unboxing my new little box (my first intel nuc)
What propeller-head technologist doesn't like to get a shiny new toy?!?! I know I sure do and for me, my next "gadget" was a shiny new Intel NUC to play with. Specifically, I went with the NUC5CPYH model.
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!!
Turning four screws opens this thing up.
Next step is to add the memory.
Then slip the hard drive in and screw the thing back together.
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 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.
I went with Ubuntu's recommendation of using UNetbootin to build a bootable USB disk (remember, it has to be FAT32) which was painless. And, as expected, the rest of the installation was as user-friendly as everyone says it is with Ubuntu. I finished up with a pretty nice Linux desktop machine for just over $200, sans KVM.
Overall, this was a quick (and relatively inexpensive) test and I'm glad I did it. Next up, is rebuilding it as an Ubuntu (or CentOS) server with some creative (and portable) networking to start me down the path of building a mini Hadoop cluster with a few more nodes. I'll be sure to blog about that adventure, too!