Convert 10 yr old PC into a File Server | DIY NAS Part 2 - Hardware

hi everyone haukke here with part two of my Nest project as a reminder when my off the shelf Network it had storage recently died on me I decided to build my very own DIY solution from scratch in the last video I went over what happened and covered some of the basics like what an ass is why you would want one as well as some of the key Concepts like raid if you haven't watched it here's a card you can click on if you're curious because I won't go over the stuff in detail again and if you're only looking for part 3 where I select install and configure the nas software feel free to skip ahead as well in this video I will go over what Hardware I'm using and correct some of the issues that came with those choices we'll also discuss how I plan to actually configure the nas as always I will have the video broken into chapters and I will link to those in the description below so if you want to skip something or jump around be my guest [Music] the hardware I have available is this gen 7 Hewlett-Packard Proline micro server n40l and a bunch of lightly used hard drives this guy dates back to about 2010 if I'm not mistaken it has four Drive Bays two Ram slots and a fifth onboard SATA port as well as an e-sata port in the rear plus an internal and six external USB 2 ports it's actually quite Nifty even has additional screws and a right size tools stored in the bay door which you can unhook during maintenance for better access so I think this is fairly well thought out there also is plenty of documentation available which certainly comes in handy if I need to change something it is of course only SATA 2 but given the H duh so that's going to limit my read write speed performance and no matter what Drive I put in there I won't be seeing anything really Beyond 300 megabyte per second but at least I can expand my storage or add USB 3 ports if I so choose via one of its pcie expansion slots the processor is a 1.5 gigahertz AMD tourion II neon n40l that's not only a mouthful it also is an old 45 nanometer architecture the ram is DDR3 running at 800 megahertz but at least it's Error correcting ECC memory so yeah not exactly a super computer but as this is mainly going to be my file server and I don't really plan to do any heavy processing like transcoding anytime soon I think it'll be perfectly fine it's my first foreign as building so let's get going the first step was to inspect the hardware and see if it even still turns on which it did yes but given the age of the power supply and the noise it's fan made I decided to order a replacement PSU for about 60 bucks turns out that was a good idea because the old PSU literally died a few days after I done that and for some reason I couldn't unplug the power cord Stills attached so this goes to recycling as is I have considered upgrading the ram as well but for now I think I'll see how the system behaves with its 8 gigabyte on board and revisit that one later if and when it becomes necessary next I went on the interwebs to see if there is anything in terms of updates available out there among a couple of drivers and documentation I found in your bios and a service pack so I went ahead and downloaded and installed those in case you found this video to learn specifically how to update the BIOS on this particular machine let's go over the BIOS upgrade real quick as it isn't as straightforward as one might think first you need to find the BIOS upgrade file the HP support site has a lot of good stuff to offer but they will not let you download a bios update unless you have an active warranty with them so instead go over to the n40l fandom page and head to the bias hack section here you can either download SP 64420 directly via the Wayback machine link or further down the page there's a link to Nathaniel Perez's webpage where you can read all about the why and the how of what you're about to do and grab the provided mod package which includes the same upgrade file this is as good a time as any to grab a USB stick and get it ready for install make sure it's empty in a good working order I like the format mine in TFS for good measure extract the zip archive if you downloaded a minute ago and run SP 64420 it'll unpack itself into a folder and open a page in your browser to navigate from here you want to launch the setup creation utility but be careful to select the correct drive whatever you've got on there will get wiped in the process if the page didn't open for some reason or you get this type of error you can always navigate to the folder everything I've unpacked into earlier and launch the utility manually the file you're looking for is called hpq usb.exe and if you didn't pay attention during the install where stuff got written here's how you can find the folder just make sure you run the utility as an administrator otherwise you'll get the same error again once the utility is finished you now have a bona fide BIOS Recovery slash upgrade memory stick if anything goes wrong from here on out you should be able to revert to the official HP BIOS with this stick or another one you create the same way and if you're not yet running bias version 41 this would be the time to boot your device from this stick the server should automatically start upgrading the BIOS and once you see the C prompt remove the stick and reboot now let's fix the bios so your device works as it should open the folder with Mod files you downloaded and extracted earlier and copy the ROM file onto your USB stick confirm replace when prompted boot your server from this stick like we just went over and don't touch anything until the cprom pops up which shouldn't take longer than about a minute and when you reboot you should now see a different date for your bios okay now that the little guy has regained his composure somewhat let's talk about how I actually plan to configure the nas as I have several smaller but otherwise perfectly fine drives laying around I intend to rub them together into one large array so I don't have to interact with a bunch of smaller individual drives that will mean something like a union file system and because any Drive eventually will fail lightly sooner than later in my case I want to be able to replace and rebuild any failing Drive in the array without any loss of data this will require a parity Drive in some type of Ray configuration last but not least I don't want to find out the hard way again that raid is not backup so I want to ensure I have a secondary copy of my files available in case something catastrophic happens in terms of constraints the micro server has four three and a half inch hard drive base plus an additional Internal Sata as well as an external e-sata port and I have a couple of extension cards so considering the drives I have available here's what I have in mind combine three hard drives to two terabyte and one three terabyte into a seven terabyte array use a 16 terabyte drive for a raid parity and use another 16 terabyte drive as a separate external backup solution I hear somebody typing in the comments why don't you use ssds for so much faster yes ssds are faster they're also more expensive and don't have this kind of capacity besides may I remind you person I just made up that the hardware is running SATA 2. so I wouldn't be able to tap into those speeds regardless back to our configuration here your parity Drive should be at least as large as your biggest individual Data Drive so 16 terabyte is complete Overkill but I found a really good deal on a pair of WD red pros and this gives me plenty of opportunity to grow the system in the near future by the way this is how Western Digital should be those two drives not complaining I just found a slightly hilarious but before I commit all my data to the drives I want to get comfortable with the technology test replacing drives and so on and for that I am creating a much simpler test setup with two data drives an 80 and a 250 Gigabyte and one 250 Gigabyte parity drive so that is what we will be doing for this build [Music] thank you [Music] we also need to think about the drive v-nas software or operating system will reside on which we will install in the next video here we have three options a regular hard disk an SSD or a USB stick because I have enough SATA ports for now and I'm primarily going for a proof of concept with this build and I don't really need the speed of an SSD I will use an old 40 gigabyte yes they used to exist hard disk for now but I think I'll switch over to a USB stick for the final build in order to free up as many SATA ports as possible for additional data storage but more on that in the next video thank you for following along so far if any of this was at all interesting or helpful please consider leaving a like and comment below I'd love to hear of anyone else out there is still using 10 year old Hardware to run an ass also don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification Bell so you don't miss any new content I'll see you next time and we'll pick and install the software for our Nas and then configure it to work in our Network thanks again for watching [Music] oh come on thank you

Channel: Hauke's Projects

Views: 4,800

Keywords: Hauke, DIY, tools, How To, vlog, project, fun, tutorial, repair, replace, reframe, fix, renaissance man, NAS, network attached, storage, computer, technology, IT, LTT, simple, easy, help, intro, holiday projects, homegrown, home brew, cheap, better, own, what is, instructions, guide, HP, Proliant, Microserver, N40L, gen 7, old, hardware, free, upgrade, power supply, SATA II, BIOS, update, Nathaniel Perez, file server, RAID, sizing, parity drive, OS drive, test setup, configure, set up, data, truenas, budget NAS, fandom

Id: nplg60c3dSU

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023