Long-time Home Assistant user finally migrating my camera setup off Synology Surveillance Station to Frigate. Current NVR host is a Dell OptiPlex 3050 (i3-7100T) that's well past its limits, so this is a full hardware refresh. Goal was a box I don't have to revisit for several years, with room to add services later instead of being boxed in like I am now.

Would appreciate a gut check before I start ordering and building.

Hardware

Host: MINISFORUM MS-02 Ultra (MS-02U-285HX) (Amazon purchase)

• Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (24C/24T)
• 32GB DDR5 (single module as shipped)
• 1TB NVMe included
• 4× M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots, PCIe 5.0 x16 slot
• Dual 25GbE SFP28 + 10GbE + 2.5GbE
• Intel vPro / AMT for out-of-band KVM
• 350W internal PSU, 4.8L chassis

Detector/decoder: Sparkle Intel Arc A310 ECO (SA310C-4G) (Ebay purchase)

• 4GB GDDR6, 50W, single-slot low profile, no aux power

Storage: Samsung 990 PRO 2TB NVMe (Ebay purchase)

• Frigate config, database, snapshots

Recordings: Synology DS1522+ over NFS

Cameras

Six Reolink, mixed models:

• Video Doorbell
• Elite Floodlight
• 2× Duo 2
• E1 Pro PTZ
• RLC-410W

All currently recording to Surveillance Station. Plan on two more after everything settles.

Architecture

Proxmox VE 9.x on bare metal.

• Frigate: dedicated VM (Debian/Ubuntu), Docker, Arc A310 passed through via VFIO
• Home Assistant: HA OS VM, migrated from the OptiPlex
• go2rtc: restream layer so both Frigate and Surveillance Station can pull from each camera without hitting Reolink's concurrent RTSP client limits

Deliberate choices worth flagging:

Frigate standalone, not an HA add-on. HA restarts and Supervisor churn shouldn't touch the NVR.

Discrete GPU instead of the iGPU. The 285HX iGPU stays with Proxmox for console, and the Arc gets bound to VFIO for the Frigate VM alone. Avoids the headless i915-blacklist gamble entirely, and vPro is there as a backstop.

NFS mounted inside the Frigate VM, not passed through from the host. Recordings land at a fixed local path, so swapping the NAS for local disks later is an fstab change and nothing else. Database and cache stay on local NVMe — no SQLite over NFS.

tmpfs for /tmp/cache so in-progress segments never touch flash.

Open questions

1. Memory. It ships as a single 32GB stick, so I'm single-channel out of the box. Plan is to run as-is, watch memory pressure, then drop in a matched 2×32GB kit (keeping two slots free) rather than pairing something with the original module. ECC is supported on this model — is it worth doing the all-ECC swap for a 24/7 NVR host, or overkill at home?
2. A310 with 4GB. Fine for detection on six cameras. How does it hold up once semantic search / face recognition / LPR are enabled? Anyone running enrichments on 4GB?
3. The included 25GbE card. I have no use for it (2.5GbE to the NAS is more than enough at my bitrates) and it reportedly runs hot and needs dedicated airflow. Leaning toward pulling it for thermals and a free slot. Any reason to keep it installed?
4. Arrow Lake passthrough. Aware Meteor/Arrow/Lunar Lake need QEMU 10.1+, hence PVE 9. Anyone passing a discrete Arc card through on an HX-series board — any gotchas beyond the usual q35/OVMF/no-ballooning?
5. Am I overbuilt? Six cameras is not a lot. I went this direction specifically for expansion room, but if there's a strong argument I'm paying for headroom I'll never touch, I'd like to hear it.

Any advise / guidance would be great appreciated.