It's always refreshing when people demonstrate that you can play and learn this tech on a pocket money budget. That's how I got into tech when I was a teenager anyway.
This was essentially the start of my home Server Rabbit hole. Other tip, check with your company. They I managed to get about 7 fully functional Delll Optiplex i5 systems free just by asking my IT department what they were doing with the old systems they just switched out. This was at a sporting good store. Many places don't want to pay to get rid of these systems.
Love this video. These old PCs are like horses anymore.. they used to run the world but now are just sitting around with nothing to do. Personally, I think it's virtuous to find a job for an obsolete but yet amazingly powerful and high tech machine and put it to practical everyday use.
I bought a rt5 8510 hp pos server, 16 gb ram and a i5 4th gen, its my primary pc now, since my main rig got destroyed by lightning strike in my fuse box. That thing still rund great with linux and kde plasma installed. It has also a media server instance running in the background so i can stream videos from my phone. That thing is f**** heavy and build like a tank. About 7 kg
I had my wife's old Dell laptop biting the dust and it had Windows 7 SP1 on it. Added a 2TB SATA SSD and upgraded it to Windows 10. Then installed Ubuntu on it and installed Docker. Power consumption during idle is around 8-10W. Peak usage goes close to 35W as it's an Intel Sandy Bridge i5 processor and got QuickSync. Plenty fast and one device saved from the bin and performs really well with downloads and streaming!
Another great video! nailed it on the budget as parts are getting cheaper for older off-lease workstations that you can always use for something to scratch that HomeLab itch. I would have done the 2TB drives to add a little extra later for other parts or more memory.
I have the older variant of this machine. My job was upgrading hardware and my manager let me have the i5 4570 model with 16GB of RAM. Well, I got a taste for self-hosting and now it's been upgraded to an i7 4790, 32GB of RAM, Intel ARC A380, 2.5Gb NIC, PCIe 4-Port SATA Controller, and 2 16TB WD RED Pro drives for my TrueNAS vm and a 500GB SSD for boot and other vm's. It's been amazing and has really opened my eyes to how Windows can bog down this hardware that is otherwise fantastic! The funniest part of it all is that the wife's biggest enjoyment comes from not having ads on her mobile games since I'm running AdGuard Home.
Sir, I'm going to need a P.O box to send a lawsuit to, since I snorted my drink out of my nose and proceeded to have a wheezing attack trying to control my laughter when you said "Go.. mow the world's smallest plot of grass". Seriously, where did that even come from?
Okay, I guess the 'no local deals' disqualifies me, but last month I won an auction for a computer from our local university with a $15.50 bid, which came out to 19 bucks after buyer's fees and tax. What I came home with was an HP Elitedesk 800 G1 SFF with no storage and a single stick of 4 GB DDR3 RAM. However, it had an i7-4770, a Blu-ray slimline drive, and a 23" flat-panel monitor, along with keyboard, mouse, and all necessary cables. I spent $47 for a Crucial 1 TB SSD and around $20 for two 8 GB sticks of DDR3. I'm still less than a hundred bucks into this machine and so far it's been running Proxmox without issue.
Great video. You can learn so much from self hosting. I have an old an HP N40L Microserver running Unraid for my NAS. I prefer to keep my NAS separate from everything else. I also have a Dell Wyse 5070 Extended with upgraded RAM and SSD as my real "home server". It runs Proxmox virtualisation and various containers including Nextcloud for self hosted cloud storage. Using ex-corporate SFF systems like the Wyse is a really good way of getting a cheap system which also has a low power consumption. I leave the N40L powered off unless I need to use it but the Wyse consumes less than 10w so I leave that powered on all the time.
5:01 - there are actually 4 spare drive screws that are screwed into the front of your liftable drive tray, pictured on the far-side shot of the timestamp.
I picked up an Elitedesk 800 G3 SFF with an i5-6600, 16GB DDR4 and no HDD for $58 shipped. Definitely a nice chassis for a SSF build and has surprisingly good upgradeability as long as you're ok with just two 3.5" and one 2.5" drive to go with your sick CD drive.
If I remember correctly, there are 3 SATA ports in those for HDDs/SSDs, and one for the optical drive. If so, you can get a caddy to replace the optical drive, and slap another 2.5" drive in it.
Nice!! i got the exact same build with same specs for about $60 shipped. I just threw in a 128gb ssd (for the boot drive) and 2 x 4tb HDDs I had lying around from a previous pc build. Im currently using it to fun a badass FiveM multi-player server for GTA V on PC and it handles it like a champ even with multiple other players
I would go with a hp's z230 sff, grab a xeon, ecc ddr3, 2x120 ssd's, 5.×2.5 to sdd/3.5 adapter, used quadro p400 (for h265 encodingg) 3x 3.5 inch hard drives, m.2 to pcie adapter, cheap nvme for cache, and 2.5 gbe down the road.
