Building a Mini ITX NAS Home Server

foreign therapy and to today's Mini ITX homeless build this video will be split into two parts the first part will be dedicated to building the server and the second one focused on the software side of the things and the setup so without further Ado let's look at the different components that will make this home Nas server and the reasoning behind using these components before we look into the components though it is important to understand what were the requirements for this server to justify the choices made one of the main requirements was to host a file server to host family photos and videos as well as act as a backup location for different home PCS in addition to these requirements there was also other requirements like the size has to be small it has to be quiet consume low power it has to be budget friendly but also have future expansion possible now I know what you're asking yourself is that too much to ask probably yes and that's not even it there is one other requirement which has gotten me interested of Lathe and that is also to use this server as a network video recorder for home security cameras this is something I will touch upon in a separate video but I will already install the hardware necessary to support this requirement lastly I want to mention that there is no requirement of streaming shows or movies from this server so with that out of the way let's start looking at the components let's start with the motherboard which is one of the most critical components when building a server keeping the design principles in mind I went for a second hand Asus z87i Deluxe Mini ITX main board with six full speed SATA slots which support sata 3 speeds which is 6 Gigabytes per second it has a gigabit Lan Port which some would say will not be enough to fulfill all the requirements however I would first like to see how far I can get with just the gigabit Lan afterwards I can always stick in a 10 gigabit card in the PCI Express slot I will not install a graphics card anyway in this slot the board supports socket 1150 CPUs and there is a huge choice of CPUs that can fit this motherboard however keeping in mind our low noise low power low price principle I went for a second hand I5 4460 CPU [Music] which is a 35 watt TDP CPU with 4 cores and four threads in future if required I can upgrade this to a low power i7 or even a full size i7 but let's see how far we can get with this CPU I've seen people make nest boxes with just an I3 so this will be very interesting choice to see over time since the motherboard supports six SATA slots I had to find a mini ITX case with 6 hard drive base although one can find many ITX cases with six to eights hot swappable Drive Bays they mostly come included with or have space for only a flex ATX power supply and if you know anything about those power supplies they can be very noisy hence it will not be quiet so my choice was to go with the case with either a full ATX power supply or an sff power supply and ultimately I went for the fractal design note 304 which is built from ground up for Nas and also pre includes three fans one 140 mm fan in the rear and two 92 mm fans in the front to cool your hard drives I also consider other cases like the Silverstone DS 380 which also includes hot sweptical drive base with the back plane but at more than double the price as compared to this case it really tilted me towards this fractal design note 304 but here's the thing before settling for the fractal design note 304 which is this one right here I was seriously considering the Jonas bow N1 case of which I will put a picture right here which not only looks nice takes even less space and supports also six hard drives however it was not only very expensive as same as the Silverstone ds380 but also needed patients of a Siberian tiger to wait for its arrival and as you might know Siberian tigers are the most patient animals however keeping the jonesbow N1 case in mind and the height restrictions of the CPU Cooler Max CPU height is 70 mm I already bought a cooler which is the noctua nh12s which is right here and it should be enough to cool down this CPU which is just of 35 Watts DDP for the ram I will be going with these Corsair value select 8 gigabyte sticks giving me a total of 16 gigabytes DDR3 memory to keep the cost down I also bought this second hand it's not the fastest Ram because it has a cast latency of 11 nanoseconds however it will be enough for this build if required I can always add faster Ram or more RAM replace these with two 16 gigabyte kits giving me a total of 32. since this whole setup is based on desktop components this Ram is not ECC type meaning there will be no error correction in the memory now one of the other most important component is the hard drives themselves and for this build I went with two four terabyte Seagate Iron Wolf Nas hard drives what new you don't want to skimp on hard drives when building a Nas especially if you buy all drives you're never quite sure how they were used and if they have any bad sectors okay you can run some tests but it's always best to buy hard drives new because they also then come with warranty I'll put the exact part numbers in the description one of them will end up being the Data Drive and the other one being as a parity Drive in the nas as I mentioned before I also want to use the server for home security camera recording and for this purpose I bought a new four terabyte Seagate Skyhawk surveillance Drive typically surveillance drives are more suitable for 24 7 recording operation as they run faster at 7200 RPM just like normal desktop hard drives as compared to these Nas hard drives which only run at 5900 RPM [Music] so all in all to begin with I will get four terabytes worth of usable storage since both the motherboard and the case support more than three more hard drive slots I can add three more four terabyte disks to result in a total storage capacity of 16 terabyte when fully loaded before needing a full overall to higher capacity disks so this actually ticks our requirement of future expansion we will use only three slots here for now and three drive base in the case and later on we can add three more hard drives or one after the other as necessary for the PSU I will make use of the Corsair vs 550 which is a 550 watt PSU and is 80 plus rated this power supply is actually an overkill for this build as even if we are fully loaded we only need a 220 watt power supply but it was just something that I had lying around for this build I only need a flash drive working as a boot drive and for this purpose I bought this SanDisk 32 gigabyte USB 3.1 flash drive it's really small so fits our requirement of being small I can just fit it in in the back and forget about it now enough talking about the components let's get right into it and build this server let's prep the case for installation I've recently done a video of this case so if you want to check it out I'll put a link in the description over here let's install the motherboard mounts a case is here ready for installing the motherboard let's prepare the motherboard install the CPU and put the CPU Cooler already in let's install the CPU match the notch which is down here CPU goes right in and close the mode let us also install the ram because I think after installing the cooler it won't be easy to install the ram in this motherboard just fold it in from one side pressure and it's installed I'm going in Rams to in now let's install the CPU Cooler these are the parts that we need to install our CPU Cooler the Nokia nh12s first we have to attach the back plate then put these four spacers mounting bracket and the screws time to put the thermal paste I'll make a peanut size thermal paste