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Abstract

$50 on eBay</a> or <a href="https://amzn.to/3AWQynd">Amazon in abundance</a>. I found one for$ 14 and another for $13, both with free shipping.</p><h2 id="f603">Motherboard ($ 65)</h2><p id="7d92">The motherboard recommended on the forum post mentioned in the introduction is the <a href="https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/QPI/5500/X8DTL-iF.cfm">Supermicro X8DTL-iF</a> which has two LGA1366 CPU sockets, six slots for DDR3 RAM, and six SATA connectors which (as we’ll see later) is perfect for the case purchased for the build. I’m sure there are other boards out there that will work well (and maybe even better) but, as I said in the introduction, the build is based on the LTT forum post and I wanted to make sure I got a motherboard that I knew would work for the build. One good thing about this board is that they are <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313&_nkw=Supermicro+X8DTL-iF&_sacat=0">readily available on eBay for under $100</a>.</p><h2 id="0a9e">RAM ($ 92)</h2><p id="86b3">Since these CPUs were released ~10 years ago (from the time of writing) the standard was DDR3 RAM. I went with <a href="https://amzn.to/39S9pUB">64GB of SuperMicro DDR3 1333MHz RAM from Amazon</a>. This particular module is on the <a href="https://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/mem.cfm">tested memory list from SuperMicro</a>. The motherboard above has 6 RAM slots and claims to only support 24 GB of DDR3 800/1066/1333MHz of non-ECC unbuffered memory or 96GB of ECC Registered memory. This isn’t really a lot of RAM by today’s standards but should be enough to serve my purposes.</p><p id="39e4">That being said, the <a href="https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/47921/intel-xeon-processor-x5660-12m-cache-2-80-ghz-6-40-gt-s-intel-qpi.html">Intel X5660 should support up to 288 GB of RAM</a>. So, if you tried, you might be able to find a motherboard that supports much more RAM if need be. Additionally, the motherboard I purchased will support 96 GB of ECC registered memory but this will likely raise the price above $500-600 as this is the most expensive component of the build.</p><h2 id="3e93">Case ($ 47)</h2><p id="51be">When choosing this case the most important things for me were the number of 3.5"/2.5" internal drive bays for extendable storage capacity and the airflow since I didn’t want a restrictive case that required multiple loud fans. I also wanted a case that wasn’t too flashy, this is a server we’re building here so the RGBs would be (even more) unnecessary. One more obvious criterion was the price. Since I was building a budget server I wanted something that wasn’t built terribly but could be bought for $60 or less. Because of this, I choose the plain <a href="https://amzn.to/39WBEkZ">Thermaltake Versa H21</a> which has three 3.5" and three 2.5" internal bays. I’ve owned two Thermaltake cases in the past and have been pretty happy with their build quality (although those were a little pricier than this one).</p><h2 id="60c6">CPU Coolers and Case Fans ($ 40)</h2><p id="337a">Good coolers and fans are obviously very important for any PC build but finding cheap, good coolers can be difficult especially considering this build needs two of them. I found these <a href="https://amzn.to/3F51YI7">DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX 300</a> CPU coolers for $20 each on Newegg. They had good reviews on both Amazon and Newegg and, most importantly to me, they are supposed to be quiet at 18-21dB(A).</p><p id="b961">As for case fans, the case mentioned above comes with one 120mm rear case fan and room for two 120mm fans in the front of the case. Since I don’t plan on the server operating under a heavy workload very often (if at all) I opted to not buy any additional fans. I do have a few fans in my closet that will fit the case if need be but, if you don’t, good, quiet <a href="https://amzn.to/3ATUG7y">Noctua fans can be found on Amazon</a> for around$ 15–20 and a plethora of other fans are available for about half of that (I’ve had good experiences with <a href="https://amzn.to/3zVw8Kf">ARCTIC fans</a> which are usually pretty cheap).</p><h2 id="f4e8">Hard Drives ($180)</h2><p id="a2d9">For the RAID drives, storage capacity was the biggest consideration (and, obviously, price). I opted for slow <a href="https://amzn.to/3kSE2ja">(5400 RPM) Seagate BarraCuda hard drives