I did build a $0.00 home server, to be honest more a backup server. It consists of the motherboard, CPU and memory of a 2003 HP d530. I had to re-erect it, because since 2 - 3 months ago I had contact problems with the IDE disks. I bought some contact spray and Monday and Tuesday I got it working again. The HW is a Pentium 4 HT (3.0GHz); 2x 512MB DDR (400MHz); 2x IDE HDDs 3.5" (250+320GB) and 2x SATA HDDs 2.5" (320+320GB). The 20 years old server runs the latest FreeBSD 14.0 on OpenZFS 2.2.0, released Nov 2023. It runs from the two striped 2.5" HDDs (zroot) and many of my VMs are backed up there too, the remainder is on the striped IDE HDDs (apool). At a >95% CPU load on one thread the Pentium is capable of reaching a transfer speed from 28 to 30MB/s for the "send | ssh receive". For the initial backup it took a day, also because of some power fails, that required some re-sends from e.g a 220GB dataset. Samba is working also, I only have to change the permissions of some of my ZFS datasets on zroot. Looking at the storage with one snapshot I have 30% free space on the datapool zroot and just 14% on apool, so I'm limited to 2 maybe 3 snapshots. The apool contains VMs and data that does no really change anymore (MB not GB), like VMs past receiving updates and my data like wma copies of my LPs and CDs, I don't buy LPs anymore :)
I got the same computer, but it had 16GB of ram and an SSD. I added a 2TB HDD from an Apple Airport and turned it into a proxmox server. It was in the trash pile, and the guy was going to take it to computer recycling, so he gave it to me.
I love doing home servers on a budget. I've been meaning to make some videos about things like this myself, but keep putting it off. I need to stop putting it off, lol.
My "100$" server is an upcycled HP prodesk from work that came with an i7 4770, 8tb of ram, and 1tb hdd. A 15$ 120gb prime day SSD, a dual NIC for 15$,upgraded to 32gb fan for 40$ and 2x 2tb drives left over from the hardware raid taken from my old gaming PC (prices CAD)
You need to passthrough the iGPU to Plex - you can then transcode several streams with barely any impact on CPU usage....I have a 35watt i5 4590 in my Unraid box and even that feels overkill at times.
I wouldn’t call it overkill because while I’m sure everything runs, upgrading the cpu will greatly help with transcoding and loading 4K media. I’ve also noticed that Dolby true hd glitches I was getting when watching on my shield were fixed when I upgraded my cpu from an 8th gen Intel to a 12th gen.
I attached m.2 no problem. Two 7200 hard drives is a problem. Two sata connectors ,one for dvd. No other connector for second drive. Lose the dvd connection?
Did you ever do the follow up for Unraid? I don't see it anywhere and would definitely love a follow up. Would also love to know your thoughts on how they changed the pricing structure. Love the videos!
I just bought an HP elite desk generation 3 for like $145 Going to use it as a backup NAS I7 7700 16 gigs of RAM with a brand new 500 gig NVMe drive pretty sweet deal
I run a dell optiplex with an Intel i7 3770s, 16GB of ram and a quadro p620. And for the price, the system is unbeatable, I've run minecraft servers with 200+ mods and multiple players and I run a vm (proxmox) with GPU passthrough for gaming which runs really well. The i7 3770 still holds up really well and can run multiple vms which is mind-blowing.
My unraid server is running on an HP Z4 G4 workstation. picked it up for around $400 and it was a steal, then I picked up a 3 drive bay that sits in the two 5.25 drive bays on the front, for a total of five 3.5 drive bays. Pretty fun using a normal workstation as a server, and I'll probably do that again in the future.
I guess if I want to be fair, I won't take one of those few 128G ram, dual CPU 36 core per cpu servers that we're going to send to the recycle pile from work. After all, those poorly configured machines only have 40 TB of disk space. But those do draw a bit more than 50 watts. ( In 6 months, I should have the ability to grab a few machines that have 512g of ram in each. )
There are some screws in the fold up hard drive Caddy to put the second hard drive in. I had the same issue a few days ago and was surprised to find them there.
I picked up an Elitedesk for 50$, 2 3TB HDD's for 30$ each only, and found 16GB DDR4 Ram for 30$. It took some haggling and lots of driving, but I'm ready to go.
I did something similar with the same pc but 2 used 14Tb retired video surveillance drives for a movie server for my family. Freebsd+ jellyfin is rock solid. Only caveat is edit rc.conf to set fsck to run automatically after power outage. I think it was fsck_y="YES" but check to be sure. I installed the os on the spinning rust which is less common today but it really makes no difference for a headless appliance. Another pro tip: zfs raid the 2 drives abd temporarily install a 2 or 10gb nic to copy the files faster, then pull it when the tank is full.
You can mix and match drives both in age and size with freeNAS as well you will just be limited to the slowest drives speed and the smallest drives capacity I have some 320gb 3200RPM HDDs in my NAS with some 500gb WD green drives.
Thats all great - I have a fairly up to date system running 70+TB.... what I'm struggling with is how you broadcast the files over local Wifi, and lock it down? I used to use old systems like this as local "access points", but.... that was a wired network, which I am much more comfortable with! Going wifi and making the signal strong enough (my ISP locks the router, I cant change anything inside - I think - THINK - I can add an external router and boost from there?!?!?) ANyway - advice on that is welcome.
I was considering getting an optiplex for my truenas. While their cases can be cool, they usually only hold 2-3 drives max. I ended up just snagging a used supermicro board with 64GB of ecc ram and a 10 core Xeon cpu. Definitely not the most efficient for what I need but it’s definitely more fun and more badass. I’m excited to learn about the motherboard and and all the little jumpers. Also I’ll be learning a bunch on truenas scale. Once I saw the optiplex workstation prices, even on the used market I opted to just build with used components and have more fun.
