produce a 6U 10" mini rack. At the time I purchased it, it was £70 on sale which was even cheaper than DeskPi’s 4U rack. It felt like the perfect find.

Thoughts

Now that I’ve had the rack for a few months, I can say that I’m very happy with it. The frame appears to be powder coated sheet steel that has been stamped and bent into shape and is nice and strong. Rather than threaded holes it has space for cage nuts on both sides which is a nice touch, and every U of space has its number printed on the frame so you don’t need to count every time.

The sides and top appear to be laser cut acrylic, with the top having a ventilation grille cut into it. The handles as well attach strongly and I would be comfortable carrying the whole thing loaded sideways, it feels very sturdy.

So if you’re looking for something similar I can’t fault it.

In my next post, we’ll start installing parts into the rack and see how it all goes together.