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As suggested in the picture above, the NUC is a full system shy of a hard drive and some memory. It even has wifi and bluetooth! Here's how I spec'd mine out which came in around $215.
| Component | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Intel NUC NUC5CPYH | $125 | There are definitely some faster boxes as shown on the NUC Product Page, but this one seemed to fit the bill of price vs performance for me |
| Kingston 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L | $30 | This thing can only take a single 8GB stick maxed out |
| HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB | $60 | To get the whole thing under $200 I could have gone with a smaller (say 120GB) SSD for about $40, but my ultimate goal is to build a small Hadoop cluster with 3+ of these, so I really wanted at least 1TB of space for each node |
This little box is about 4.5" x 4.5" and only 2" tall. Very sweet!!
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From there you just need to hook up your KVM and decide on an OS to install. As I was interested in installing Linux, I was glad to see several customer-reported distros working. Having a bit more familiarity with CentoOS, and wanting to do something new, I ultimately went with Ubuntu. I settled on the an older version, 14.04 (specifically, I used the 64-bit Desktop version), instead of the latest/greatest as, again, my ultimate goal is to create a Hadoop cluster and I wanted to align with a supported OS for Ambari 2.2.
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