Project MINI RACK

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Jeff Geerling's first MINI RACK

Project MINI RACK is a guide for miniature rack builds, for compact Homelabs, RF battlestations, and portable network racks. Watch the video announcing this project by clicking the image below:

Jeff Geerling - Project Mini Rack - click to play

This site is maintained by Jeff Geerling, who lives in the US. Sadly, mini rack gear is often only available in specific regions. For example, many vendors sell only in the UK or parts of Europe. So this site is mainly focused on gear I’m able to acquire, living in the US. That doesn’t mean its scope can’t broaden over time, though.

Some links on this site are affiliate links—I earn for qualifying purchases. These links help fund the ongoing maintenance of this project :)

Table of Contents

Community

Visit Project MINI RACK Issues to discuss your own mini rack builds, ask for help finding a particular piece of equipment, or to share your experience.

Issues are categorized:

Besides this site, check out Reddit’s r/minilab for discussion about about mini racks and the broader topic of mini homelabs (which may or may not incorporate a rack).

Hardware

Jeff Geerling's MINI RACK 003

10” Mini Racks

At the center of every mini rack is a 10” or ‘half-width’ rack. A typical rack is 19” wide, but half-racks fit in more places. There are only a few manufacturers of mini racks, currently, and availability varies by country.

PDUs (Power Distribution Units)

Every device in a rack needs power. If it’s not provided by a PoE switch, it has to come from somewhere! A PDU, or Power Distribution Unit, takes one power source (usually AC wall power) and lets you plug multiple devices into it—whether through DC 12V adapters, USB-C, or AC outlets.

Some PDUs can be remotely managed, other PDUs are basically rack-mountable surge protectors. And yet others distribute power with more panache.

Note: Some small PoE switches also have PoE+ or PoE++ power input, such as the Ubiquiti USW-Ultra. Assuming you are in a location with another PoE++ switch, and everything is PoE-powered, you could power everything off one Ethernet cable, and bypass the need for a PDU or UPS in the mini rack!

Ongoing discussions:

UPSes (Uninterruptible Power Supplies)

UPSes, or Uninterruptable Power Supplies, offer protection against brownouts or power loss, and usually have better power protection circuits as well.

Mini Rack UPSes

Ongoing discussions:

Device-specific UPSes

Patch Panels

Patch panels help organize a mess of RJ45 network cables, USB, HDMI, Coax, or whatever other signals you’d like to pass through from the back to the front. Often mounted just above or below a switch for a tidy install.

Network Gear

The heart of every homelab is a network switch or router. There aren’t a lot of switches that can natively mount in a 10” rack, but every year a couple new ‘half rack’ models are introduced.

In this section, gear will be split between devices which natively mount in a 10” rack (e.g. with hard-mounted rack ears), and devices which can fit in a 10” rack but require a shelf or 3D printed mounting adapter.

Rack-mountable Network Gear

Note: Some switches intended for full-width rack mount ears may work in a 10” rack with ‘universal’ rack ears, like the Pelopy Adjustable Universal Rack Mount Ear Kit.

Some manufacturers require special kits for 10” rack compatibility:

See Issue #2: Find a perfect way to mount small switches into mini racks for more discussion around this topic.

Network Gear that fits on a 10” shelf

Note: Many of these switches have 3D printable ears on Printables, Thingiverse, etc.

3D Printable mini rack systems

Some makers have created entire mini rack ‘systems’, where you 3D print a faceplate (or cut it out of metal, like with SendCutSend), and insert different types of gear, like SBCs, SSDs, mini network switches, etc.

This section is for systems, not individual 3D printable parts. For parts like cable modem or mini switch mounts, please see the respective sections elsewhere.

Mini PC / Server Shelves

There are a variety of commercial options to mount Mini ITX motherboards (or SBC clusterboards, like the Turing Pi 2, or DeskPi Super6C!), or to mount Tiny/Mini/Micro PCs like a Lenovo M series computer.

SBC Shelves

SBCs, or Single Board Computers, are ideal for mini racks, due to their low power, thermal, and space requirements. You can often fit multiple SBCs per U of rack space, and there are many mini rack setups centered around an SBC cluster, or SBC routers or storage devices.

Disk Shelves

It can be difficult to adapt storage devices (especially full 3.5” hard drives!) into a mini rack, but there are always solutions—sometimes as simple as placing a 2-bay NAS on its side, or putting an entire 4-bay NAS on a shelf!

Shelves and Blanking Panels

Not all gear can be mounted on rack rails. And not every U of space needs to be filled. Often, a device needs extra room above or below for cooling or for an accessory that sticks out. In these cases, you can employ a rack shelf or blanking panels.

Cable Management

Mini racks can quickly turn from beauty into beast, once you start plugging things into each other! Larger racks usually have areas where cables can be routed for a tidy finish and easy maintenance, but mini racks often don’t have room. So you can add on accessories to tidy up unsightly cable messes.

Build showcase

I’m not the first person to build a mini rack. In fact, the mini-homelab community’s been thriving for years! Check out Reddit r/minilab for some extra inspiration.

If you would like your mini rack added to this list, please open a new issue, add the build showcase label, and document your build! Once it is complete(ish), we can add it to this list:

User Year Description
geerlingguy 2025 Mini Rack 001: 4U PoE, Solar, and UPS K3s cluster
geerlingguy 2025 Mini Rack 002: Simple USB-C powered Pi K3s Cluster
geerlingguy 2025 Mini Rack 003: ITX Dense Compute with external UPS
timothystewart6 2025 Mini Rack 004: Complete HomeLab - Proxmox, TrueNAS, Firewall, KVM, and of course RGB
sefs93 2025 Custom 3D-printable rack
stirkage 2025 IKEDA Eket DIY 10” rack
alatnet 2025 Custom 8U Homelab rack

Browse all issues tagged ‘build showcase’ (includes in-progress builds).

Software

There’s a ton of things you can do in a Homelab—and many of them run perfectly fine on mini PCs or SBCs in a mini rack!

Here’s a collection of cluster-related projects that may be a good test or starting point for your own rack, if you need the inspiration:

License

GPLv3 or later

Open Source Repository

This website is generated from the geerlingguy/mini-rack GitHub repository.

Author

Jeff Geerling

This site is open source. Improve this page.