I Built A $100 Storage Server! (2024)

what's going on guys my name is Matt and at this point I built a couple of custom storage servers and while I do consider those budget builds I think for most people making a system with dozens of terabytes and a price tag of over $1,000 doesn't make a lot of sense that got me thinking about what I would put together if I was just getting into home servers and had a much smaller budget say only a 100 bucks so because of this I decide to give myself the challenge of putting together a DIY Nas that can do stuff like host files local act as a personal cloud be a media server and even Host Game servers for stuff like Minecraft all with a budget of $100 this was definitely a big Challenge and the end result isn't perfect but I'm very excited to show you guys how it all turned out so without further Ado here's the story of how I built a super budget $100 storage server I think when building a cheap Home Server the best way to go about it is to take a similar approach to building an ultra budget gaming PC which is find an old pre-built for cheap and upgrade it to fit your needs now when picking a pre-built there are a lot of options from the likes of HP Lenovo and Dell but for me I wasn't looking for any specific brand and was much more focused on the specs they had the main thing I was looking for was a PC featuring a relatively modern quad core processor 8 GB or more of ram room for a few drives and ideally pcie slots for future expansion I think looking locally on sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace is a good idea especially if you live in a very populated area but for me I personally prefer eBay as I can still find a really good deal with enough searching and patience after looking at all the available options it looked like if I wanted to keep the base system at or under $50 the best thing to look for was a system with a 6G I5 as you can readily find pre-builts featuring one of those CPUs with 8 GB of RAM for $50 Buy It Now meaning if I search long enough I should be able to find one for even less after looking for a week or so I found an HP Elite desk 800 G3 for $25. 49 Plus $16. 9 for shipping which I am including shipping but will not be including taxes in the final price as they can vary from place to place so with a total price of $41.

68 this looked like it was going to be a great base system for this Budget Home Server while also leaving plenty of budget for upgrades after about a week of waiting this box landed on my doorstep the Box didn't seem to have any noticeable damage and opening it up I found the seller packaged the machine really nicely other than the PC itself the only other thing in the Box was an ATX power cable cutting open the bubble wrap revealed the machine I ordered in what I would consider fair condition with some minor scuffs with the PC onbox I decided the first order of business was to plug it in and see if it works after pressing the power button I was happy to see the machine start right up and after a few minutes of messing around and doing this I did eventually make it into the BIOS and once I confirmed it was recognizing all the hardware I decided to power it down to take a closer look and hopefully clean it up a bit as if the outside was any sign the inside was probably going to be pretty dusty so I put the Monitor and keyboard to the side and then struggled a while to get the top panel off as the latch was holding it stuck but after a couple minutes I figured out how to get inside opening it up revealed a moderately Dusty system so I decided to just pull everything out to both clean and get a closer look tear down was simple and the only really annoying thing was the fact all the screws were torqux and the fact you have to remove the CPU Cooler to remove the motherboard I started by wiping off the old thermal paste which actually looked like a relatively fresh application and then remove the single stick of ram then it was just a matter of doing an initial dusting and going over everything quickly with some Q-tips and 99% ice approval alcohol this isn't the best or most optimal method but these are the materials I had on hand and the end result is a decently clean board pulling the fan from the cooler revealed a fair bit of dust for the fan I again just used Q-tips and alcohol and for the heat sink just brushed away all the dust I could for the front panel dust was removed with a brush and vacuum and the Annoying paper sticker was no match for some alcohol and a plastic scraping tool then the power supply and fan shroud were just wiped down along with the main chassis itself getting the same treatment so with about 15 or 20 minutes of elbow grease I had some much cleaner parts before I throw everything back into the case let's talk about all of what came with the base system the CPU itself is an Intel cor 56500 a quad core CPU without hyperthreading and a Bas and boost clock of 3. 2 and 3. 6 GHz respectively this little quad core released all the way back in Q3 of 2015 but for a budget server like this one it should work great our CPU is sitting in a very proprietary LGA 1151 motherboard which features four dim slots three SATA ports four pcie slots an m.

2 slot for an SSD and an m. 2 slot for Wi-Fi which can actually be retrofitted for a number of different things and interestingly enough the front panel IO is actually built into the board in terms of back panel IO it has plenty of USB ports gigabit Ethernet and a few display out options this single Ram stick that I pulled out earlier is an 8 GB stick of Samsung ddr4 memory clocked at 2400 MHz what's nice is because this is only taking up one of the four slots it means we could theoretically upgrade to 32 GB of RAM in the future by popping in three more 8 GB sticks the cooler is a pretty basic all aluminum cooler but it definitely gets the job done the power supply is what I believe to be a tfx form factor unit with 180 WS of output and a surprising 80 plus Platinum rating all in all these parts came together to make a really nice base system to build off of and because the total cost was $41. 68 it means there's about $58 left in the budget so what was I looking to upgrade this machine with ideally I was looking to add an SSD boot Drve of some sort to larger mechanical drives for the storage pool and if budget permitted more RAM I decided to First grab the drives as those were going to take the biggest chunk of the budget and the reality of building a storage server this cheap is that new hard drives are going to be way too expensive this means I again had to turn to eBay after looking at options it seemed like I could get a couple 2 TB drives that would fit into the budget my search led me to this listing featuring a couple 7200 RPM 2 terb Seagate drives I spe specifically went for these as they were only $18 a pop with free shipping and the listing stated they had 100% Health which I decide to take the seller's word for with that being said don't be afraid to ask for smart data to see stuff like Drve health and Power on time before your purchase the worst the seller can do is say no which would be a good sign to move on to a different listing with the remaining 20ish dollar I purchased a 128 GB OEM Samsung nvme SSD for $9.

99 with free shipping along with an identical stick of ram to the one already installed for $987 again with free shipping this meant I was all in at $975 before tax for all the parts and all that was left to do was wait for everything to arrive the hard drives arrived nicely packed and bubble wrap and before putting them into the system I wanted to plug them into my PC and check the drive health and Data Drve 1 showed to be in good health with a power on time of about 2 years and a power up count of only 22 the second drive again showed good health but a higher power on time of 3 years and a few more power ups this overall is decent and while there's no telling when these drives will fail I do expect these could very easily last for another 2 or 3 years in a server like this one the SSD like the drives came packaged well and I went ahead and installed it into my m. 2 nvme to USB adapter so I could check its Health plugging it into my PC I found that well it did state it was in good health it also showed an estimated 44% life remaining and about 71 tab of Lifetime rights this isn't great and if I wasn't sticking to a very strict budget I would have just grabbed a new drive for5 or $10 more with that being said using a drive like this means you definitely want to be backing it up as much as possible as there's no telling how long it'll last finally the ram showed up and opening it up and comparing it to my current stick confirmed it was in fact the same model and capacity and I decided to just test this in the system itself as RAM doesn't really have a lifetime line as much as normal storage does and generally speaking it either just works or it doesn't so with the parts in hand it meant it was time to upgrade the base system I started by installing the second stick of RAM and from what I found on hp's website it doesn't matter which channel the two sticks are in so I just placed them in slots 2 and four then for the SSD I installed it into the m. 2 slot in the board and ended up having to use one of my own m.

2 screws as the board didn't come with one then it was time to install the drives and I realized something one I needed an extra satad data cable and two I didn't have the official mounting hardware for the drives so I just used an extra Sata cable that I had and just set the drives into place for now and decided I would figure out a mounting solution later obviously the Sata cable and m.