Building a HOME SERVER on a BUDGET

let's be honest a hundred dollars doesn't get you much anymore a Raspberry Pi extra guac and chipotle there's cool cufflinks that's your wife's boyfriend always wears it's honestly ridiculous however I'm Gonna Be Your Saving Grace today I'm gonna show you that with just a hundred dollars you can get yourself a nice new powerful Home Server now the price is fairly arbitrary here I just picked a hundred dollars because it sounds good and I think it's about the cheapest I'd go without getting too Jank if your budget is more than by all means spend more if it's less than that's okay too we'll talk about that so other than setting a 100 limit for myself I also set a few rules rule number one no Local Deals set this rule because I wanted this to be something anyone could replicate for the most part fully aware that I could have found some better deals on Craigslist and with my talents probably could have even gotten some stuff for free so everything I I bought was off of eBay roll two no pre-builts kind of there had to be some kind of thought to this and I figured it would be lame to just buy the best 100 listing I could find now I'm not saying that's a bad idea I'm just saying it was more fun to do it this way rule number three the three threes we need a minimum of PCI 3.0 say to 3 and DDR3 rule number four power efficiency I set a goal of a sub 50 watt system so no dual socket systems that eat up over 100 watts and finally rule number five expandability the system needs to support expansion in terms of pcie cards or storage which essentially just rules out many PCs alright so with those rules in mind I set off on my virtual Journey my idea was to just search for PC computers on eBay instead of Max price of fifty dollars which would give us half the budget to spend on upgrades I found more listings than I thought I would here but a lot of them would break rule five since they were many PCs with no room for expansion the ones that were upgradable though seem to be quite old which had me worried about the power requirements after about 30 minutes of searching I stumbled upon a listing that seemed to check all the boxes and HP Pro desk with an i5 6500 and 8 gigabytes of ddr4 RAM but with no storage fifty dollars even or best offer I went ahead and put in an offer of 38 and the seller countered with 45 dollars so I jumped on it now I5 6500 is decent enough with four cores and four threads boosts up to 3.6 gigahertz has integrated Graphics supports virtualization and has a TDP of 65 Watts which is above our 50 watt Target but the system isn't going to be running full blast so I think we're safe we also get a decent amount of pcie slots a a pretty decent case and the best part a CD drive with tax and shipping it came out to 48.26 giving this just over 50 left since the system has no storage we obviously needed some I went into this with the idea that I'd like this to be able to function as a mass and I run a no Nas without some kind of redundancy which will require two drives I set a minimum of two terabytes of storage for myself which would be a minimum of two two terabyte drives after doing some browsing I ended up going with two three terabyte drives for a total cost of 46.78 looking back I think I made a mistake here because I could have gotten two two terabyte drives for just thirty dollars this would have left me with around twenty dollars left instead of 4.96 what even am I supposed to do with that I figured there were two options here cheap SSD or cheap knit I eventually settled on a 60 gigabyte SSD because the thought of having to run an operating system on spinning drives made me cry this ended up costing me 7.48 bringing the grand total to a hundred and two dollars and 52 cents yeah I went two dollars over go mow the world's smallest lawn or something and here it is the fruits of all of our labor we've got an i5 6500 eight gigabytes of RAM two three terabyte hard drives and a 60 gigabyte SSD I mentioned before that I probably should have gone with two two terabyte drives to sacrifice some of the storage which may given me enough for a 2.5 gigabit Nick oh well this is what I ended up with and I'm not mad about it when everything came in I was pretty happy with the system it actually looks pretty nice and it was super clean which was surprising the case fortunately has just enough mounting spots for our two hard drives and one SSD unfortunately though it doesn't come with the mounting brackets or screws that's okay I just grabbed my random assortment of screws and washer kit and MacGyver it hey man if it's stupid but it works it ain't stupid so that's our Hardware but what about software what do we run on here I would usually go with proxbox or true Nas but I don't think we have enough resources for proxbox to be worth it and I'm not running ZFS so true NASA's out I know proximox isn't resource heavy or anything but I feel that it's more suited for systems with a decent amount of resources since you'll most likely be spinning up VMS and containers for application and storage management it would certainly be fine on here but I went with a different route with Hardware like this I narrowed it down to two choices unrate or open media Vault I like unraised since it's a great all-in-one solution for or hosting an asset as well as virtualization with Docker same goes for open media Vault but even more so focused on being a Nas first with some virtualization in the end I settled on unraid and yes I know it isn't free I only went with it because I've used open media vault in one of my last videos and haven't done an unread video in probably two years so I wanted to give it some loving now everything in here is pretty much how I remember it if you want to see my initial thoughts on unraid from like forever ago go check that video out I'm not