When your board owns a free pcie slot, you could also buy an extension card to use all of you m.2 ssd.

I have something to read for you :

My Request

It is a request of me from earlier this year. The boards I mention in the opening post are no good choice. But the Asrock J500x or J5040 (the one I picked in the end) are. For my needs it is enough of everything. Even if some users here think the celerons are “heaters that can do math” ^^

On the other hand, the cpu is soldered to the board. No upgrade without switching the board either… Even the SODIMM ram needs to be replaced when switching away from an itx-board…

On the other hand, it is less energy consuming than using an old desktop cpu etc.

The pico-psu is just sweet 😊

Edit: fixed link

Startpage.com for more than 4 years know I guess.

At the moment I do exactly that. Learn proxmox, omv, influxDB and tomorrow grafana comes around to play 😉

Nevertheless proxmox and omv are the difficult ones if you never used a hypervisor before. And my toughest lesson was: software raid is pretty slow. This took quiet some time to realise that this was the problem.

But it is great to have a hypervisor to play around with, test different things in containers or vms and if you mess things up, just spin up another in a few seconds and try it again. It just feels less impactfull than reinstalling all stuff on one machine.

And you learn a lot about networks along the way if you aren’t already familliar with it.