While I have officially had a whole load of smaller machines as “selfhosted” servers, they have been adhoc all over the place (raspis are quite fun to stick in random places and then forget about). I have also been running on some older laptop hard drives that finally kicked the bucket and I don’t have space on my main rig anymore after fiting a 3090 and a 3070 in it.
I wanted a system that was relatively light on power even if where I live power is reasonably cheap and also didn’t want to spend over 250$ on hardware. Thankfully now that ebay.com is a thing in my life, it was pretty easy to source the parts. I used the excellent NAS Killer guide as a base for choosing the parts. I did have to meander off the list for motherboard options since almost all of them are out of stock in ebay.
| Component | Description | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU[used] | i5-8500t | $47.95 |
| Motherboard[used] | ASUS Prime H370M Plus | $47.97 |
| PSU | EVGA 550 BP | $77.00 |
| Heatsink | Thermalright Assassin X120 | $19.00 |
| Case | Cooler Master N400 | $82.11 |
| RAM | Old 32GB (8x4) | $0.00 |
| Total | $274.03 |
For the main RAID storage, I got 2x HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA 6Gb 256MB for about 80$ each which had been running for around 5 years in a datacenter. The power on cycles on both of the drives look extremly good which is great, need to figure out a way to dump this info into git over time so I can keep track of them failing. Boot drive is an old SSD WD green 256GB I had lying around from some time ago.
The HDD is pretty noisy with some pointed sounds coming out of it, but it’s not as annoying as I though it would be so it continues to churn on right next to my main desk, on idle it uses about 45W in total which is not bad at all.
Software
Running manjaro with btrfs raid 1 on the HDDs, planning to run plex, immich on k3s, but that’s for another day.