Options

</a> since I would just be copying data to them late at night (around 3 AM once a week) and would rarely be reading and writing to them besides that.</p><p id="a951">As for the hard drive for the operating system, I had some old 2.5" HDDs lying around from laptops and opted to use a 320 GB WD Blue of that form factor (super budget here, $0). Don’t worry if you don’t have an extra hard drive lying around. A cheap SSD that’s plenty big to run Linux (120-250GB) or a much larger (but slower) HDD can be purchased for around$ 20–50.</p><h2 id="4c96">Power Supply ( $0-$ 100)</h2><p id="aa4f">Fortunately, I had an old power supply already that was more than big enough for this PC. I had purchased a new one thinking the old one had gone bad in a previous build but it turned out not to be the issue. So, the power supply has just been sitting in my closet for a few years.</p><p id="68d1">If you’re less fortunate (or less of a hoarder), a reasonably good power supply can be purchased for around $50-$ 100 on Newegg or Amazon. If you do a little research and read a few reviews you should end up with a pretty good power supply without pushing you over the $600 budget. For this build (since there isn’t a power-hog GPU) anything around 500 watts should be more than enough. If you deviate from the above there are power supply calculators available all over the web (e.g. <a href="https://www.newegg.com/tools/power-supply-calculator/">this one from OuterVision</a>).</p><p id="9e00">The most important thing to note in terms of the power supply is that it has 2 EPS/CPU connectors if you are using both CPUs in the motherboard. These are the 8 pin (4+4) connectors used to power the CPUs; many power supplies only contain one such connector and the GPU 8 pin (6+2) configuration does not work for the CPU. Some EVGA power supplies have this functionality including the <a href="https://amzn.to/3D07KZE">EVGA 750 GQ</a> which should also provide enough power for this system. There are many other <a href="https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007657%20601331284">power supplies that can fulfill this role as well</a>.</p><h2 id="b2b0">Miscellaneous ($ 5– $20)</h2><p id="981d">There may be a few other things you need for this build. For example, I bought some Arctic Silver thermal paste to install the CPU fans on Amazon for ~$ 6. You might also want to pick up some cable ties for nice cable management (if you don’t have any or don’t like zip ties). There are a few things you can add on but they shouldn’t break the bank and may not be necessary for the build.</p><h2 id="2239">Operating System ( $0)</h2><p id="825a">Like any good server, my home server will be running Linux which, in most cases, is free. I chose to use <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> for the operating system. It was a toss-up between CentOS and Debian but, having much more experience with Debian-based distributions (Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS), I decided to go with the latter. I’m choosing to use the stable release of Debian with no desktop which recommends 512 MB of RAM and 2 GB of hard drive space but claims to take less than that depending on installation options.</p><h1 id="84d8">Conclusion</h1><p id="c0ac">If, like me, you happen to have the same spare parts lying around the build total comes to$ 457. Looking at the worst cases from the sections above goes a little over budget at $641. This assumes you buy a$ 100 power supply, a $50 drive for the operating system, an additional$ 20 case fan, and $20 worth of installation supplies (miscellaneous). I think a more realistic estimate, for those without any spare parts, would be closer to$ 566. For this number I assumed an extra $15 was spent on a case fan,$ 40 went towards a drive for the OS, a power supply was purchased for $50, and$ 10 of miscellaneous installation hardware was needed (I’m assuming you need at least thermal paste and zip ties).</p><p id="bb40">In conclusion, the parts selected above are not about to break any records but for a relatively low price, this parts list should give you a pretty solid home server. With 12 cores/24 threads, ~4TB of storage (assuming RAID 1), and 24 GB of RAM (albeit DDR3 RAM) this PC should pack enough horsepower for many standard home server tasks, e.g. hosting some popular video game servers (Minecraft), file storage/serving, and hosting/running various bots.</p></article></body>

Building an Affordable Home Server with Old Server Hardware (<$600)

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. All of the links leading to amazon.com are affiliate links. Purchases made via these links entitle me to a portion of the proceeds from the sale.

