Building my Homeserver : Hardware

I have been planning to build a cheap home server since my external HDD failed unexpectedly. My initial search leads to FreeNAS. But after posting foolish questions in forum i found out that it requires better hardware as it’s based on ZFS. ECC supported RAM and MOBO will be a cost overhead for my rig as i decided to go for some second hand hardware. Then i found this NAS4Free. It’s not simple as FreeNAS but it’s based on UFS so it need not be a heavy hardware.


I bought a second hand i3 pc with four hdd and ran NAS4free for 3-4 days. One of it’s hdd failed sometime. I think the problem is with the PSU. So i bought a new Corsair vs450 .So that’s my rig. Lets see the spec.
Mobo : Intel Desktop Board DH55TC
CPU : Core i3 530 @ 2.93Ghz
RAM : 2GB Kingston
PSU : Corsair vs450
HDD : 1 x 500GB WD Green
3 X 500GB Seagate

Here is some pictures : 

Front :


My 140MM deepcool Fan

 Side View 

HDD bay


Mobo


Ram

My Cable Mangement (Later i changed the PSU to Corsair VS450 which had good sleeve cable)

That's my Bios 


And my new PSU



I tweaked my case for better air flow. I just flipped the front panel so that the optical drive opening will come to the bottom . I bought a deepcool 140mm fan so that i could ensure my rig gets a good airflow . Also fitted an 80mm fan in the rear of the case and also planning to place one on bottom.


For cable management i just cut and bend the plate on the back so that i could run the 24pin and sata cable through behind the mobo. It’s a small tweak but saved a lot of space in this low end case. The dvd bay gives lot of space to fold and keep my excessive cables.

Special Thanks to Linus and Luke from linustechtips.com/  for their cable management ideas and really their videos gave me the courage to alter things from what it supposed to be like flipping the front panel for airflow and cutting cabinet for cable management( Though it's not a elegant one but am satisfied with it).
Also thanks to the guys in teksyndicate forum


First i will be trying NAS4Free and probably then i would switch to Centos 7 so i can run different web server and GitLab.


Future Updates.
Need to place some net or filter in front of the 140mm fan so to prevent dust entering into my rig. And also like to upgrade the RAM . Well 2GB is not sufficient for any server. An UPS is also needed to face the power outage :P .

I will update with my server installation and other updates in recent post.


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