Hello!
I’ve decided to build my own small server for the house and would really appreciate some advice. I’m plannin on using it for storage, video sharing(was gonna do Plex but I jus heard about the price change and something about jellyfin?), Minecraft, and Valheim. Nothin too serious. I have a pair of 12tb HDDs (a Seagate iron wolf and a WD Red), a Lenovo m710q to use as the base, and HexOS to run it . As I’ve opened it up I realized is not gonna be as simple as I thought, like the sata cable not having room for more, or if they can be powered by the board itself. I was already thinking of getting a smallish SSD to run the OS off of and upgrading the ram kit already, but with the HDDs I’m not as sure. Should I look into a sata splitter and get creative with adding the HDDs, should I look into getting a pair of external HDD cages, or should I drop back and punt with my old i5-4590 tower I was using until I upgraded my old rig? I figured the m710q would run it better, but yeah.
Thanks for any help!
I would set up a media server in the old case that fits your drives but set up the game servers on the lenovo.
Plex is fine for people that already have it set up but since you’re starting from scratch why not start with the free one?
Have you already bought a HexOS license? You can do more with Proxmox or TrueNAS for free.
I was about to suggest the same: Proxmox VE on the m710q, and something like TrueNAS, or good ol’ Debian (using NFS so the m710q VMs can mount remote folders) and podman/docker/whatever on the i5-4590 to run stuff like Jellyfin.
Another possibility: Proxmox on both, clustered (not that really hard to achieve), with a “NAS” VM on the i5-4590 node and another transcoding/media-player VM with Jellyfin (you can relatively easily expose PCIe stuff to a VM with Proxmox nowadays, including a gfx card).
If OP prefers runing LXC containers, Incus can also be an interesting choice.
Yeah, I got it on sale back in December
drop back and punt with my old i5-4590 tower
This one. It’s old, but with RAM and a GPU you’ll be able to handle streaming/transcoding.
The problem with Dell/HP/Lenovo etc. PCs, especially smaller form factors, is that they’re non-standard, as you found. And not just the motherboard mounts, but also the power supply connectors, and often other stuff too. And any feature found on a typical board, but not used in that particular model, will be missing, like multiple SATA ports, again as you found.
You could probably get a newer desktop for not much money, too.
To add on this, my server is running a 4790k, and that’s plenty for all common tasks. While faster is always nicer, the threshold for good enough is very low for server tasks.
What form factor is the m710q? I have a tiny FF so I’m imagining you trying to squeeze two HDDs into that… I was in a similar situation a while ago and broke down and bought a new case and transplanted my CPU and RAM. The options are only limited by your budget and needs when building
It definitely is too small to fit them, I think my original idea was to move the guts to my old case, but the shape of the mb changes that. Though I could probably jus use the old hdd cages for that anyway, maybe even plop the thing in whole and wire the HDDs outside the m710q an into the cage like normal. May look a lil janky, but if it works thas what works for me, though I would still have to power the drives
The power supply probably won’t spin those drives and you may have some difficulty with thermal management. I used a SFF PC case with a SATA extender running outside to a few HDDs for a while. The drives got really hot until I got a fan running over them. This was a super janky setup though. Made a lot of dust. If you’re looking to stay low budget and don’t need RAID or SMART reporting then I would get an enclosure for those drives and just use USB. Otherwise see what you can Frankenstein from what you have. I built a NAS using my janky setup’s HDDs, CPU, and RAM. Got a cheap full size tower, old motherboard off eBay, basic cooler, and power supply for much cheaper than a new build. Still janky but upgradable with a lot of internal space for storage/GPUs.
I have a Tiny connected to a startech dual USB drive dock. The drives get warm, but not deadly hot. Moving big files is a bit slow, but for streaming on Plex and Jellyfin it works fine.
I love that dock. I had four HDDs in two of these docks connected to one of my servers for a bit. Same experience. A bit slow for large transfers but fast enough for HD streaming. I think the space between the drives allows for enough natural airflow to keep them relatively cool. I think the hottest they got was 63 degrees Celsius during a large transfers. Usually stayed a bit below 60. In my janky homebrew NAS I see temperatures around 50, give or take 5 degrees. The use case should really determine the build so that may be the best option for many, especially with budget constraints.
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