The sad thing over here is that buying 2nd hand is not worth it, because what the sellers ask, put a 100 or 200 dollars more and you get a brand new more modern model.
You DO NOT want to run anything ZFS-based on a system that doesn't pack ECC RAM (like, NEVER EVER !) unless it's meant to store data that you can lose without any regrets... It's just a bad idea altogether. The used Supermicro board+ Xeon is a much more solid way to go IMO. Because a.) ZFS needs all the RAM you can throw at it to cache most-accessed files and b.) data corruptions are supposed to be handled by ZFS without issues, which is true, but ONLY if it runs on ECC RAM ! If not, the damage is likely to be worse (as its can be "snowballed", kinda) ! If you're dead set on using regular RAM, you'll be much safer choosing any solution that uses the good old ext4 FS.
Nice presentation. I recognize this HP box. It was nothing special, just an office desktop workhorse. So expect to see a lot of hardware of this caliber hitting the market as corporate layoffs go brrrrrrrr. . . .
Lubuntu is light enough. essentially ubuntu but for lower end pcs. it has all the features of ubuntu if wanted. so you can modify what you need in the os.
That was swell guy. This lowers the bar for entry for a lot of people. I have been thinking about doing something similar but with a budget of $250 to build a simple 2 user/4 device home server. I have seen some stripped out models with the I7 6700 for under $75 with no ram or drives.
i run my homelab on 5x i5-3470 16GB 1TB SSD HP 6300 Pro SFF desktops i swiped from work when we upgraded ppl to laptops. i use one for HTPC with a 2GB GPU on Win10... the other one i do light gaming on with another 2GB GPU also on Win10. Another 2 i have Windows Server 2022 running Hyper V for my VMs. Two ubuntu VMs for pihole. One ubuntu VM for nextcloud. Messing around with some crypto magnitude calculator on one and then a camera surveillance VM as well running Zoneminder. the 5th desktop i just have Windows 11 running on it for about 3 weeks now, seems to work ok despite not being supported on win11.
Sounds like ultra budget NAS, 1G network is up to spec with HDDs, even Ironwolfs that brag 180MBs seem to top out at 130-140MB in my synology, the SSD goes 220MBs on dual 1G with smb Multichannel. You can try that as 2.5G switches arent budget yet they go out of budget spec.
Been using those and compaq 8300 and 8200 for fkn ages now, great home servers if you are on a budget or in my case you can get many of them for free when companies are getting rid of them. Using them as a backup for my VMs atm, hell buy 3 NIC cards with 4 gigabit ports and install pfsense and have your own damn router hehe Pretty durable little pcs that do not generate heat at all and are dead silent, had 4 of those 24/7 in my room for 3 years durring college and never heard the fan spin to the point where it would bother me while sleeping. Dead silence and low power cost :P
Love the vid! I was thinking to myself for a video idea, do an upgrade video and use the same system and upgrade it with like an additonal $100 or something
I make a mini server use eeebox, with d525 atom processor, 2gb ram and 250 mechanic disk. I chose lubuntu, princpal use use run pihole. Second use samba server. Work well, now use only 600 mb of ram.
I set myself a limit of £200 and got a HPE microserver G10 with 16gb ram and a AMD Opteron X3216 for £168. 95 with delivery. I would say set a realistic budget for a good base unit you can add to as money allows. HPE microserver G8 units are good and where what i was after till i snagged the G10 version for what i consider a good price here in the UK, to a degree i regret buying the G10 as the cpu is soldered to the mobo, this is something i failed to remember at time of purchase. I still think i will get a Gen8 version upgrade the CPU and lust after a G10 plus as money and the missus allow. I bought 2 x 12tb seagate drives new for my first pool in raid 1 and plan on getting 2 more for a second raid1 pool later. Not decided on what to do with the 5th sata port for the dvd yet, no doubt it will be something daft overpriced and a waste of money, but as long as the missus does not find out it is all good. To backup the server i have a ORICO 5Bay Hard Drive Enclosure which i filled with older smaller drives 6TB-8TB, abit of a half arse solution but i already had everything and buggered if i will waste the hardware ATM. Again something i can upgrade the drive size later and rotate the old drives to single usb enclosures as i do if they are still good. This video looks like it will cost me as i am now looking at a HP 800 series SFF G4 for a new media server for the home mostly for the kids music [if you can call that SH1T music] there videos and the missus rom-com collection, god bless handbrake for shrinking that dribble down. This will allow me to really play with the HPE microserver without any whining and pi$$ing and moaning. thanks for the video i think, take care, God bless one and all.
Bret, I love these videos and your other budget builds. How can I search on ebay for say cheapest server or Workstation with at least 6 cores, nvme and 4 drive bays? Too many random results. Please help.
took a hp 6005 pro ssf and stuffed in 2 2tb sata drives I had and installed Open Media Vault is fast enough to use to store mp3 and ripped movies to the other computers om my wifi network and cost me $0.00 just used what I already had
i have one of these dell SFF pc's im using as a server. id like to get a external sas card and find/make some kind of external drive bay for like 4 more drives.
