I recently moved, and the old server was a little to noisy in my new place. For now, the new update is smaller and almost silent. The final outcome worked pretty good, so, here’s what I’ve got.
I run my servers at home for a whole bunch of reasons. Largely its a sandbox for testing, running things I don’t need or want in my cloud server, development testing, backups, and a variety of other things.
This server was made out of the following:
- A TRIGKEY Mini PC. N150 Intel processor with 16GB Ram and an internal SSD drive of 500GB.
- A M.2 to SATA3.0 Adaptor card
- 6x 1TB hard disks I happened to have laying around from an old NAS array.
- Power supply for the hard disks.
- Misc Cables and screws
- 3D Printed mounts and brackets for the disks and computer – https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7208732
I choose that mini PC because it had an extra M.2 slot that I could put external hard disks on. I always raid together the disks in a RAID 6 config, so, the data on them is safe. The OS (Debian Linux) run off the boot disk (the 500GB one that came with it) with the idea that if something goes wrong with that disk, its a pain, but my data is safe.
The system runs Debian Linux with the disks Software raided for a total of 5TB of disk space. My previous, large noisy server had 20+ TB of disk space on an array of 8x3TB disks running with a VMWare host.
Overall, the total cost of this project was around $400 CAD. That doesn’t count the disks and the 3d printing. You can’t really even get 1TB drives these days, and the print was less then a dollar, but, it took me some time to get the design put together for the mount on the side.