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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Man, I appreciate your videos, simple fact that you are not meticulous makes the video enjoyable and educational while in a relaxing enviornment, even if I am not building a server---really just learning. Anyways, thanks for going slightly over the 100$. Great Video.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
My first "dedicated server" was a similar setup. A Dell SFF unit with an i5-4500 CPU (4c/4t) that came with one 8GB stick of RAM. I dropped in a second 8GB stick, and ran it as an Unraid server for a few years. Plex with the 'arr's, a few other Docker apps, two Linux VMs (Debian and Arch), and a Windows 10 VM. Bumping it up to 16GB made all the difference. Since I have Plex Pass, I enabled hardware transcoding on the iGPU. That at least allowed two simultaneous transcodes.
You shouldn't have to transcode anything in 2023. 99% of the devices people use on a regular basis support MPEG-2 playback or H.264/265 natively, especially if you use M Player or VLC for playback. For years people kept talking about transcoding buzz word. Before Intel and AMD SoC's and ARM SoC's matured this was a problem especially streaming with Netflix/CZcams but even that isn't a problem anymore. The only reason I would see the use of a GPU is for remote game play but even then your ability to play the latest and greatest AAA games on hardware this old will be nearly impossible but emulation all the way up to PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube no problem at all. Anyway thanks Owl for the budget build.
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 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.
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?
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 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. )
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 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
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 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.
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.
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.
great vid, only other thing i would have said is 3tb drives also have the highest failure rate of all hdds so 2x2 plus the ability to get a small ssd and a nice nic is where i would have differed
I have a similar setup at home. I got a free hp sff with i3 4310. Added 16gb ram for 50 eur and 2x10tb hdd for total of around 350 eur. I run the hdds without parity but I have replaceable data on there only. Two plex streams locally work just fine.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
I'd like to see another take on this with say a $300 budget? I know this definitely doesn't satisfy the power budget, but I bought 2 cheap E5 v4 Xeons on Aliexpress and one of those cheap dual X99 boards (less than $100 total), tons of CPU horsepower. Personally I bought a cheap case locally and used an old PSU (1 EPS connector worked fine), cheap DDR4 ECC RAM and chucked my old GPU in, but you could do the same for $300 easily, at least in the UK. Planning on messing around with proxmox on it, but I'd love to see your take on a slightly higher budget home server, I think it will allow for a much more powerful, more DIY approach.
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.
99% likely you don't need more power than RPi 4, also with external SSDs no moving parts, 3 watts dead silent. People these days use proxmox, truenas, unraid and synology garbage web ui forgetting tools like rsync, rclone and cron, what a joke. I run jellyfin, pi-hole, vaultwarden, samba, transmission, syncthing, filebrowser, lighttpd, full wikipedia kiwix server, all it takes is 450mb of ram. On idle cpu load is 0.00. No dockers, no VMs.
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
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 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.
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'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?
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.
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…$50 server lol
Love this video. These old PCs are like horses anymore.. they used to run the world but now are just sitting around with nothing to do. Personally, I think it's virtuous to find a job for an obsolete but yet amazingly powerful and high tech machine and put it to practical everyday use.
I bought a rt5 8510 hp pos server, 16 gb ram and a i5 4th gen, its my primary pc now, since my main rig got destroyed by lightning strike in my fuse box.
That thing still rund great with linux and kde plasma installed.
It has also a media server instance running in the background so i can stream videos from my phone.
That thing is f**** heavy and build like a tank.
About 7 kg
I had my wife's old Dell laptop biting the dust and it had Windows 7 SP1 on it. Added a 2TB SATA SSD and upgraded it to Windows 10.
Then installed Ubuntu on it and installed Docker. Power consumption during idle is around 8-10W. Peak usage goes close to 35W as it's an Intel Sandy Bridge i5 processor and got QuickSync.
Plenty fast and one device saved from the bin and performs really well with downloads and streaming!
Why install Windows if you’re going to install Ubuntu anyway?
@@ufukpolat4691 to figure out just how much windows actually sucks
Network Chuck: Currently unboxing and building one of the largest “home” servers of all time.
RAID Owl: Pfft, watch this.
This is a great starter homelab for just building out a home cloud for remote office apps, self hosted email client or media streaming. Cool video
23$ for a 3 tb HD... what a place to live! here you got to pay 90€ for one of those🤦♀🤦♀
4:28 loved the bald sign
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?
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.
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.
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.
I love the idea of using old hardware in non-critical roles to help keep them out of the landfill. e-waste is terrible.
wife's boyfriend 💀
She keeps one with hair around
@@keylanoslokj1806 he has hair, just not where it’s useful
My server has been running now for about 4 years, built from pritty much the same as you did here! 3770K, 32Gb DDR3, 120SSD and 3x16TB discs
Man, I appreciate your videos, simple fact that you are not meticulous makes the video enjoyable and educational while in a relaxing enviornment, even if I am not building a server---really just learning. Anyways, thanks for going slightly over the 100$. Great Video.
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
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.
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 always love these videos. New project that I will start but then abandon. 🤣
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.
I like your sense of humor. Subscribed!
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 :)
“With my ‘talents’” Song plays. Actually laughed. Subbed.
00:56
I know that music. it definitely caught my attention. 😃😄
Thank you for this video! Always fun to see projects like this!