Brooo here in Brazil i've never seen good prices like that. 100$ = R$500 give or take With R$500 you are lucky if you find a pc with more than 4gb ddr2 and a core 2 duo
Note that the "New" adjective is not literal... And no RAID data protection (just RAID 0) to get the 6 TB of storage (I'm an old-school RAID 0+1 guy, which is NOT the same as RAID 10)... I used to evaluate new UNIX admins by whether they could use the command line (adding users, etc.) or were "GUI admins" (I told you that I was old school... Linux didn't exist when I was working)... ;-P
nice fun project! Not going to local options was brave; but would've been severely limiting here as it's ez to find cheaper options locally I would suggest people going for this to atleast find a 7th or 8th gen i5 as it can handle transcoding (built in support for hevc too) I actually run a Lenovo P330 with i5 8500T and a Quadro p620 it's a tiny PC but the only one that has a PCIE riser slot for a GPU You should try building in one of those! ik u don't like the Tiny Mini Micro form factor but do check it out once Maybe a review or a scrapyard build like this 1 plz
It's a great video! Sir how connect this server from outside (or remote like as cloud) if you completely build all with Unraid? Second question but Unraid is paid and is there Unraid completely free version?
I used an HP z440 with Xeon E5-1660v4 CPU , 64gb DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GT 730, LSI 9300-8i HBA controller, and 8 internal hard drives. I had to add an internal hard drive cage I purchased from eBay for $25. I have 8x20tb hard drives for a total of 160tb. I am using an Intel 670p 2tb SSD on PCIe adapter as boot drive. I purchased everything on eBay and the base computer costs $120 in total it cost about $350 for the computer build without the hard drives. I am running Win-10 but it supports Win-11 too, Linux and most other Operating systems.
Whats the point of a home server? I'm 13 and looking forward to expanding and playing around with enterprise level equipment. But what I mainly want to know is how can it help me? And what other things could help me learn more.
It depends on use case. The definition of a "server" is very broad. If your purpose was to host a SAP instance for training, you want a lot of ram and a decent cpu. If you just want a basic LAMP stack for learning Linux web server, just about any pc will work to get you started. Also, don't be afraid to set up a mock up in virtual box. That way if you clobber the virtual server, you can delete it and start over before you deploy to real hardware.
I've watched this video a couple of times and I think you should make a follow up video with it. If you came into another $100, what would you add to this server?
Í got a HP elitedesk with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for 115 including shipping, I spent another 10 euros on extra 4gb of RAM. it has a ryzen 5 pro 2400G with 8 threads. I am running some services like Pi-Hole and some SMB shares now. works fine for me. I am planning on hosting a site and I want to add some storage to use it as a NAS. (SMB Shares are for HTML and other code files). I run Ubuntu server 22.04LTS
It's always refreshing when people demonstrate that you can play and learn this tech on a pocket money budget. That's how I got into tech when I was a teenager anyway.
That's what I did too. Kindof snowballed now but that's life!
actually debating making my own rust server with the stuff i just bought
This was essentially the start of my home Server Rabbit hole. Other tip, check with your company. They I managed to get about 7 fully functional Delll Optiplex i5 systems free just by asking my IT department what they were doing with the old systems they just switched out. This was at a sporting good store. Many places don't want to pay to get rid of these systems.
Did the same, yeah costs more to get rid of than they are worth
I appreciate you saying essentially rather than literally
Man, I wish I could have free optiplexes, haha
Finally, broken down so I can digest it. Everyone else explains it like you've had five years experience. Thank you.
Love this video. These old PCs are like horses anymore.. they used to run the world but now are just sitting around with nothing to do. Personally, I think it's virtuous to find a job for an obsolete but yet amazingly powerful and high tech machine and put it to practical everyday use.
I bought a rt5 8510 hp pos server, 16 gb ram and a i5 4th gen, its my primary pc now, since my main rig got destroyed by lightning strike in my fuse box.
That thing still rund great with linux and kde plasma installed.
It has also a media server instance running in the background so i can stream videos from my phone.
That thing is f**** heavy and build like a tank.
About 7 kg
Network Chuck: Currently unboxing and building one of the largest “home” servers of all time.
RAID Owl: Pfft, watch this.
I had my wife's old Dell laptop biting the dust and it had Windows 7 SP1 on it. Added a 2TB SATA SSD and upgraded it to Windows 10.
Then installed Ubuntu on it and installed Docker. Power consumption during idle is around 8-10W. Peak usage goes close to 35W as it's an Intel Sandy Bridge i5 processor and got QuickSync.
Plenty fast and one device saved from the bin and performs really well with downloads and streaming!
Why install Windows if you’re going to install Ubuntu anyway?
@@ufukpolat4691 to figure out just how much windows actually sucks
Another great video! nailed it on the budget as parts are getting cheaper for older off-lease workstations that you can always use for something to scratch that HomeLab itch. I would have done the 2TB drives to add a little extra later for other parts or more memory.
Yeahhhh next step…$50 server lol
This is a great starter homelab for just building out a home cloud for remote office apps, self hosted email client or media streaming. Cool video
23$ for a 3 tb HD... what a place to live! here you got to pay 90€ for one of those🤦♀🤦♀
I have the older variant of this machine. My job was upgrading hardware and my manager let me have the i5 4570 model with 16GB of RAM. Well, I got a taste for self-hosting and now it's been upgraded to an i7 4790, 32GB of RAM, Intel ARC A380, 2.5Gb NIC, PCIe 4-Port SATA Controller, and 2 16TB WD RED Pro drives for my TrueNAS vm and a 500GB SSD for boot and other vm's.
