Home-Friendly DIY Homelab Server - The DIY 8-Bay Server

today's goal build an 8-bay Nas and virtualization server for under a thousand dollars and try not to nullify 17 years of marriage when I decide to turn it on inside the house ah hey Jeff thanks for meeting with me ah no problem Christian the honor is mine and can I just say what what uh are you speaking Klingon I'm just trying to connect a little bit you know I've been trying to learn your language Patak foreign don't embarrass yourself on your next Intergalactic call boost your babbling with Babel while they don't offer Galactic basic they can help you connect with your fellow humans thanks to courses in Spanish French and yes even German whether it's your next vacation making yourself more valuable at work or connecting with friends from around the world Babble can help you get going in just three weeks time and if you aren't satisfied they offer a 20-day money-back guarantee as they say this time of year so want to give Babel a try get 60 off your subscription by following the link down in the video description and kaplat and Kahlo to Babel for sponsoring today's video welcome back to craft Computing everyone as always I'm Jeff now on this channel I like to Tinker with servers and network gear everything from 100 Gig switches to the latest and greatest in servers to six figure Enterprise graphics cards and I tend to put everything inside of a rack to keep it all nice and tidy but have I gotten a little bit too Posh for my own good like a lot of home labbers the more equipment that I can keep running the happier I am but those who've watched my channel for a long time know my home lab comes from very humble beginnings in fact it started as a single desktop in the back of a bedroom closet for today's video I'm going back to my roots so to speak building a sub 1000 PC that will work as both a Nas and a virtualization host and once it's turned on will be fairly invisible both from a visual and an audio standpoint today's video is going to be mostly about the hardware what Hardware to pick and how to put it together and turn it all on next week we'll go over software and Os installs bringing all the tutorials on my channel up to date 8 along the way now for builds like this you actually don't want to start by selecting a motherboard or a platform to build on rather you want to start by selecting your chassis as everything's going to be built around that in this case I knew I wanted to install eight disks and so an eight Bay chassis was in the works I found this one on Amazon for just 199 dollars from a company called odd hide AUD heid 199 dollars eight Drive Bays up front and it features both an ATX or sfx mount power supply compatibility and a Micro ATX motherboard tray in the top with the chassis selected now we can move on to our motherboard selection now that we know what system is actually going to fit and this should be absolutely no surprise to those who have watched the channel for some time we're going with the eerieing 11800h es0000 Micro ATX motherboard now this is available for about 165 on AliExpress and while it did jump in price after my first couple of videos on this it's actually settled back down to almost exactly that price and in fact now there's even 140 dollar model available with a 6 core and 12 threaded version this of course is using the engineering sample of a tiger lake mobile CPU with eight cores and 16 threads a base clock of 2.2 gigahertz and a max turbo somewhere in the 4.6 gigahertz range so definitely not a slouch and now that I've heard all of the comments about how you would never run a server around this and it's a piece of garbage and the vrm is trash and I'm just waiting for problems I've been running two of these in my Home Server rack for the last three months with absolutely no problem at all so if you've got that kind of run time please let me know now as the CPU is only a 45 watt part it doesn't need a whole lot of cooling or Exotic Solutions I did opt to go for a slightly higher end model than I probably should have in the noctua l9i and this comes in at about 49 but I've ran the system successfully before with nothing more than the Intel box cooler on it for memory I'm going about as cheap as I have ever gone with this 32 gigabyte kit of ddr4 266 that I picked up on Amazon for just forty two dollars that's a dollar Thirty per gigabyte for brand new ddr4 I'm looking forward to seeing how that works on top of the low power power use and low cooling requirements of the eerieing 11800h motherboards another reason I really like them is for the Dual nvme slots and we are definitely going to be taking advantage of that here for storage today I'm going to be installing a pair of silicon power a 61 terabyte drives to run our OS now these are only about 35 on Amazon and have proven themselves more than reliable enough for Server use at least as an OS drive now before we close the book on storage I do want to point out that I plan on running proxmox as my main operating system on this system and then virtualizing other systems underneath that now with proxmox you install the OS onto your pair of drives but then those pair of drives can also function as a storage pool for virtualized hard disks inside of your system other hypervisor os's don't necessarily have that same ability such as truenast scale if you install turnouts onto a pair of drives those are locked only to the OS you cannot install or use that storage for anything else if you you're planning on running a hypervisor other than proxmox you might need to think about adding a secondary storage pool to this overall configuration to run your virtualized Systems off of but in this case proxmox is able to use these disks and so that's how we're going to move forward and now we get into the really fun part which is the storage configuration now unfortunately the odd hide case does not come with a drive controller nor do many of these Micro ATX motherboards of any kind these days come with eight SATA ports on board for you to run all a bay so you're going to need a secondary storage controller in this case I picked up an as media 1064 I believe is the controller on this one basically it is a 1x PCI Express card that has an 8 bay SATA controller built in so we've got all eight SATA ports that will give us full line rate data without taking up too much of our PCI Express bandwidth the really nice part this card came with SATA cables and it was just 45 dollars oh it also includes the low profile bracket which you're going to need all right two more parts and we can get to building starting