A year has gone by living with my mini-itx box sitting by my bed, quiet as can be, it does everything for me - it's running Home Automation, DNS Filtering, Uptime Monitoring, Dashboards, i have no reason to complain at this point

However, at this point, i have too many things spread out across too many different machines:

• Synology Box Running File Storage

• Intel NUC hosting my Gaming Servers

• Mini-ITX Ubuntu Server

Ideally, you do want to have your services distributed; many setups will separate Storage Nodes from Compute & GPU Nodes; however in my case, the problems began stacking up over time - Container's were crashing on Synology due to limited hardware, config files were being misplaced randomly on the system, the Intel NUC Gaming Server's NVME SSD began overheating over time, naturally causing kernel errors to drop like flies and nobody could get on; this all created a craving for simplicity

When designing Syrup MK2, the obvious question was: why not use a dedicated NAS operating system? Platforms like TrueNAS and Unraid dominate the homelab world for good reason. They provide excellent storage management, snapshots, and a polished interface.

I Considered Both:

• UNRAID = major drawback for me was its boot architecture. Unraid runs entirely from a USB drive that must remain inserted at all times. While this design works fine for many people, it creates a single point of failure that I wasn’t comfortable building my core system around. If the USB device fails, the entire system goes down until it is replaced and restored. For a machine intended to run constantly and host critical services, that design made me uneasy.

• TRUENAS SCALE = ZFS organizes disks into VDEVs, which then form storage pools. While this architecture is extremely robust for enterprise environments, it can be rigid for homelab experimentation. Expanding storage later often means adding entire VDEVs instead of simply dropping in another drive.

  • Additionally, container support and application management felt secondary compared to the storage layer. My environment relies heavily on containers, and I wanted the operating system to treat them as a first-class workload, not an add-on.

  • The system also carried a heavier resource footprint than I wanted for a general-purpose server.

In the end, the simplest option turned out to be the best.

Syrup MK1 ran on Ubuntu Server, and over the course of a year it proved extremely reliable. Hardware compatibility was solid, updates were predictable, and most importantly, GPU support for my NVIDIA card worked without issue (big plus). 

Why not Debian? After all, there are households who simply have an always running Debian system that run everything on it. This is where my design choices in MK1 came back to bite me... 

• Having an RTX 3060 (NVIDIA) has generally been a blast, it's what I designed the original itteration of Syrup around - having a machine with a GPU always available to the network. However at the time, I did not realize that unlike AMD Driver's, NVIDIA sometimes... lags behind - one careless update and suddenly i'll be digging Syrup out of the closet and attaching a monitor to rollback to the last working kernel until a working update comes down the line... not ideal for an always on system running services network wide

Running a full Linux server means every service—containers, monitoring, automation, and storage—lives within the same flexible environment. Instead of fighting the operating system to make it behave like a server, I started with an operating system that already is one.

• Besides, having lived with them for a year, LVM's have grown on me

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700 8-Core, 16-Thread

• RAM: CORSAIR VENGEANCE DDR5 RAM 32GB (Syrup MK1 Carryover)

• MOTHERBOARD: MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk

• GPU: GIGABYTE WINDFORCE OC GeForce RTX 3060 12GB GDDR6 (Syrup MK1 Carryover)

• BOOT DRIVE: FX550 NVMe SSD 1TB M.2 SSD PCIe 3.0×4 (Syrup MK1 Carryover)

• SSD's: Crucial BX500 2TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD x2 (Proxmox Server Carryover)

• HDD's: Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD x4 (Synology DS423 Carryover)

• CASE: JONSBO N5 NAS Pc Case, E-ATX,12HDD+4SSD Drive Bay GPU HP Host

• POWER SUPPLY: CORSAIR SF750 (2024) (Syrup MK1 Carryover)