It's been amazing and has really opened my eyes to how Windows can bog down this hardware that is otherwise fantastic!
The funniest part of it all is that the wife's biggest enjoyment comes from not having ads on her mobile games since I'm running AdGuard Home.
Sir, I'm going to need a P.O box to send a lawsuit to, since I snorted my drink out of my nose and proceeded to have a wheezing attack trying to control my laughter when you said "Go.. mow the world's smallest plot of grass". Seriously, where did that even come from?
That's what I started homelabing on, with OMV 😁 Worked really well. Now use it as my daily driver, more than powerful enough as I don't do games
Heck yeah gotta start somewhere!
Not doing games opens up a whole world of possibility! I could do most anything code wise on an older machine like this.
Okay, I guess the 'no local deals' disqualifies me, but last month I won an auction for a computer from our local university with a $15.50 bid, which came out to 19 bucks after buyer's fees and tax. What I came home with was an HP Elitedesk 800 G1 SFF with no storage and a single stick of 4 GB DDR3 RAM. However, it had an i7-4770, a Blu-ray slimline drive, and a 23" flat-panel monitor, along with keyboard, mouse, and all necessary cables.
I spent $47 for a Crucial 1 TB SSD and around $20 for two 8 GB sticks of DDR3. I'm still less than a hundred bucks into this machine and so far it's been running Proxmox without issue.
that's a pretty neat deal, could probably sell the bluray drive and recoup the money lol... but I would use that to rip my discs for plex :D
Great video. You can learn so much from self hosting. I have an old an HP N40L Microserver running Unraid for my NAS. I prefer to keep my NAS separate from everything else. I also have a Dell Wyse 5070 Extended with upgraded RAM and SSD as my real "home server". It runs Proxmox virtualisation and various containers including Nextcloud for self hosted cloud storage. Using ex-corporate SFF systems like the Wyse is a really good way of getting a cheap system which also has a low power consumption. I leave the N40L powered off unless I need to use it but the Wyse consumes less than 10w so I leave that powered on all the time.
5:01 - there are actually 4 spare drive screws that are screwed into the front of your liftable drive tray, pictured on the far-side shot of the timestamp.
I picked up an Elitedesk 800 G3 SFF with an i5-6600, 16GB DDR4 and no HDD for $58 shipped. Definitely a nice chassis for a SSF build and has surprisingly good upgradeability as long as you're ok with just two 3.5" and one 2.5" drive to go with your sick CD drive.
If I remember correctly, there are 3 SATA ports in those for HDDs/SSDs, and one for the optical drive. If so, you can get a caddy to replace the optical drive, and slap another 2.5" drive in it.
Nice!! i got the exact same build with same specs for about $60 shipped. I just threw in a 128gb ssd (for the boot drive) and 2 x 4tb HDDs I had lying around from a previous pc build.
Im currently using it to fun a badass FiveM multi-player server for GTA V on PC and it handles it like a champ even with multiple other players
I love the idea of using old hardware in non-critical roles to help keep them out of the landfill. e-waste is terrible.
I would go with a hp's z230 sff, grab a xeon, ecc ddr3, 2x120 ssd's, 5.×2.5 to sdd/3.5 adapter, used quadro p400 (for h265 encodingg) 3x 3.5 inch hard drives, m.2 to pcie adapter, cheap nvme for cache, and 2.5 gbe down the road.
I did build a $0.00 home server, to be honest more a backup server. It consists of the motherboard, CPU and memory of a 2003 HP d530. I had to re-erect it, because since 2 - 3 months ago I had contact problems with the IDE disks. I bought some contact spray and Monday and Tuesday I got it working again. The HW is a Pentium 4 HT (3.0GHz); 2x 512MB DDR (400MHz); 2x IDE HDDs 3.5" (250+320GB) and 2x SATA HDDs 2.5" (320+320GB). The 20 years old server runs the latest FreeBSD 14.0 on OpenZFS 2.2.0, released Nov 2023. It runs from the two striped 2.5" HDDs (zroot) and many of my VMs are backed up there too, the remainder is on the striped IDE HDDs (apool).
At a >95% CPU load on one thread the Pentium is capable of reaching a transfer speed from 28 to 30MB/s for the "send | ssh receive". For the initial backup it took a day, also because of some power fails, that required some re-sends from e.g a 220GB dataset. Samba is working also, I only have to change the permissions of some of my ZFS datasets on zroot. Looking at the storage with one snapshot I have 30% free space on the datapool zroot and just 14% on apool, so I'm limited to 2 maybe 3 snapshots. The apool contains VMs and data that does no really change anymore (MB not GB), like VMs past receiving updates and my data like wma copies of my LPs and CDs, I don't buy LPs anymore :)
I got the same computer, but it had 16GB of ram and an SSD. I added a 2TB HDD from an Apple Airport and turned it into a proxmox server. It was in the trash pile, and the guy was going to take it to computer recycling, so he gave it to me.
I always love these videos. New project that I will start but then abandon. 🤣
I like your sense of humor. Subscribed!
“With my ‘talents’” Song plays. Actually laughed. Subbed.
I have a hp z240 running unraid as a backup server. Similar specs as the box in the video. Fantastic machine.
First time watching your video and you answered my every questions. Instant sub.
