The Perfect Home Server Build! 18TB, 10Gbit LAN, Quiet & Compact

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 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. 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.