Budget Home Server Build - This turned out better than I thought...

many years ago i built my first home server it was an old i3 second gen it's like two cores and i don't even know if it had hyper threading but it was my first experience with linux and i hooked it up to an old usb external hard drive and essentially it served as my nas since then i've built a couple more most recently i had a ryzen 2700 that functioned as my home server slash living room gaming setup and most recently i upgraded to a full-fledged amd epic based beast if you want to check that build out i'll leave a link up there somewhere but i haven't built one in a couple months so i got the itch i need to build another one i figured let's build a decent home setup on a budget build and my goal was to build a functioning home server that can be used to run a couple vms and act as an ass with adequate storage space all for under 500. so did we do it let's talk about it [Music] so if you saw the thumbnail or the title of this video you've probably determined that yes we did stay under our 500 budget now let's go over the parts starting with the cpu i went on ebay and purchased a xeon e5 2650 v2 now this is a 8 core 16 thread processor and i mean it's old i think it's from 2013 but the number of cores and threads in this will make it perfectly adequate for running multiple vms now the base clock is at 2.6 gigahertz but it can boost up to 3.4 so that's decent single core performance i mean we're not building a editing workstation here or a gaming setup this is a budget home server build so this is more than enough i paid 32 dollars for this with shipping and taxes to my door and you know there are many of these on ebay you can go with a lesser version or a more powerful version depending on your budget for the motherboard um this is probably the most interesting part of the build this is a genu motherboard now if you haven't heard of that brand i definitely believe that this is one of quite a few chinese-made boards that you see all over ebay and aliexpress i've actually seen quite a few decent reviews on these so while it does seem a little sketchy um my preliminary research says that these are pretty solid for the price and feature set now the reason i did go with this uh specifically was is that they include nvme which is very strange because the original x79 chipset does not include nvme so you do get the x79 chipset with nvme built in which will give you much better performance if you're running a bunch of vms the reason i know this is going to be good is because you know this is the original i mean you can't argue with that also game assistant in case we do want to run games we have game assistant now if you're worried about whether or not this has a strong cmpt don't worry it does and obviously this is going gonna work perfectly because it's tested great okay jokes aside um i am praying that this actually works out for ram i went with 32 gigabytes of 1300 megahertz ddr3 another benefit of using x79 and server grade components is that you can use ecc memory uh which is error checking so you get more stability out of it we got 32 gigabytes for 45 dollars and i forgot to mention i paid about 125 for this motherboard so for an nvme drive i initially bought a 256 gigabyte toshiba um for thirty dollars but we've had some complications with the united states postal service they apparently couldn't deliver it and they're supposed to return to the sender but it's lost and i put in tickets with usps and you're just closing them and not contacting me so you guys suck so in place of that i'm just using a nvme drive i had laying around this is a one terabyte western digital blue sn 550 so for raw storage i went with four of these hgst two terabyte um hard drives so they're 7200 rpm um yes they're a bit older but i got them from a reputable ebay seller to cool this processor i've heard some good things about this snowman brand so i got this off of aliexpress for uh twenty dollars and it apparently has decent reviews so i figured why not give it a shot i keep forgetting to do this but i paid about twenty five dollars each for these hard drives so grand total came out to about 104 okay the last two pieces of the build are the case and the power supply now i already had a case with a power supply from an older build so i just went with that now obviously that's not really free so i'm not gonna say oh yeah just just pull this out of your closet and use that so i've allocated about forty dollars for a case you can find a decent case for sale on new ag or amazon for around forty dollars so let's go with that and same thing with the power supply allocated about 50 for that so grand total for everything here was 449 pretty solid based on the hardware we're putting in this thing now obviously you can go on ebay or craigslist and find an old server an old dell optiplex or something that somebody's selling for a couple hundred dollars and say here's my home server i fully endorse that if that's the route you want to take awesome go for it there's no gatekeeping on home servers you can do whatever you want but i want to do something a little more fun and get something more customized to my needs and it's just more fun to build it myself so let's start building okay all right genu oh i already ripped the box uh let it be noted that it does not come with the motherboard battery so make sure that you have one of the cr23 batteries if you go with a board like this okay so up here you can see the nvme slot which you know is very strange for an x79 chipset board but there it is you also