I love doing home servers on a budget. I've been meaning to make some videos about things like this myself, but keep putting it off. I need to stop putting it off, lol.
wife's boyfriend 💀
She keeps one with hair around
@@keylanoslokj1806 he has hair, just not where it’s useful
I appreciate the no local deal thing. I live in a small town where i can search for months and never find any electronics.
Any hardware + Alpine Linux + NFSutils
Or
Any hardware + Ubuntu + Samba
Those setups run on 2G of RAM flawlessly! 👌🏿
Don't mind the CLI, ProxMox with out VM does make a good storage solution. Samba and CIFS, and then everything can talk to it and it super lite os.
What are your talents?
If this guy had a podcast, I'd listen to it all day...just sayin 👂
My "100$" server is an upcycled HP prodesk from work that came with an i7 4770, 8tb of ram, and 1tb hdd. A 15$ 120gb prime day SSD, a dual NIC for 15$,upgraded to 32gb fan for 40$ and 2x 2tb drives left over from the hardware raid taken from my old gaming PC (prices CAD)
You need to passthrough the iGPU to Plex - you can then transcode several streams with barely any impact on CPU usage....I have a 35watt i5 4590 in my Unraid box and even that feels overkill at times.
Ooo good point
there's no HEVC acceleration, only H.264 though, right?
@@TazzSmk The 6500 in the server in this video can do HEVC encoding/decoding.
I wouldn’t call it overkill because while I’m sure everything runs, upgrading the cpu will greatly help with transcoding and loading 4K media. I’ve also noticed that Dolby true hd glitches I was getting when watching on my shield were fixed when I upgraded my cpu from an 8th gen Intel to a 12th gen.
@@AgentMoler with QuickSync using the iGPU it handles 4K without load at all on the CPU cores, and that includes transcoding.
00:56
I know that music. it definitely caught my attention. 😃😄
I attached m.2 no problem. Two 7200 hard drives is a problem. Two sata connectors ,one for dvd. No other connector for second drive. Lose the dvd connection?
Thank you for this video! Always fun to see projects like this!
Did you ever do the follow up for Unraid? I don't see it anywhere and would definitely love a follow up. Would also love to know your thoughts on how they changed the pricing structure. Love the videos!
You look like Nicholas Cage. Great video btw. Really helpful
I just bought an HP elite desk generation 3 for like $145
Going to use it as a backup NAS
I7 7700 16 gigs of RAM with a brand new 500 gig NVMe drive pretty sweet deal
I was not prepared for the "bald" note on his head. HAHAHA
I run a dell optiplex with an Intel i7 3770s, 16GB of ram and a quadro p620. And for the price, the system is unbeatable, I've run minecraft servers with 200+ mods and multiple players and I run a vm (proxmox) with GPU passthrough for gaming which runs really well. The i7 3770 still holds up really well and can run multiple vms which is mind-blowing.
My unraid server is running on an HP Z4 G4 workstation. picked it up for around $400 and it was a steal, then I picked up a 3 drive bay that sits in the two 5.25 drive bays on the front, for a total of five 3.5 drive bays. Pretty fun using a normal workstation as a server, and I'll probably do that again in the future.
I guess if I want to be fair, I won't take one of those few 128G ram, dual CPU 36 core per cpu servers that we're going to send to the recycle pile from work. After all, those poorly configured machines only have 40 TB of disk space. But those do draw a bit more than 50 watts. ( In 6 months, I should have the ability to grab a few machines that have 512g of ram in each. )
This is the exact computer I used to make my VR gaming rig, and then my unpaid server after I upgraded my gaming rig
There are some screws in the fold up hard drive Caddy to put the second hard drive in. I had the same issue a few days ago and was surprised to find them there.
That opening…. GD! lol!
I picked up an Elitedesk for 50$, 2 3TB HDD's for 30$ each only, and found 16GB DDR4 Ram for 30$. It took some haggling and lots of driving, but I'm ready to go.
When it was grinding when doing the vm thats just a simple ram upgrade, cheap fix. Skip the faster network.
I did something similar with the same pc but 2 used 14Tb retired video surveillance drives for a movie server for my family. Freebsd+ jellyfin is rock solid. Only caveat is edit rc.conf to set fsck to run automatically after power outage. I think it was fsck_y="YES" but check to be sure. I installed the os on the spinning rust which is less common today but it really makes no difference for a headless appliance.
Another pro tip: zfs raid the 2 drives abd temporarily install a 2 or 10gb nic to copy the files faster, then pull it when the tank is full.
My wifes boyfriend loved this video. Thanks man!
Real stand up guy he his
😂 4:28 ---> bald , that’s hilarious
I turned my 15 years old core 2 quad cpu into a home server with nas os and 4 tb nas drive. Works pretty well.
Hey that's great! Thank you! I will go and get one!
You can mix and match drives both in age and size with freeNAS as well you will just be limited to the slowest drives speed and the smallest drives capacity I have some 320gb 3200RPM HDDs in my NAS with some 500gb WD green drives.
Thats all great - I have a fairly up to date system running 70+TB.... what I'm struggling with is how you broadcast the files over local Wifi, and lock it down? I used to use old systems like this as local "access points", but.... that was a wired network, which I am much more comfortable with! Going wifi and making the signal strong enough (my ISP locks the router, I cant change anything inside - I think - THINK - I can add an external router and boost from there?!?!?) ANyway - advice on that is welcome.
What do you mean with "lock it down"?
