This is my home server. You might remember it from this video that
I made last summer, and it's pretty cool. It's cheap, doesn't consume a lot of power and has enough storage for system
backups, Youtube footage and Linux ISOs. Unfortunately, after around a year of use, one
of the backplane connections on the case failed, which prompted me to look for a new case. I had some parts left over
from my previous builds, and it kind of spiraled out of control from there. So this is my new home server. It has 18TB of hard drive storage,
a 1TB SSD for fast backups and 8 SATA ports in total. It also has a 10 Gbit SFP+ LAN connection,
Raspberry Pi-based KVM for remote access and all of this is installed, provisioned,
deployed and managed automatically using Ansible and cloud-init. This might be one of the most overkill
computer builds that I've done in my life, And if two of my previous
home server videos focused on practical setups that don't break the bank This build went a little bit off the rails. As I mentioned, I used some parts that
were left over from my previous builds, So I wasn't really concerened
about the price of those parts, But I will definitely mention sensible
alternatives later on in that video. That being said, if you need a file server
for torrenting, media streaming and backups, you probably don't need something like that, and my previous server build
would be just fine for you. Oh, and one more thing before we get started – This video is going to be about
the hardware side of things. If you want to know about the
software setup – what OS it's running, how I deploy and configure
it, what services I'm using – check out this video right here (here) It should be out in about a month if you're
watching this video the day it came out. First off, let me tell you a little
bit about how I use my home server And what I need from it in
terms of hardware and software. First of all, I need my
server to be small and quiet, And that eliminates both rack
and ATX tower form factors. Rack cases often have
industrial cooling fans in them That are optimized for maximum airflow
with no consideration for noise. (1U fan noise intensifies) And ATX tower cases take too
much space in my opinion. So that's why I decided to go with
a miniITX enclosure and motherboard. Even though you are limited to one PCI express
expansion card for most miniITX boards, That's not really a deal-breaker for me. Second, I want my server to be performant enough. I don't run any virtual machines and
don't do any crazy computational stuff, But it should at least be able to handle
media encoding in Plex and Jellyfin. I also run Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Unifi
Controller and many other services on my server, So I need something that could handle that. That's the reason I didn't go
with an off-the-shelf solution Like HP Microserver, Synology or QNAP. They're great products with their own use
cases, but I needed something beefier. Third, despite going with a small form
factor, I want to have enough SATA ports. Many cheap miniITX motherboards
have 4 or even 2 SATA ports, Which just isn't enough for a storage server. Last but not least, I want my home server
to be as power efficient as possible, While still fulfilling all
of my other requirements. And I think I've found a platform that is the
perfect balance between those four factors Size, performance, SATA
ports and power efficiency. This is ASRock Rack C236 WSI. It's an Intel Skylake miniITX
workstation motherboard That has 8 SATA ports and
supports DDR4 ECC memory. It's an old motherboard, and it's
still pretty expensive even today. I bought it for 185 euros
used, which is about 210 bucks, And that's a lot of money for
a used Skylake motherboard. But it's pretty much the only miniITX motherboard
in this price range that has that many SATA ports. I paired the motherboard
with an Intel Core i3-6100 And even though it's a pretty old CPU, the performance is still more
than enough for home server tasks. And yes, the i3 Skylake CPUs do
support ECC memory just fine, And you don't need a Xeon CPU for that. As an added bonus, i3-6100 also supports
QuickSync for hardware video decoding. Now, the fans of AMD might want to ask me Why I went with a crappy Intel CPU,
instead of a glorious AMD Ryzen. And the reason is pretty simple As I already said, Asrock's C236 WSI was the
only miniITX board that had 8 SATA ports, And apart from that, Skylake
CPUs are dirt cheap and feature hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding, Which is good for Plex and Jellyfin. Now RAM is where this is where the whole "I
had this kicking around" gets a bit weird, Because it just so happened that
I had two 16 gig ECC RAM sticks Literally laying around in my basement. I bought them for my desktop ITX build Since those were the only RAM sticks
that would fit under the CPU cooler. Now that I have a different
case and different RAM sticks, I've been trying to sell these, but to no avail. Which is good, because now I
