ASRock H110M-STX Deskmini 110w With Headless Ubuntu Server

About 8 months ago when I saw the Intel NUC at local computer store, I thought maybe I could get one for my expirements/projects. One that I could just leave running (headless) on one corner and either do of the following:

I did a bit of research about Intel NUC, just wanted to make sure that it will be worthy for the price that I’d be paying for. However as I dig more info about it - blogs, reviews and forums - the following tipped off the scale for NUC:

Hardware

The Toshiba and Western Digital SATA disks are old stuff I pulled out from an old laptop.

Name Type Spec Additional Info
ASRock Deskmini Barebone PC H110M-STX, 110W (Wireless version) ASRock Website info
Intel G4560 Pentium CPU 3.50GHz, 2 Cores Intel-Pentium-G4560-vs-Intel-Core-i3-6100
Samsung 960 EVO SSD 250GB, M.2, PCIe Tom’s Hardware review on 960 EVO NVMe SSD
Crucial SODIMM RAM 2x8GB, DDR4-2133 crucial info
TOSHIBA MQ01ABF050 SATA 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5” newegg.com TOSHIBA MQ01ABF050
Western Digital WD2500BEVT SATA 250GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5” newegg.com Western Digital WD2500BEVT

Here are a couple of shots of my Deskmini and its components.

Pentium LGA1151

Pentium G4560

960 EVO M.2 Box

960 EVO 250GB SSD

Crucial 2x8GB DDR4 RAM

Side View: Assembled Deskmini

Top View: Assembled Deskmini

Deskmini Contents

Bottom View: Toshiba SATA Disk

Deskmini, RAM, SSD, CPU


Issues

It wouldn’t be an exciting stuff if there are no issues, don’t you think ?

BIOS & Kaby Lake

Once you get the build done and pushed the start button - IT WON’T BOOT THE F**K UP! why?! - Kaby Lake processor needs UEFI/BIOS version 7.0 or greater. To fix this issue you either need to do the following:

Future Plan

Obviously we want the best, fastest and the latest - so my wishlist for this box are:

Conclusion

Overall I’m happy with this box, gets the job done. It’s been just few weeks since I built this and its current uptime is 11 days. The OS is Ubuntu Server 16.04.2 LTS + Docker version 17.03.1-ce with 3 running Docker containers for my fullstack development. Head over at the references below should you need more details.

I will have another blog for the OS and development experience so stay tuned.

References


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