I was considering getting an optiplex for my truenas. While their cases can be cool, they usually only hold 2-3 drives max. I ended up just snagging a used supermicro board with 64GB of ecc ram and a 10 core Xeon cpu. Definitely not the most efficient for what I need but it’s definitely more fun and more badass. I’m excited to learn about the motherboard and and all the little jumpers. Also I’ll be learning a bunch on truenas scale. Once I saw the optiplex workstation prices, even on the used market I opted to just build with used components and have more fun.
The sad thing over here is that buying 2nd hand is not worth it, because what the sellers ask, put a 100 or 200 dollars more and you get a brand new more modern model.
You DO NOT want to run anything ZFS-based on a system that doesn't pack ECC RAM (like, NEVER EVER !) unless it's meant to store data that you can lose without any regrets... It's just a bad idea altogether. The used Supermicro board+ Xeon is a much more solid way to go IMO.
Because a.) ZFS needs all the RAM you can throw at it to cache most-accessed files and b.) data corruptions are supposed to be handled by ZFS without issues, which is true, but ONLY if it runs on ECC RAM ! If not, the damage is likely to be worse (as its can be "snowballed", kinda) !
If you're dead set on using regular RAM, you'll be much safer choosing any solution that uses the good old ext4 FS.
I recomend to search some hp z240 sff. It cost my around 100$. It have e3-1245v5, 32gb ram, 256gb ssd.
Subscribed…I was under the belief…that there would be pickle tickling.
Were you not leverage the Intel GPU for transcoding? Anything H.264 and below should have transcoded with that gpu, so no processor wrecking.
Nice presentation. I recognize this HP box. It was nothing special, just an office desktop workhorse. So expect to see a lot of hardware of this caliber hitting the market as corporate layoffs go brrrrrrrr. . . .
Lubuntu is light enough. essentially ubuntu but for lower end pcs. it has all the features of ubuntu if wanted. so you can modify what you need in the os.
That was swell guy. This lowers the bar for entry for a lot of people. I have been thinking about doing something similar but with a budget of $250 to build a simple 2 user/4 device home server. I have seen some stripped out models with the I7 6700 for under $75 with no ram or drives.
i run my homelab on 5x i5-3470 16GB 1TB SSD HP 6300 Pro SFF desktops i swiped from work when we upgraded ppl to laptops. i use one for HTPC with a 2GB GPU on Win10... the other one i do light gaming on with another 2GB GPU also on Win10. Another 2 i have Windows Server 2022 running Hyper V for my VMs. Two ubuntu VMs for pihole. One ubuntu VM for nextcloud. Messing around with some crypto magnitude calculator on one and then a camera surveillance VM as well running Zoneminder. the 5th desktop i just have Windows 11 running on it for about 3 weeks now, seems to work ok despite not being supported on win11.
You know when Scrooge McDuck dives into a pile of gold coins? Well, gold is so heavy it would be like diving onto concrete. He'd break his neck...
Unless those drives are NEW... i wouldn't put much stock into them lasting.
This guy ain’t playing around with that intro 😅
This machine will easily operate as a plex server if you upgrade the cpu to a 7th gen chip and buy the plex pass for hardware transcoding
What's a Plex
@@keylanoslokj1806 it's a streaming service that allows you to host your own media and share it with your friends amd family members.
Sounds like ultra budget NAS, 1G network is up to spec with HDDs, even Ironwolfs that brag 180MBs seem to top out at 130-140MB in my synology, the SSD goes 220MBs on dual 1G with smb Multichannel. You can try that as 2.5G switches arent budget yet they go out of budget spec.
Spinning up a VM would not be a problem if you put proxmox on that hp machine
i laughed hard enough in the first opening statements you got a like and follow regardless of the content lol
Been using those and compaq 8300 and 8200 for fkn ages now, great home servers if you are on a budget or in my case you can get many of them for free when companies are getting rid of them.
Using them as a backup for my VMs atm, hell buy 3 NIC cards with 4 gigabit ports and install pfsense and have your own damn router hehe
Pretty durable little pcs that do not generate heat at all and are dead silent, had 4 of those 24/7 in my room for 3 years durring college and never heard the fan spin to the point where it would bother me while sleeping. Dead silence and low power cost :P
Did you say my wife’s boyfriends cufflinks? Dude that’s funny! Made me laugh I didn’t even watch the video.
His cuff links are just so cool!
Love the vid! I was thinking to myself for a video idea, do an upgrade video and use the same system and upgrade it with like an additonal $100 or something
I make a mini server use eeebox, with d525 atom processor, 2gb ram and 250 mechanic disk. I chose lubuntu, princpal use use run pihole. Second use samba server. Work well, now use only 600 mb of ram.
I sold off a donated i3-2100 a few years ago, freshly equipped with Linux Mint, for $75 , with a few hours of it hitting a local website...
I set myself a limit of £200 and got a HPE microserver G10 with 16gb ram and a AMD Opteron X3216 for £168. 95 with delivery. I would say set a realistic budget for a good base unit you can add to as money allows. HPE microserver G8 units are good and where what i was after till i snagged the G10 version for what i consider a good price here in the UK, to a degree i regret buying the G10 as the cpu is soldered to the mobo, this is something i failed to remember at time of purchase. I still think i will get a Gen8 version upgrade the CPU and lust after a G10 plus as money and the missus allow.
