Building home/media server

[mfenn]

Cool, let us know how it goes. 🙂

 

[smitbret]

Let us know. A good homebrew is so much less expensive than a prebuilt with the same performance and more flexible, too.

I'm curious what PSU you decided on. That's one place I would never cut corners with a NAS/Server. One blown cap or surge from a poor PSU and you just lost everything. It's the type of component than can be carried over to new build if it's a good one. Server PSU don't have to be large, either. 300W-400W is plenty for most home setups.

 

[ggadrian]

Let us know. A good homebrew is so much less expensive than a prebuilt with the same performance and more flexible, too.

I'm curious what PSU you decided on. That's one place I would never cut corners with a NAS/Server. One blown cap or surge from a poor PSU and you just lost everything. It's the type of component than can be carried over to new build if it's a good one. Server PSU don't have to be large, either. 300W-400W is plenty for most home setups.

I've read some positive reviews on internet, and it's looks that it's a basic but not bad quality one.

I has pretty high efficiency and build quality wasn't bad at all (or so they say). I wouldn't buy a no brand one, but I think that the fact of it being Corsair and reading that it's not a bad one made me set mi mind on it. Also, it's just 34€, so if it blows up in a few years i'll just put a new one in; and about blowing up the rest of the components, yes, it can happen, but I've seen a lot of PSU go belly up and the rest of the computer was perfectly fine, so I guess I'll take my chances.

Of course, if this system were critical and it had to have a high uptime I would put a better PSU.

About the wattage, I just didn't find a lower wattage one in my retailer (we don't have something as new egg, that has almost any part, so sometimes you just have to choose from what they have) that weren't an OEM one or really really cheap, so the VS450 was the lowest power one I was able to buy.

 

[smitbret]

Whoops, my bad. I didn't see the PSU in the list. I've no problems with that one.

 

[ggadrian]

Sorry for the delays but between configuring the server, studing for the final exams that I have after the holydays and christmas I've been pretty busy.

So, some pics of the server (sorry for the quality, I should have used the DSLR, but I wa anxious to strat building it, so I used the crappy camera in my nexus):

All the parts in their boxes before starting

Nice case, really good buid quality and pretty small

The motherboard fits without any problem, but I don't understand why the case doesn't come with the standof's preinstalled.

The PSU also fits perfectly. This unit despite being cheap feels heavy (for my at least it denotes quality) and nice.

The HDD trays are good looking and functional.

Some food for my and my brother, he'd never seen an open computer, so I tried to teach him something.

I tried to organize the cables, it doesn't look too organized, but they are and the air-flow path is clear from cables.

The finished computer is quite silent and runs really cool. It has an idle temperature of 31ºC and a loaded one that remains between 43 and 44ºC with the CPU cooler fan at 2000rpm (Intel stock).

I'm really happy with the build and with Windows Server 2012 R2, it's a really nice and useful OS. I think that I'm gonna use it in future projects, I really liked it. In fact today I ordered an 8GB RAM stick to setup some VM and practice with it.

Thank you all for your help.

 

[mfenn]

Very nice, glad it turned out well!