with the hard drives now in this case I picked up eight hgst he6 Enterprise drives up off of eBay they were about 45 dollars each in this budget range this seems to be a pretty good amount of storage to amount of money that you have to Shell out to fill this entire Drive Bay now you could go with higher capacity drives and fewer of them but I like actually filling out an entire Drive Bay all at once and not needing to expand it later call me kind of crazy this will give us about 36 terabytes of usable storage after we configure it in a raid Z2 and for the same budget we actually picked up two spare discs as well so I picked up a total of 10 of these drives meaning that two of them can fail in the array and I still have two spares on my shelf when buying used Enterprise drives always budget in at least one or two to hold his extra just in case of failures now the last part is definitely the one I'm going to receive the most criticism for because it is the power supply now look I've used these power supplies for years for projects like this that is systems that are not going to require a lot of power this is a 350 watt unit I expect this system to draw less than 200 Watts from the wall we are more than inside the efficiency curve of this power supply even without an 80 plus rating of any kind and at 16 it's really hard to justify spending more just to power on the system we're not running a graphics card our CPU rail is going to drop 45 Watts at Absolute Peak and each of our drives is going to draw right around 8 watts at maximum speed which means there's not a lot for this actually to do there's not a 12 volt rail that's really going to be stressed modern gaming power supplies are built to withstand so much more load then we're possibly going to deliver there's no point in blowing your budget on a hundred dollar power supply to get 500 watts when you're not going to need that 12 volt rail output to power a graphics card now these power supplies they power like 90 of the OEM PC World are they bulletproof are they going to last forever no of course not but no power supply lasts forever but as long as you don't overload them and this system is definitely not going to overload them 16 is a heck of a mark to hit versus 100 or 150 dollars for a modern 500 or 600 watt power supply so this is going in the system you can install in your system whatever you'd like and with the parts out of the way let's go ahead and finally get this system together thank you foreign foreign I wish I could say rtfm but there's not even a manual included in this box uh so far this case has been beautiful and if it was going to work the way I absolutely wanted it to it would be perfect but obviously there's a couple issues keeping it from getting a full recommendation at this point let's go ahead and talk about that first and foremost you might have saw me have to knock one of the motherboard posts off of the tray uh those are pressed in from the factory to the motherboard tray unfortunately motherboard layouts ATX Micro ATX are not exactly standard on which screw posts they actually use they are standardized but they're also not uh in the case of the erieing motherboard it didn't use one particular screw post and needed a different one however there's no changing out the location of the screw posts on this motherboard tray as again they're all pressed in so I had to use a quarter inch or a half inch socket and a hammer and knock one of the posts out of there to mount the motherboard in not off to a great start uh next up what to do about power supply it does include the sfx and the standard ATX power supply brackets as it did state in the Amazon listing but curiously I saw on the side of here there's also a flex ATX power supply Mount right there so that got me really curious uh why would they give you options for all three uh well as it turns out the drive Bays on this unit are modular in pairs so there's actually two two two and two not a four and four or even an eight Bay modular unit down here uh that is because depending on the power supply configuration you want to use you can remove between two and four Drive Bays to use your sfx or your ATX power supply counter defeats the purpose of an eight-bane ass and not to sound like you know someone who knows a lot better but there is so much wasted space at the front of this case there's really no reason this couldn't have supported a full ATX power supply if they just shifted some crap around oh this is so incredibly frustrating uh so now if I want this to be an 8 bay Nas I have to use the flex ATX power supply which kills all of the value proposition of this unit luckily number one I have a flex ATX power supply on hand uh but that's actually not the one I'm going to use I am actually going to overnight a unit that I've had my eye on for a little while supposedly it's 500 watt and 80 plus gold and is only 61 dollars and it's fully modular I know that's a lot of words that don't make a lot of sense at 61 but I'm gonna give it a try hopefully it turns out to be a good unit and uh we can still put a seal of approval on this thing when it's all said and done but so far man if you've got to get a 350 watt you know Flex ATX power supply in here just to use this thing that that's a hundred and thirty five dollar power supply right there and that again that that's a hundred and some odd dollars directly out of your upper end budget that's really disappointing but that's where we're at for the night so I'm gonna wrap this thing up and hopefully first thing in the morning I've got a power supply on my porch and we can finish putting this thing together all right it is the next day let's see what Amazon dropped off 500 watt Flex ATX 80 plus gold we shall see now the worrying thing about Flex ATX is there's not exactly one standard for how they mount into a case uh there's various layouts there's various mounting points there's various standards for where the AC power goes in where the DC power comes out how that all looks they're not exactly a silver bullet when it comes to fit and finish and the winner for putting the most English letters in a row that make the least amount of sense when put together has got to be the hov-x-j-z-k Hawk so I don't know where they're getting 500 watts from because the 5 volt and 3 volt will do 75 and the 12 volt will do 384. which in my brain adds up to be less than 460. I I don't even know oh well that's still way more than I need let's go and put this in and see if it works you didn't even think about needing Molex plugs hopefully I have something that'll work okay baby steps foreign