I have a hp z240 running unraid as a backup server. Similar specs as the box in the video. Fantastic machine.
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.
My first "dedicated server" was a similar setup. A Dell SFF unit with an i5-4500 CPU (4c/4t) that came with one 8GB stick of RAM. I dropped in a second 8GB stick, and ran it as an Unraid server for a few years. Plex with the 'arr's, a few other Docker apps, two Linux VMs (Debian and Arch), and a Windows 10 VM. Bumping it up to 16GB made all the difference.
Since I have Plex Pass, I enabled hardware transcoding on the iGPU. That at least allowed two simultaneous transcodes.
You shouldn't have to transcode anything in 2023. 99% of the devices people use on a regular basis support MPEG-2 playback or H.264/265 natively, especially if you use M Player or VLC for playback.
For years people kept talking about transcoding buzz word. Before Intel and AMD SoC's and ARM SoC's matured this was a problem especially streaming with Netflix/CZcams but even that isn't a problem anymore.
The only reason I would see the use of a GPU is for remote game play but even then your ability to play the latest and greatest AAA games on hardware this old will be nearly impossible but emulation all the way up to PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube no problem at all.
Anyway thanks Owl for the budget build.
I appreciate the no local deal thing. I live in a small town where i can search for months and never find any electronics.
I was not prepared for the "bald" note on his head. HAHAHA
I’ve used a few second hand HP proDesk and eliteDesk PCs as servers, running windows server 2016/2019 and running 24/7 for years, amazing value.
Gotta love budget servers
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 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.
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?
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)
What are your talents?
You look like Nicholas Cage. Great video btw. Really helpful
When you said talents and that sound played it sent me lmfaoo😂😂😂
If this guy had a podcast, I'd listen to it all day...just sayin 👂
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.
"Your wife's boyfriend wears" love the humor.
This is the exact computer I used to make my VR gaming rig, and then my unpaid server after I upgraded my gaming rig
Any hardware + Alpine Linux + NFSutils
Or
Any hardware + Ubuntu + Samba
Those setups run on 2G of RAM flawlessly! 👌🏿
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. )
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 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’m ngl i’m kind of a cynical asshole but this video already made me laugh like 3 times in the first 20 seconds. A+
😂 4:28 ---> bald , that’s hilarious
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"?
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...
Thank you very much. As always, really like the vids.
For the Plex transcoding your i5 has an Igpu so with Plex pass it should be able to transcode without any issue
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.
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.
When it was grinding when doing the vm thats just a simple ram upgrade, cheap fix. Skip the faster network.
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.
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$. It took some haggling and lots of driving, but I'm ready to go.
Hey that's great! Thank you! I will go and get one!
I recomend to search some hp z240 sff. It cost my around 100$. It have e3-1245v5, 32gb ram, 256gb ssd.
That opening…. GD! lol!
Were you not leverage the Intel GPU for transcoding? Anything H.264 and below should have transcoded with that gpu, so no processor wrecking.
great vid, only other thing i would have said is 3tb drives also have the highest failure rate of all hdds so 2x2 plus the ability to get a small ssd and a nice nic is where i would have differed
I have a similar setup at home. I got a free hp sff with i3 4310. Added 16gb ram for 50 eur and 2x10tb hdd for total of around 350 eur. I run the hdds without parity but I have replaceable data on there only. Two plex streams locally work just fine.
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.
Subscribed…I was under the belief…that there would be pickle tickling.
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.
This guy ain’t playing around with that intro 😅
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?
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
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. . . .
i laughed hard enough in the first opening statements you got a like and follow regardless of the content lol
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.
I'd like to see another take on this with say a $300 budget? I know this definitely doesn't satisfy the power budget, but I bought 2 cheap E5 v4 Xeons on Aliexpress and one of those cheap dual X99 boards (less than $100 total), tons of CPU horsepower. Personally I bought a cheap case locally and used an old PSU (1 EPS connector worked fine), cheap DDR4 ECC RAM and chucked my old GPU in, but you could do the same for $300 easily, at least in the UK.
Planning on messing around with proxmox on it, but I'd love to see your take on a slightly higher budget home server, I think it will allow for a much more powerful, more DIY approach.
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!
My wifes boyfriend loved this video. Thanks man!
Real stand up guy he his
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.
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...
Spinning up a VM would not be a problem if you put proxmox on that hp machine
The 'bald' spec is what made me buy one just now 🤣
An underrated feature
Bought one for €50 🖥
Unless those drives are NEW... i wouldn't put much stock into them lasting.
99% likely you don't need more power than RPi 4, also with external SSDs no moving parts, 3 watts dead silent. People these days use proxmox, truenas, unraid and synology garbage web ui forgetting tools like rsync, rclone and cron, what a joke. I run jellyfin, pi-hole, vaultwarden, samba, transmission, syncthing, filebrowser, lighttpd, full wikipedia kiwix server, all it takes is 450mb of ram. On idle cpu load is 0.00. No dockers, no VMs.
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
Yoooo this is actually my setup. I have the same pc with 2 3tb hard drives running jellyfin. I want to upgrade tho
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.
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 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.
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'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?
Makes budget home server
Proceeds to use unraid that costs half of what the server costs...
Yessir
That computer has better specs than my main pc which i game on…i‘m still on intel 3rd gen i5
$100 build. 4 bottles of cheap whiskey and be happy I have 1 computer that runs all my games.