I use fish which is quite nice OOTB, although if you want a posix compliant shell, zsh with some plugins is also great.

Use a shell with decent auto-completion. I have not been irritated by this in years.

My home server is a RockPro64. I didn’t specifically buy it for that purpose but since I had it lying around I figured I might as well use it.

It has a PCIe Slot which I used for a SATA controller, with two 3,5" HDDs.

They have an official NAS case for it too, not sure I’d recommend it as it’s kind of expensive, doesn’t isolate HDD vibration / noise at all and isn’t very convenient to service (to replace the drives for instance). I’m not aware of a better case option for this board though.

I run debian and OpenMediaVault on it (I didn’t have to mess with the kernel or device tree at all), with the ZFS plugin, and several docker containers (Jellyfin, PiHole, Syncthing, Tailscale).

For my needs it’s working perfectly fine and doesn’t need much power. But:

• It isn’t particularly great at video transcoding
• 4GB of RAM isn’t a ton especially with ZFS, keep that in mind if you wish to run more / heavier services such as Nextcloud
• being ARM based, this board basically limits you to OMV or manually setting up stuff on Linux through the CLI, as TrueNAS, Unraid and Proxmox only support x86. OMV is fine for it’s core functionality and you can get some more advanced features through plugins, but at that point it often gets kind of janky and annoying compared to e. g. TrueNAS. Also, the KVM plugin apparently doesn’t work on ARM.

TL;DR these low power ARM boards are just fine as a cheap option for getting into homelab / Self hosting and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against them, but sooner or later I want to build a low power x86 based NAS with more RAM, SSD cache and TrueNAS Scale instead.

Reminds me of this…