get another m.2 slot but this one is for sata drives only so you cannot use two nvme drives in here um one of those has to be m.2 sata you get four memory slots this is going to run in dual channel you also get usb 3.0 connections for front i o if you want that uh one downside is that while there are six sata ports only two of them are sata three so we will be hooking up our drives uh using sata two which is three gigabits per second which comes out to about 360 megabytes per second which is perfectly fine based on the hard drive storage that we're using it also has this power delivery cooler up here so cooling your vrms i'm hoping that this little fan isn't too loud or annoying but we will see as for io it looks like we get pretty standard stuff you have ps2 ports so if you're rocking some old school input devices you get four usb 2.0 ports two usb 3.0 ports gigabit lan and your standard audio interface okay let's get this party started here is our 2650 uh it is on intel's 22 nanometer process so pretty old like i said from about 2013 okay so let's put this down and see what you get for 20 oh we got to put on our own bracket thingy okay here it is um nothing too special here i mean it's relatively smaller than i thought it was i guess because what is this a 92 millimeter fan i thought it was so this looks pretty straightforward these clips clip onto here and let's see we want the fan blowing exhaust facing that way so we need it to go this way okay so it looks like there are six total heat pipes i need thermal paste i found thermal paste okay so you should just i'm not a fan of these old school amd style clip mounts there's one and i'm an idiot an idiot with an installed cpu fan so we're good let's throw the ram in there we're in oh yeah uh m.2 or nvme drive okay that is in always keep these motherboard covers for intel boards because for intel boards the pins are on the motherboard and those are the most fragile uh part um i guess we can put it in the case there we go okay so this is the case it's nothing special i probably got it on sale a while ago off of newegg for like 40 bucks i already have the power supply installed in here and three of the hard drives um one of them is in the dedicated spot down here but i had to macgyver it a little bit and two of the hard drives are actually up at the top so let me tilt it see if you can see that they're actually up in here and that is because that is the only spot i could find to fit them and it's like my dad always said if you can't fit your hard drives in the dedicated hard drive cage for the case that you bought then look somewhere else and possibly put them in the exhaust section at the top what do you think's in there ah not that exciting let's move these out of the way please fit oh like a glove where the hell is this spacing okay so there's some non-traditional spacing on these motherboard pins so it doesn't definitely doesn't reach over here at all it's like in between atx or extended atx and something else so okay good enough legit sweating oh put me in coach studio lights plus text summer bra okay in let's wire everything up now front panel i can't remember the color scheme and there's no real documentation that they really don't give you any documentation with the motherboard but i need to know what colors oh wait it's up here i'm an idiot oh my god is this not going to reach oh my god it doesn't reach one note the eight pin connector is very far away from the power supply so even with an extension i still had to route it in front of the motherboard so uh i'm aware it's not the best cable managed system ever but you'll be all right so hd audio doesn't reach so we're not getting hd audio oh this is ugly we're gonna need some some zip ties or something okay let's get the last hard drive put in kind of just snaps in there we go so one thing you probably noticed or may not have noticed is that when i showed you the back io you'll notice there was nowhere for video you will have to install some type of video card now you can literally go on ebay to your local thrift store i've found a basket of these things for five dollars so i honestly don't even know what card this is we're done time to test it okay moment of truth okay everything's spinning hopefully we get some video output yes yes we are in 32 gigs ddr3 we are going to be installing windows 10 for a home server i generally use proxmox but uh for benchmarking purposes it's just easier to just install windows 10 on this i don't really know what i'm going to do with this server yet so this is just for the mean time okay but does it recognize our nvme drive what is going on here oh okay here it is drive4 one terabyte that's our one terabyte nvme drive i think windows i don't know if you can see it's recognizing all four hard drives and our nvme drives so so far so good hopefully next time i see you we will be booted into windows and we can run some benchmarks all right so windows installed without a hitch i've actually been using it for a couple of hours now and i'm pretty excited about the results so let's jump into it first of all let's take a look at cpu-z you can see that yes the system is detecting the right processor which makes sense we have our xeon e5 2650v2 at 2.6 gigahertz and you can see it detects all 32 gigabytes of our ram running at 1333 megahertz so let's jump into some benchmarks cinebench r23 multi-core score we got 5710 pretty impressive remember this is a 30 dollar processor the score we got sits just below an intel 7700k which was my main processor that i was using for years and while it is a couple of