For quite some time I’ve been wanting to build a home server to safely (and redundantly) store files, host video game servers, and handle various tasks I’ve written about in previous posts (e.g. host discord bots, run algorithmic P2P trading bots, and gather data for my stock information database). To handle these tasks I currently use my primary machine (which I use for work, writing, and programming) and a collection of Raspberry Pi 3’s and 4’s that I have accrued over time. This setup has worked fine so far, but, while adding another SSD to my system that I planned on installing another Linux distro on, I broke the SATA connector on the HDD that I use for file backup. This HDD is used to store family photos and old documents from the various PC’s that I’ve built in the past. The hard drive has been through 3 machines and stores what I consider important data.

Fortunately, I still have the hard drives from the old machines and the larger data HDD for my current machine (typically I boot from an SSD/M.2 and have a larger disk drive for storage) so no data was actually lost. However, for the time being, this data has no redundancy. This incident opened my eyes to the need for redundant storage and, ideally, a file server.

There were a couple of approaches I considered. Either I was going to build a new machine to handle the tasks I outlined above of or I was going to buy a RAID enclosure and some hard drives and just have a standalone attachable storage device. While making the decision I was looking for home server ideas for under $500 USD and came across this Linus Tech Tips forum post which outlined exactly that. Most of the build was lifted from a comment on this post but I did have some parts already available at home and needed to pick out a few components that weren’t listed.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the machine I built to host my file server, game servers, web services, and other various tasks. You should easily be able to duplicate this build for <$600 USD and likely less than $500 if you shop around. I will emphasize that the PC built from the parts below should perform fairly well as a home server but will probably not be breaking any performance records.

The Parts List

CPUs (2x$13.50)

The affordability of this home server is driven by the inexpensive CPUs and corresponding motherboard. The CPUs I used are Intel X5660's which launched in Q1 of 2010 and were on Intel’s 32nm node. The processors have 6 cores and 12 threads each which gives this system a total of 12 cores and 24 threads running at 2.80 GHz/3.20 GHz turbo. These CPUs are certainly not new but can be found for under $50 on eBay or Amazon in abundance. I found one for $14 and another for $13, both with free shipping.

Motherboard ($65)

The motherboard recommended on the forum post mentioned in the introduction is the Supermicro X8DTL-iF which has two LGA1366 CPU sockets, six slots for DDR3 RAM, and six SATA connectors which (as we’ll see later) is perfect for the case purchased for the build. I’m sure there are other boards out there that will work well (and maybe even better) but, as I said in the introduction, the build is based on the LTT forum post and I wanted to make sure I got a motherboard that I knew would work for the build. One good thing about this board is that they are readily available on eBay for under $100.

RAM ($92)

Since these CPUs were released ~10 years ago (from the time of writing) the standard was DDR3 RAM. I went with 64GB of SuperMicro DDR3 1333MHz RAM from Amazon. This particular module is on the tested memory list from SuperMicro. The motherboard above has 6 RAM slots and claims to only support 24 GB of DDR3 800/1066/1333MHz of non-ECC unbuffered memory or 96GB of ECC Registered memory. This isn’t really a lot of RAM by today’s standards but should be enough to serve my purposes.

That being said, the Intel X5660 should support up to 288 GB of RAM. So, if you tried, you might be able to find a motherboard that supports much more RAM if need be. Additionally, the motherboard I purchased will support 96 GB of ECC registered memory but this will likely raise the price above $500–600 as this is the most expensive component of the build.

Case ($47)

When choosing this case the most important things for me were the number of 3.5"/2.5" internal drive bays for extendable storage capacity and the airflow since I didn’t want a restrictive case that required multiple loud fans. I also wanted a case that wasn’t too flashy, this is a server we’re building here so the RGBs would be (even more) unnecessary. One more obvious criterion was the price. Since I was building a budget server I wanted something that wasn’t built terribly but could be bought for $60 or less. Because of this, I choose the plain Thermaltake Versa H21 which has three 3.5" and three 2.5" internal bays. I’ve owned two Thermaltake cases in the past and have been pretty happy with their build quality (although those were a little pricier than this one).

