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!
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.