going to do a deep dive into unraid here as I'm working on a dedicated video for that subscribe if that tickles your pickle my first task was to set up my array which would be pretty freaking easy since I have only two hard drives one of them was a parody drive and one of them was a Data Drive the way unraid works is that you can add whatever size drives you want to your array but each Drive can only use as much capacity as your parity Drive in my case that's three terabytes so I can throw in a one terabyte two terabyte or three terabyte drives to expand my storage but if I were to use anything larger like a 10 terabyte drive it would only give me three terabytes worth of capacity it's still an awesome feature of unraid and helps keep older mismatched drives from becoming landfill but wait what about your 60 gigabyte SSD now that's not being used since unraid boots from a USB drive then runs directly in Ram so our SSD is going to be used as a Cash Drive I just created a new cache pool then assigned my SSD to that and boom we have caching now I had two goals with this server to use as an S and to run applications to check that first box we simply had to create a share and Export it which essentially means just to allow it to be accessible over the network via SMB transferring files went about as expected we maxed out the one gigabit connection writing to our three terabyte array I don't know how fast these older drives would actually go especially while doing parity calculations so maybe going for that 2.5 gigabit Nick wouldn't really have been as much of a benefit as I thought either way it works as expected and I can't complain about that all right applications I'd argue the second biggest selling point of unraid is the large app store that has a good mix of official apps and community-backed projects these run on top of Docker which is already installed by default most apps are single click installs with some requiring a bit more setup with environment variables now with a setup like this you'll never please everyone sure it's a simple process which a lot of beginners like but I can see Advanced users turning up their nose at the thought of using a simple UI for container management to those people I'd say stop sniffing your own farts and go touch some grass with that I was free to install whatever apps I wanted and to really test the system out I installed a lot of apps you can see we are running quite a few things here and while they're running even though they are idle for the most part we aren't using much of our horsepower obviously once we start using some of these things that will change but this just shows you that you can run a whole lot of stuff on cheaper Hardware as long as you aren't running all that stuff at Full Tilt all the time let's see what we can get out of here though I'm gonna load up a Minecraft game and connect to my server while also running Plex as you can see when I do this we are definitely using our horsepower now and using more than our 50 watt Benchmark note that I am transcoding via Plex since this is playing remotely over cellular data but even still this system is usable and Minecraft is running fine this may change when more users connect though so be wary of that if I switch to local Plex playback which doesn't require real-time transcoding we are using much less of our resources seeing these results has me coming to the conclusion that this is an excellent system for a single user or to run Media Services locally if you're looking to host aplex server for a bunch of people that will require transcoding then you may want something with a bit more juice now in terms of running VMS that didn't go well at all it was extremely slow and even when just trying to install Ubuntu desktop with no other services running it was having issues it froze up during install at different points each time I didn't really expect to be spinning on VMS on this thing as I'd honestly just use it as a main Docker server anyway so it wasn't really that big of a deal but man I was hoping to at least be able to spin up a single Linux VM without it proving its fans with all of that said what do I think of this system it's freaking awesome man it's a hundred dollars so clearly you have to make some trade-offs would I love more RAM yeah would I like more processing power duh more capacity faster networking a GPU yeah man all that sounds really nice but we only have a hundred dollars I said before if I could do it over again I'd probably take a bit less storage capacity and go with a 2.5 gigabit Nic or a four by one gigabit Nick which would allow me to virtualize a firewall in here again it's all about what you're looking for but overall I think this is a solid system if I had about 50 more I'd 100 snag a dedicated GPU for Plex transcoding or more RAM or storage let me know down in the comments what you do with your 100 build and what you do differently here now if you have less than a hundred dollars that is okay you don't have to go on eBay and find all these parts separately go search Craigslist go search Facebook Marketplace there are a lot of systems out there that you can get already built with pretty much everything you need for a fraction of the cost but that's all I have for you today if you like this then go ahead and drop a like if if you want to see more stuff like this or want to see my follow-up video on revisiting unread then subscribe so you'll be around for that I want to give a huge shout out to my YouTube members and my patreons you guys are literally my 100 support group and I give you Keys all of you virtually you guys are awesome and if you're still watching you're awesome too thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 310,128

Keywords: homelab, server, nas

Id: e1lVV0nguZ8

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023