CPU Coolers and Case Fans ($40)

Good coolers and fans are obviously very important for any PC build but finding cheap, good coolers can be difficult especially considering this build needs two of them. I found these DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX 300 CPU coolers for $20 each on Newegg. They had good reviews on both Amazon and Newegg and, most importantly to me, they are supposed to be quiet at 18–21dB(A).

As for case fans, the case mentioned above comes with one 120mm rear case fan and room for two 120mm fans in the front of the case. Since I don’t plan on the server operating under a heavy workload very often (if at all) I opted to not buy any additional fans. I do have a few fans in my closet that will fit the case if need be but, if you don’t, good, quiet Noctua fans can be found on Amazon for around $15–20 and a plethora of other fans are available for about half of that (I’ve had good experiences with ARCTIC fans which are usually pretty cheap).

Hard Drives ($180)

For the RAID drives, storage capacity was the biggest consideration (and, obviously, price). I opted for slow (5400 RPM) Seagate BarraCuda hard drives since I would just be copying data to them late at night (around 3 AM once a week) and would rarely be reading and writing to them besides that.

As for the hard drive for the operating system, I had some old 2.5" HDDs lying around from laptops and opted to use a 320 GB WD Blue of that form factor (super budget here, $0). Don’t worry if you don’t have an extra hard drive lying around. A cheap SSD that’s plenty big to run Linux (120–250GB) or a much larger (but slower) HDD can be purchased for around $20–50.

Power Supply ($0–$100)

Fortunately, I had an old power supply already that was more than big enough for this PC. I had purchased a new one thinking the old one had gone bad in a previous build but it turned out not to be the issue. So, the power supply has just been sitting in my closet for a few years.

If you’re less fortunate (or less of a hoarder), a reasonably good power supply can be purchased for around $50–$100 on Newegg or Amazon. If you do a little research and read a few reviews you should end up with a pretty good power supply without pushing you over the $600 budget. For this build (since there isn’t a power-hog GPU) anything around 500 watts should be more than enough. If you deviate from the above there are power supply calculators available all over the web (e.g. this one from OuterVision).

The most important thing to note in terms of the power supply is that it has 2 EPS/CPU connectors if you are using both CPUs in the motherboard. These are the 8 pin (4+4) connectors used to power the CPUs; many power supplies only contain one such connector and the GPU 8 pin (6+2) configuration does not work for the CPU. Some EVGA power supplies have this functionality including the EVGA 750 GQ which should also provide enough power for this system. There are many other power supplies that can fulfill this role as well.

Miscellaneous ($5–$20)

There may be a few other things you need for this build. For example, I bought some Arctic Silver thermal paste to install the CPU fans on Amazon for ~$6. You might also want to pick up some cable ties for nice cable management (if you don’t have any or don’t like zip ties). There are a few things you can add on but they shouldn’t break the bank and may not be necessary for the build.

Operating System ($0)

Like any good server, my home server will be running Linux which, in most cases, is free. I chose to use Debian for the operating system. It was a toss-up between CentOS and Debian but, having much more experience with Debian-based distributions (Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS), I decided to go with the latter. I’m choosing to use the stable release of Debian with no desktop which recommends 512 MB of RAM and 2 GB of hard drive space but claims to take less than that depending on installation options.

Conclusion

If, like me, you happen to have the same spare parts lying around the build total comes to $457. Looking at the worst cases from the sections above goes a little over budget at $641. This assumes you buy a $100 power supply, a $50 drive for the operating system, an additional $20 case fan, and $20 worth of installation supplies (miscellaneous). I think a more realistic estimate, for those without any spare parts, would be closer to $566. For this number I assumed an extra $15 was spent on a case fan, $40 went towards a drive for the OS, a power supply was purchased for $50, and $10 of miscellaneous installation hardware was needed (I’m assuming you need at least thermal paste and zip ties).

In conclusion, the parts selected above are not about to break any records but for a relatively low price, this parts list should give you a pretty solid home server. With 12 cores/24 threads, ~4TB of storage (assuming RAID 1), and 24 GB of RAM (albeit DDR3 RAM) this PC should pack enough horsepower for many standard home server tasks, e.g. hosting some popular video game servers (Minecraft), file storage/serving, and hosting/running various bots.