tada ah where to even begin this is one of those projects that I had such high expectations for I so wanted to love but I so fell out of love throughout the entire process of putting it together let's go ahead and walk through some of the fire points like uh why one of the top panels is off and why I had to dremel out the fan mounts and why I had to do half of the things that I had to do and why it's still not working right obviously one of the first issues I ran into was the motherboard standoffs being pressed in from the factory and not matching the Micro ATX board that I have and this is actually going to end up being a common issue because there's about as many different standoff patterns as there are Micro ATX boards on the market so your mileage is definitely going to vary uh make sure you have a hammer and a half inch socket on hand in case you need to punch one of those out next unless your motherboard happens to have eight SATA ports on board which is a very rare feature especially for Micro ATX these days you're going to have to have some kind of say to expansion card I picked up an eight base Ada expansion card for about 45 dollars it came with cables the problem is this case is the definition of low profile cards only there is absolutely no additional height allowed to any expansion ports like the two of eight SATA ports that are on this card so this card doesn't even fit inside this case uh unless you went with some server style adapter with both of the sff 8087 or whatever ports sticking out the back and adapted those into SATA uh I don't know that you're going to get much more success than this either as pretty much every single SATA adapter and state expansion card that I found had a similar configuration and similar layout where a Max of six ports went out the back and if you needed more than that they started coming out the top of the card moving on to the power supply and oh man what a debacle that was uh looking back at the website it does say that only four drives are supported if you use a full ATX power supply and six drives are supported if you use an sfx it doesn't say anywhere that the flex ATX is supported or at least it didn't when I was reading the page um but again like I mentioned when I was installing this Flex ATX power supply not all Flex ATX power supplies are created equal or built to the same standard and so even though I found a 500 watt modular that ended up delivering all the cables everywhere that I needed uh this one is bulging out the top there's not enough room for the one power supply that would fit with all eight Drive bays in here okay it's maddening how did this even make it off the drawing board as a good idea or a good concept for a case you could have easily put the flex ATX power supply up here in the top and made this whole thing that much Slimmer because you're not taking up that much room with the motherboard up top there's all this there's a whole hands worth of wasted space right up here that you could easily fit an sfx or a flex ATX power supply but instead they decided to cram it along the one thing that would interfere with the one reason I bought this case I don't understand I really have no words at this point speaking of interfering there are a couple of 120 millimeter fan mounts around the rear of this case and this whole assembly does pull out for ease of installation however these fan mounts are recessed so far into the case that if you were to mount the fans behind and inside the case uh they'd actually hit the SATA ports that are protruding from the rear of the drive Bays so you can't install fans there unless you install it inside of the recess cutout if you installed inside of the recess cutout there's nowhere to Route the cables so I had to end up notching the top of the framework to get the cables back inside of the case to plug into the motherboard it's just another one of those things of like I don't even know if they drew this up properly on paper let alone if they bothered putting a system together once they had this in metal and realizing this this entire thing was just a bad concept from the start Nothing fits properly on this case nothing ends up working the way you think it should and there's no included manual in the Box it's nowhere to be found so any questions of how to put things together or configurations or different orientations for power supplies it's left up to you to figure out so at the end of the day we got the system up and running almost almost up and running uh I still only have two of the eight Drive Bays lit up because my Flex ATX only included a single Molex connector uh don't worry I will be getting that solved probably later this week uh but not in time for the end of this video uh but I will say once the system is powered on it is fairly quiet uh there's not a lot of complaints I have other than I wish I could close the top panel I I wish I wish that would close so why are there no affordable Nas enclosures that you can set on a bookshelf and uh run your a drive bays and have a home lab without the need for a giant server Rack or you know deprecated server Hardware well because the people who are building brand new ones totally suck at it I am not done with this system I am going to try to make this work and fledge it out into something that I would actually be happy to run in my own home network as I may end up running this as a backup server or a secondary server here in my house uh I just want to get the top panel to close I need to replace the SATA controller with something that'll fit inside of there uh and we've got a couple other fit and finish items to cross off the list I'm not overly happy but at the same time with a second pass of parts and thought and engineering I could probably make this work anyway if you're interested in any of the parts from today's build I will have affiliate links down in the video description buyer beware to make sure everything actually goes together on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like And subscribe to craft Computing if you haven't done so already follow me on the social medias at craft Computing and if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me in what I do consider joining the patreon link is also down in the video description that's going to do for me in this one thank you all so much for watching and as always I will see you in the next video cheers guys foreign

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 80,743

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Id: NPaDCiyY3Kw

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2023