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!
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.