can use them in this server. If I didn't have 32 gigs of ECC memory laying
around, I'd probably just buy something like this. 8 gigabytes is more than enough for a server like
this and 30 to 40 euros is a pretty good price. Hard drives are probably the most
important part of a NAS build, And here you have three options. If you want cheap drives, get these. These are 6TB WD Elements external drives Which you can just take apart and use in
your PC just like any normal SATA drive. The problem with those drives is that
they're based on the SMR technology, Which makes them slower and probably
less reliable in the long run. You should definitely stay away from
SMR drives if you plan on using ZFS Because the resilver times are
incredibly slow with those. That being said, they're
pretty good for casual use And go for as little as 90
euros on Amazon Warehouse. I'm cheap, so that's what I went with. I've been running these drives for 1 year
pretty much 24/7 and they haven't failed yet. If you want good and
inexpensive drives, get these. These are the same WD Elements
drives, but 8TB instead of 6. Those should be CMR drives,
which is the good stuff, But they're also harder to get. Also, depending on when
you're watching this video, Western Digital might have made them
SMR as well, so do your research. Now, if you want to go balls to
the walls, need maximum reliability And don't care about the money, get these. These are WD Red Plus, flagship prosumer drives
that are made for the use in storage servers. They also cost almost twice as
much as the WD Elements CMR drives, But for that price you get the NASWare firmware
and a 3-year limited warranty, so there's that. Now, if you're gonna be using
MergerFS and Snapraid like me, You don't have to go for the same size
drives and buy all of the drives at once. You can start with just one or two drives, And then gradually buy more and
more drives as time goes on. There is only one thing that you need to consider: Your parity drive, the one you're going
to be storing the SnapRAID data on, Should be as large as your biggest data drive. So in my case, I got three 6TB SMR drives, Which will mostly be used
for backup and media storage, And I also got a 1TB SSD for Time Machine backups. I pulled that SSD out of my Sandisk Extreme
and stuck it into an M.2 to SATA adapter, And so far it's been working out pretty well. I've also got a 128gb SATA SSD as my boot drive. It's the same drive that I used all
the way back in my first NAS build And it still chugs along just fine,
although it's far from being fast. Next, we've got the case. I decided to re-use Streacom DA2 that
used to house my workstation build, But you can definitely get a cheaper
case like this Fractal Design Node 304 With six 3.5" hard drive slots. Because of its modular rail system, Streacom
DA2 can fit up to six 3.5" hard drives AND up to twelve 2.5" drives. That's 18 drives in a system that
can easily fit in a large backpack! Obviously, my motherboard doesn't even have
that many SATA ports, but the option is there. I've also ordered some extra
rails from the Streacom shop To mount the additional hard drives at
the bottom and 140mm fans at the top. Remember I said that Noctua's 140mm fans suck? Well, apparently they suck so
much nobody wants to buy them, Which is once again good, because now
I can use them to cool my home server. I'm also going to be using
Noctua's smallest CPU cooler, L9i. This case can fit coolers that
are way beefier than that, But I need the space for hard drives, And the L9i is way enough to cool
the i3-6100 installed in there. In my previous NAS I used a
power supply called PicoPSU. It's a passively cooled super
small 150W power supply, Which would absolutely not cut it in my new build. So instead I went with Corsair SF450, Which is a small form factor 450W power
supply with a platinum efficiency rating. It's also modular, which makes cable
management a little bit easier. And there's going to be a lot of cables to manage. For the network card, I got this. You might wonder why I need another network adapter if I already have two LAN
ports on the motherboard itself. Well, that's because it's not
just a regular network adapter. This is Mellanox Connect-X3,
a 10 gigabit SFP+ card. This will let me have a
10Gbit link to my home server and take advantage of that 1TB
SSD I have installed in it. I'm going to make a separate video
on my 10Gbit home network by the way, So make sure to subscribe if
you don't want to miss it. One thing that I really wish my old server had
is some kind of a remote management system. Sure, SSH is fine for most things, but it only works if you can boot
into your OS in the first place. If your operating system doesn't boot, or
if you need to change the BIOS settings, You need to take the server out
of the shelf, put it on your desk, Connect it to the monitor and the keyboard,
and then bring it all the way back. Which is really annoying. A lot of server motherboards have a
separate LAN port for remote control. It gives you access to a web UI where
