Alex Hyett

Building a new home server

For the past couple of weeks I have slowly been putting together my new home server. I say new, it is new to me, but the core consists of parts salvaged from an old computer.

My Dad had an old motherboard, CPU and RAM lying around, so I thought I would put it to good use rather than taking it to landfill. This is what I had to work with:

I currently have a Dell Wyze 5070 as my always on server. This thing uses between 5 - 15W which at my current energy price of £0.2577/kWh means it costs between £11 - £34 a year to run. The problem is, it only has 128 GB of hard drive space, so I am limited to what I can use it for.

This new server is going to act as a multimedia, entertainment, storage server. Essentially it is a NAS with benefits. I have 2 TB drives from an old D-Link NAS that have been sitting unused as well as a bunch of hard drives from other builds that I plan to put into it.

I bought a copy of Unraid Plus (before they put the price up) which I am using as the OS. If you are not familiar with Unraid, it is a NAS OS that lets you combine multiple drives of varying sizes into one big array. It also has built in support for running docker containers and virtual machines.

To use Unraid you need to have one hard drive that needs to be at least as big as your biggest hard drive. This is what they call a parity drive. It essentially does bitwise operations on your other disks, so it knows what is on them and can rebuild a drive if it fails.

You also have the option to add in SSD drives or NVMe for cache which can be used for faster writes as well as for running VMs and Docker.

New Parts #

For those interested this is what I ended up buying for this new server:

Since getting my SteamDeck, I no longer use my old gaming machine, so I managed to salvage a few parts from that as well.

Now you might be wondering why I need a graphics card in an overpowered NAS server.

The plan is to set up a Windows VM and offload some of the more power hungry and large games on to the VM. There are a few games that I play on my Steam Deck such as Red Dead Redemption 2, which work well but cause the Steam Deck to sound like it is going to take off and drain the battery like crazy.

With the Windows VM, I can turn it on when I need it and enjoy a whopping 6 hours battery life streaming games from the server.

Server Uses #

I am planning on keeping my Dell Wyze 5070 as my main always on server. With such a small energy footprint it is useful to have something running all the time.

This new server uses a lot more power, so I have it scheduled to turn off every day at 10pm, and I turn it on manually in the morning. I bought a Tasmota Power Monitor plug from LocalBytes to monitor the server's power.

If I left this server on 24/7, at 50W it would cost £112 a year to run or less than £10 a month. Which is actually not too bad, I just don't like the idea of a full computer running all the time when I am not home or asleep.

The plan is to split my Docker containers and other services between my Dell server and my new one. Anything that needs access to a lot of data will run on the new server, whereas lightweight services will run on the Dell.

New Server #

This is what I am going to be running on my new server:

This server is also going to be for general backup as well. I currently have over 100 GB of video recorded for my YouTube channel which is just sitting on my desktop at the moment.

Old Server #

On my old server is anything that I need access to 24/7.

If you are thinking of building your own server I would recommend dabbling with the low power servers first before building a bigger one. Unless you need the hard drive space a small server would likely cover most of your needs.

I am quite happy with my new server, but I will likely upgrade the parts I got from my Dad in a year or so. The i5-4690K processor is coming up for 10 years old now and with only 4 cores there is a limit to how much I can do with it. The newer Intel processors tend to use a lot less power when idle too. Luckily I will still be able to reuse all the other parts that I bought for this system.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

📝 Article - There’s a 30-year old dead rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station - I am not old enough to remember these but if you have ever seen this at Seven Sisters, now you know why.

📝 Article - On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars - I am a terrible writer. I know this for a fact when I read in awe at other writers words. One of these writers is Maggie Appleton. All her writing is brilliant, so if she is dishing out writing advice, I am going to read it.

🛠 Tool - GitHub - johang/btfs: A bittorrent filesystem based on FUSE. -This seems like an interesting use for BitTorrent. Although I am not sure how well it works if there is no one to download the file from.

❓ - KRAZAM - Looking for some Windows 98 nostalgia? This is brilliant.

📝 Article - Taking regular screenshots of my website - My website has gone through a lot of iterations and I don't have a copy of what it used to look like. The wayback machine is great for content, but it often doesn't preserve the style of your site. This was alexhyett.com in 2015, I am pretty sure it looked better than that.

📝 Article - Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs - If you are generating IDs that are going to be read by people then it is worth considering leaving out "visually ambiguous characters". There is nothing worse than reading out a string of characters and not knowing if something is an O or a 0, or a 1 of and I. Depending on the font it can be difficult to tell.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

Dometrain, the course platform that I have my SOLID course on is having a promotion for it's 1 year birthday. 40% off any course with the code BIRTHDAY40. There are some great courses on there so worth a look. You can also get 20% off any bundle with BIRTHDAY20 and 15% off Dometrain Pro with BIRTHDAY15. Offer ends on Tuesday (30th April).

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