I bought 2 x 12tb seagate drives new for my first pool in raid 1 and plan on getting 2 more for a second raid1 pool later. Not decided on what to do with the 5th sata port for the dvd yet, no doubt it will be something daft overpriced and a waste of money, but as long as the missus does not find out it is all good. To backup the server i have a ORICO 5Bay Hard Drive Enclosure which i filled with older smaller drives 6TB-8TB, abit of a half arse solution but i already had everything and buggered if i will waste the hardware ATM. Again something i can upgrade the drive size later and rotate the old drives to single usb enclosures as i do if they are still good.
This video looks like it will cost me as i am now looking at a HP 800 series SFF G4 for a new media server for the home mostly for the kids music [if you can call that SH1T music] there videos and the missus rom-com collection, god bless handbrake for shrinking that dribble down. This will allow me to really play with the HPE microserver without any whining and pi$$ing and moaning.
thanks for the video i think, take care, God bless one and all.
I picked up an old mac mini and gave it an external drive. works lovely.
Bret, I love these videos and your other budget builds. How can I search on ebay for say cheapest server or Workstation with at least 6 cores, nvme and 4 drive bays? Too many random results. Please help.
i think its a pretty good system!!! Cheers
took a hp 6005 pro ssf and stuffed in 2 2tb sata drives I had and installed Open Media Vault is fast enough to use to store mp3 and ripped movies to the other computers om my wifi network and cost me $0.00 just used what I already had
If I built one, I would run a Minecraft sever on it. Also, I would try to go for a Ryzen 5 instead of an i5 for better power efficiency.
i have one of these dell SFF pc's im using as a server. id like to get a external sas card and find/make some kind of external drive bay for like 4 more drives.
I picked up a Optiplex 5050 with 32GB ram, I3 ( little small but iz ok ) and a 512GB NVme SSD for 50 euros, couldnt be happier :D
also managed to score a barebones R730 for 80 euro which is top tier 😂shoutout ebay
That computer has better specs than my main pc which i game on…i‘m still on intel 3rd gen i5
Brooo here in Brazil i've never seen good prices like that.
100$ = R$500 give or take
With R$500 you are lucky if you find a pc with more than 4gb ddr2 and a core 2 duo
Intro = Win
Note that the "New" adjective is not literal...
And no RAID data protection (just RAID 0) to get the 6 TB of storage (I'm an old-school RAID 0+1 guy, which is NOT the same as RAID 10)...
I used to evaluate new UNIX admins by whether they could use the command line (adding users, etc.) or were "GUI admins"
(I told you that I was old school... Linux didn't exist when I was working)... ;-P
nice fun project! Not going to local options was brave; but would've been severely limiting here as it's ez to find cheaper options locally
I would suggest people going for this to atleast find a 7th or 8th gen i5 as it can handle transcoding (built in support for hevc too)
I actually run a Lenovo P330 with i5 8500T and a Quadro p620 it's a tiny PC but the only one that has a PCIE riser slot for a GPU
You should try building in one of those! ik u don't like the Tiny Mini Micro form factor but do check it out once
Maybe a review or a scrapyard build like this 1 plz
Great video, but the boyfriend says he still wants the cufflinks 😔
It's a great video! Sir how connect this server from outside (or remote like as cloud) if you completely build all with Unraid? Second question but Unraid is paid and is there Unraid completely free version?
The 'bald' spec is what made me buy one just now 🤣
An underrated feature
Bought one for €50 🖥
I used an HP z440 with Xeon E5-1660v4 CPU , 64gb DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GT 730, LSI 9300-8i HBA controller, and 8 internal hard drives. I had to add an internal hard drive cage I purchased from eBay for $25. I have 8x20tb hard drives for a total of 160tb. I am using an Intel 670p 2tb SSD on PCIe adapter as boot drive. I purchased everything on eBay and the base computer costs $120 in total it cost about $350 for the computer build without the hard drives. I am running Win-10 but it supports Win-11 too, Linux and most other Operating systems.
Whats the point of a home server? I'm 13 and looking forward to expanding and playing around with enterprise level equipment. But what I mainly want to know is how can it help me? And what other things could help me learn more.
It depends on use case. The definition of a "server" is very broad. If your purpose was to host a SAP instance for training, you want a lot of ram and a decent cpu. If you just want a basic LAMP stack for learning Linux web server, just about any pc will work to get you started. Also, don't be afraid to set up a mock up in virtual box. That way if you clobber the virtual server, you can delete it and start over before you deploy to real hardware.
That thing is a beast. Yeah, It's a $100 but it will cost you more to run it.
I really don't understand why people shell out $500+ on a NAS when they could just do this instead
Convenience
I’d be more than happy with this system for that price, I wouldn’t of gone for those drives so I’d save a few pennies
I've watched this video a couple of times and I think you should make a follow up video with it. If you came into another $100, what would you add to this server?
What is the absolute best home media server I can build that is power efficient and under $1000?
Thanks for any suggestions!
Í got a HP elitedesk with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for 115 including shipping, I spent another 10 euros on extra 4gb of RAM. it has a ryzen 5 pro 2400G with 8 threads. I am running some services like Pi-Hole and some SMB shares now. works fine for me. I am planning on hosting a site and I want to add some storage to use it as a NAS. (SMB Shares are for HTML and other code files). I run Ubuntu server 22.04LTS