generations old it still is a really powerful processor with four cores eight threads and i was getting up to five gigahertz on it so going toe-to-toe with that in multi-threaded processes is impressive now remember this is a budget build when we look at the single core results it's not as exciting that's simply because xeon processors generally aren't good single core performers they're meant to be multi-threaded workhorses single core performance we got 567 which you know obviously isn't that great so if your server is designed to run workloads that are centered around single core performance or you're expecting to use this for gaming you're not going to get the best performance i mean it's going to work if you want to run lower end games on this you can certainly do that depending on what graphics card you go with moving on to cinebench we got single core score of 553 and a multi-score core of 46.80 so again just like we saw in cinebench uh singapore performance isn't that great but multi-core score performance is very good for a 30 dollar processor now let's talk about thermal so what i did was in cpu z completely slammed the cpu i ran a stress on it and it ran for about 30 minutes and you can see here that we never even got over 50 degrees on the processor so that is i am quite shocked honestly because these older xeons and older intel chips in general usually run hot but man for a 20 aliexpress cooler wow and honestly it's not loud at all the fan that i was hearing before that i mentioned you can kind of hear that's actually the power supply fan my suggestion would be to maybe splurge a little bit more on a quality power supply because from my experience the lower end power supplies are generally the loudest man we've even pegged it three gigahertz on all cores the entire time while running so let's take a look at the storage so like i mentioned before this motherboard has nvme built in which is awesome especially if you're going to be running multiple vms so as you can see here we have a one terabyte drive and for raw hard disk space you'll see here we have 4.81 terabytes and you're probably thinking well you had four two terabyte drives that's eight terabytes what happened so basically i've gone into storage spaces and configured a pool out of those four drives so what i've done is added a parity drive so this is the equivalent of raid 5 so essentially i have three of those drives operating to give me storage space with one being a parity drive meaning that one drive can fail and i can still recover all of the data off of that pool now let's take a look at the speeds of those drives and how they performed i ran crystal disk mark on the hard disk pool array and pretty solid results obviously we're running into that kind of threshold on the reads for sata 2. uh c2 caps out at around 360 theoretical max of megabytes per second these results are perfectly fine for the price and for the use case of running this as a simple nas server if we switch over to our nvme drive we are seeing awesome results and yes the motherboard does have an nvme slot so these speeds are expected but it's kind of up in the air when you have an nvme slot on an x79 board on a no-name brand motherboard from china so to see these results show what we expected is pretty awesome so what would i suggest to use a server like this for if you've never built a home server before and never had one and you're interested in it but don't really want to spend a lot of money this is a solid starter system i mean you're getting eight cores 16 threads 32 gigs of ecc memory it's slow but you have 32 gigs of it you have nvme speeds and you have eight terabytes of raw hard disk space so all that for 450 dollars you'd be hard-pressed to find a package like that on ebay or even craigslist another use case for this would be a backup or test server this has more than enough horsepower to run mostly everything you could want obviously if you need something graphically intensive you're not going to want something like this this isn't for you i can certainly see this being beneficial for me if i want to test certain things before pushing them to my production server or if you want to use this as your production server go ahead although i wouldn't really recommend using windows 10 as your base operating system i'm a big fan of proxmox and i just saw that truenas is releasing a new version based on linux which will give you a lot more features to make trunas more of a dedicated hypervisor rather than just a dedicated mass so be interested in checking that out but that's it i'm extremely happy with how this turned out from the price to the build process to setting everything up it all went way smoother than i thought it would i'm still trying to decide what i want to use this for so if you have any suggestions leave them down below in the comments and if any of you have some good ideas i'll definitely consider them and if i use them i'll make a video about it and give you a shout out so let me know but that's it i hope you like this i hope this gave you some inspiration to get into home servers or at least alleviate some of that fear that building a server has to be this expensive scary process so if you liked it awesome leave a like below if you like content like this be sure you're subscribed and i have a couple more videos on home servers coming soon so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss those and i will see y'all in the next one you

Channel: Raid Owl

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Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021