in the middle that should be enough and now we put our cooler gently on top actually we have ran into an issue with the side plate I need to switch the fan to the top and use it as a downdraft instead of the upward cooling right now so let's switch the fan and see if that works [Music] let's first see if we will be able to feed it like so now it will not be a problem to fit this cooler fits nicely on top nocture cooler comes with this screwdriver we will make use of this to tighten two screws one by one it's now fully tight we have a lot of clearance now and now time to install the fan again let's switch it to a downdraft cooler meaning I would be installing it like this and this CPU Cooler socket is right here like a little Bend that are CPU Cooler is fully installed in downdraft mode [Music] oh I almost forgot I want to install this low noise filter in the fan cable so let's do that now okay we are done now let's install the power supply and see how much space we have and to get to insert cables in these connectors and also before putting the motherboard in I'll try to connect all these connectors while still outside the case let's open the power supply as you can see this is not modular so we will have to tuck these cables somewhere power supply has to go in from this side what really is a nice touch in this case is that I don't know if you can see there are rubber mounts here to Mount your power supply so that it doesn't cause any vibration nice thinking power supply slides right in I don't think we can reach this bottom screw here from inside so I guess it will have to be three screws okay [Music] with that our power supply is cooled in let's switch it on before we forget it [Music] now it's time to put in our motherboard let's explore the bio Shield to go like this now let's see which of the connectors we can always sticking on this motherboard before it goes in the PS connector need both of these 24 pin connector easily goes in like so then USB 3 let's connect the front panel audio connector I've also now connected the front panel connectors let's now put this motherboard inside this case I really have to muscle through not going to be easy these are your Shields have mines of Their Own finally things are aligned put this in focus and Bolt the motherboard down with the motherboard in our next step is to prepare our hard drive cages with hard drives so I'll be installing OneDrive each per cage so let's do that now let's Mount this hard drive brackets in the case let's open this fan cable so that we can route it from the side now as I mentioned before these fans are controlled by actually I mentioned it in the unboxing video These fans are controlled by this fan controller all we need to do is give some power and we can route all three fans the rear fan and the two front fans with this fan controller let's keep the SATA hard drives in here it is absolutely no room for the power cable they really have to re-bend or what I could do is Route them from within one of these hard drive brackets oh yeah we cannot do that because other hard drive brackets will come in the way maybe along the power [Music] this will be tight I find another way if I can route this next to the ram that would be perfect let's try and muscle it through okay finally I have that cable hander and I think that would be the best way to install it let's get the iron wolf drives first and then the surveillance Drive right here it's pretty tight all of this the hard drive is almost touching the fan so I think it would best if I move the fan slightly behind here not sure if you can see the middle hard drive it's just touching I could take this fan a notch lower let's move it lower not by much just one or two fins down shouldn't compromise its cooling capacity by much now let's close these still have to Route power to these hard drives and SATA connections that will also be a challenge Mini ITX building is all about overcoming those challenges if you're new to the channel I have also made a gaming PC build in the Sugo 14 chassis if you haven't checked it out go check it out if you like these kind of build videos alright now we need to provide Power to our hard drives so how many SATA cables do we have we have a cable with one SATA connector and we have two here and we also have don't think we need floppy disconnector we also have okay one SATA connector here two here and we need to use one of these which are both the same and we actually don't need the PCI Express connector because we are not installing a graphics card anyway Challenge number two getting the SATA cables to the hard drives wait I think before the power cables let's get the SATA cables we need to connect to there and one over here [Music] we have three long ones and one really short one I think the short one will work quite well for this one let's see how short this one is oh yeah it's perfect size these are all right angled let's make use of all black cables somewhere I need to put that one in there is no way I can get the SATA cables out from the back because we have molded the power cables so let's do it this way out and then I have to fold it here now I have managed to fit in the SATA cables and now it's time to put the power cables to these hard drives I've managed to connect the power to all three drives here and the SATA we already connected before so now give power to the fan controller and also connect all the fans to this fan controller there we go these fan cables I think they're better off coming at the bottom and these front panel connectors should be tucked in first I think under these power cables that's route the fan cables here that's one two and three foreign cables somehow under here it's a lot of power cables to talk in such a small space I think it's better if you hire modular power supply for this case I'll make use of one zip tie on the top so that all these SATA cables at least don't come in the fan lastly we have to put these screws to keep the hard drives from moving these screws are not very easy on your hands something that fractal design should consider changing it doesn't match the rest of the quality of the case okay with that our server build is near complete and I can put the cover on and then we will try to boot it like I mentioned before the quality of these thumb screws is appalling at best they just don't want to go in to an otherwise perfect case foreign [Music] ers is complete and don't build is complete without actually powering on the server so let's do that now I remember putting in the power supply to on position so as soon as I put this Cable in I think we should get a light here or maybe with a power book so let me do that and see if it turns on thank you we don't have a light and now we do so the computer turns on the server is ready this was part one of the video in the next part I will install the OS and set up the server as a home Nas so if you like this video press the like button if you would like to be notified of the upcoming second part of this video where I'll be installing the OS and setting up the nas Please Subscribe and click on the notification Bell and for now bye see you in the next one [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: PC Hardware Therapy

Views: 51,839

Keywords: Building Home server, Building mini itx server, mini itx nas build, mini itx home server, small, quiet, budget friendly, low cost, fractal design 304, build, build mini itx nas home server, build mini itx nas server, best mini itx nas, best mini itx home server, network video recorder, nvr, home surveillance, node 304, fractal design node 304, nas with 6 hdd, nas with 6 hard drives, nas box, itx nas box

Id: wIAZCVflSHA

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023