What (re)started this whole thing?  I have been tinkering with my Raspberry Pi’s again recently, more on that later, and started running into some processing power limitations.    I was lucky enough to have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my pocket so instead of upgrading to the latest and greatest Pi, I decided to try out one of the cheapo atom based mini pcs out there.

My criteria for the search was:

• fanless 
• low-power 
• 4GB RAM
• expandable storage
• Windows 10 Pro

The machine I landed on was the ACEPC T11 for somewhere in the $140 range after tax (it was on sale at the time).  There is a 2.5” drive bay for additional storage.  My original plan was to install a 1 TB SSD and run the OS from this new location.  If you’re reading this and that is your plan , heads up...this does not work that well.  The way the manufacturer connected this drive to the board is through a USB interface which Windows does not appreciate.  After quite a bit of instability, I reverted back to running the OS on the 64GB eMMC drive and using the SSD as storage.

Full disclosure, right now this site is currently a COVID19 past time and I'm really not all that worried about uptime or scalability.  For those reasons, and the fact that I don't want to spend any money on hosting, I chose to use a little mini-pc I found online as my “server”.   

As a way to see how this little box is surviving, I created a few performance metric images (CPU, FreeMem, Uptime) that will let me check the pulse of the server.  (Maybe I'll write a post about how to do this soon)

CPU Utilization

Available Memory

Uptime