Every couple months I get the urge to organize my lab/home office equipment into a rack/cabinet, but never follow through on it. I ocassionally look on craigslist for deals, but everything is either too far away or too big. I'd rather pay more for a smaller rack that doesn't go all the way to the ceiling and will just show up on my doorstep. A 6U would fulfil my current requirements, 12U is probably more than enough in reality but as an engineer I find myself eyeing 15-18U to be conservative. This iteration of the search has me eying these options: * [sysracks 18U server rack](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082YJVBTV/?coliid=I3NT2EN7YX0XES&colid=3E8TPEGQ105CM&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it) - slightly bigger than I want, but still reasonable. Some questionable reviews on manufacturing/shipping quality, but this seems like a solid cost/value ratio: fully enclosed, room to grow, wheels, accessories like shelves and such I'd want anyway. Feels like maybe overkill, but for the price... * [NavePoint 15U Portable Rolling Network Rack](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HWGKPWF/?coliid=I3TO1OGGRHCC1D&colid=3E8TPEGQ105CM&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it) - closer to the size I want (12/15U options), cheaper but no accessories, like shelves, I'd need bringing it closer in price to the sysrack. Similar manufacturing/shipping concern reviews. I like this one, but hard to feel like it's not a worse deal than the sysrack. * some startech variant - these seem generally higher build quality (sturdier) but higher cost and more "bare bones" looking. also often adjustable depth making it potentially more future proof. but I'm not sure either of these make up for the increased cost. What do you think? Any advice or wisdom you can share? I'm feeling like finally following through this time because my office is a tiny mess. Leaning toward the NavePoint currently.

So I run a small Kubernetes cluster (k3s) backed by MariaDB hosted on a Synology NAS with only HDDs rather than etcd colocated on the control nodes. For resiliency purposes it's been great, nodes are basically pure compute resources I can wipe out and recreate with ease and not worry about data loss. However, for over a year now I've lived with the constant chatter of active hard drives in my office. The Kube DB workload is extremely read heavy and very active: many thousands of selects per minutes with only a handful of writes. Clickclickclickclickclickclick. Seems like a good case for caching, and luckily my NAS has 2 NVMe slots for an SSD cache. I bought a couple data center drives with PLP (Kingston DC1000B, probably overkill, but not crazy expensive), pop them in, set up a read/write cache for the database and Kube NFS volumes and...silence, wonderful silence. It's almost constantly at 100% cache hits. Bonus points if things are faster as well. I'm very happy. Never optimized an application for noise levels before 😁.