you can change the BIOS settings, Change the boot order or reinstall the OS Without connecting the computer
to a monitor and a keyboard. But this motherboard is a workstation motherboard,
so it doesn't have a remote management port. Plus, even if I did find a
miniITX server motherboard With 8 SATA ports and a remote management port, it would probably cost three times as much. So instead, I use this. This is a Raspberry Pi with a USB-C splitter
and an HDMI capture card running PiKVM. The capture card connects to
the HDMI port on the board, And the USB-C splitter is connected
to a USB port on the server. PiKVM gives you a nice web interface where you
can see the display output, and the keyboard And even upload ISOs and boot from them, Since Raspberry Pi can also pretend
to be a mass storage device. As you'll see in the next video, I also use it to automaically mount
the Ubuntu Server installation ISO, So the only thing I actually need to do
is reboot the machine and boot from USB. This thing saves lives. It can add remote management to any
motherboard and it's also very cheap Compared to a server
motherboard with built-in IPMI. The whole setup looks pretty clunky But you can just hide it somewhere in the case
and forget about it, if you have the space. There's also a Kickstarter for PiKVM
hat, which is an All-In-One solution That doesn't need a USB-C splitter or an HDMI
capture card, so make sure to check that out. So since I've done my fair share
of ITX builds for the past 3 years, Building in this thing wasn't too difficult. I used the vertical brackets to put a
couple of Noctua's NF-A14 fans at the top – I think two 140mm fans are more
than enough for this 17L enclosure, And the components seem to be running pretty cool. I also had to use some standoffs for the PSU and
the drive bracket in order to clear the fans, and the 2.5" drives just barely
clear the 3.5" drives at the bottom, Which is oddly satisfying. I used rubber grommits between the vertical rails And the hard drives themselves
to minimize vibrations, And I also put some rubber bands
between the drives themselves. Now I also wanted to hide the
Raspberry Pi somewhere in the case. Since you need a total of 4 cables for it to work, It could create a pretty
bad cable mess in the case. So I decided to separate the server part and
the PiKVM part using the stock dust filter. I think it worked out pretty good, But I can tell that accessing the Pi in
case I want to use it for something else Would be a real pain in the butt. I might find another way later. Overall, I'm really happy with this build. It's a tight little box, but
there's still enough place For 3 more hard drives and 10 more SSDs
in here, if I ever need more storage. It also looks pretty cool. Now we're coming to the cost. And well, all I can say is when
it comes to Wife Approval Rating, This thing doesn't score very high. My first build was focused on cutting costs and
getting a viable home server setup for cheap. It costed me 256€ My second build costed quite a bit more,
but was still mostly budget-friendly. I paid 481€ for the whole build, including
the hard drives, and that's still pretty ok. This built cost me almost twice
as much, WITHOUT the hard drives. I'm obviously still including the prices
for the parts that I had laying around, So 755€ is about as much
as you would have to spend, If you were to build something
like that from scratch. Is 755€ a lot of money? Well, depends. In and of itself? Yes, it is. But for a small form factor NAS with
10 gig networking and 8 SATA slots? That's actually pretty cheap. Synology,'s 8 bay NAS costs 1000€, and
doesn't come with 10 gig networking. That would cost you 200€ extra. And QNAP's 8-bay NAS is 1300 euros, which
is almost twice the price is of this build. They do have their advantages of course. You don't have to set anything up
– stuff just works out of the box, With no need for manual
configuration. At least in theory. The drive bays are also much
easier to access than on my build And if a drive fails, the NAS will tell you
which bay it's in, which is pretty neat. There are also a lot of refurbished
enterprise solutions that can be cheaper – HP MicroServers, Dell PowerEdges,
and so on, and so forth – If those solutions work
better for you – that's great! Just because I built something else,
doesn't mean your option is somehow worse. Unfortunately, can't go over each and
every one of the potential alternatives And tell you exactly why my
solution works better for me, But rest assured, I did go through
pretty much all of the popular options, And ended up with building my own NAS instead. It might not be the most cost-effective, or the most performant, or even
the most future-proof home NAS. But I think it's perfect for me. It's small, quiet, powerful enough
for media server and NAS use, has 10 gig networking and plenty of room
left for additional hard drives and SSDs. And I seriously hope that this is going to be
the last NAS that I will ever have to build.
