Building a home server
Dec 22nd, 2007 by Admin
At my house we have four computers that regularly connect to the internet and each other, not to mention six or seven more that rotate in and out of use. This creates an enormous amount of files that need to be backed up, transferred between computers, and so forth. Our current solution is to simply pass around a USB hard drive but as you can imagine, that’s kind of a pain. So today, I decided to take the logical next step, and build a small server that can centrally store all of our files. It was much cheaper than I expected, just $300 with shipping for a 500gig server, with 89.99 for each additional 500 gig hard drive. Read on for specs .
The first thing I bought was a case and power supply. As we live in a small house, and this computer isn’t going to be connected to a monitor most of the time, form factor was critical. I picked out a micro ATX case with a 350 Watt power supply, 5 expansion slots, and good reviews. Price=39.99
The logical next step was to look at motherboards - it was already established that it had to be a micro ATX, given that I wanted it to fit in the case. The next major decision was whether to go AMD or Intel. Intel creates faster processors on the high-end, but this was just going to be a low powered machine, so that wasn’t necessary. AMD processors tend to be cheaper, so I went with that. After perusing several motherboards, I found an AM2 Asrock motherboard, with 4 SATA plugs, four DDR2 slots, and a decent onboard video card, making it possible for me to squeak by without buying a dedicated one. Price =53.99
Next up was RAM. This wasn’t gaming machine, but as it’s syncing with three or four computers, a decent amount of RAM is necessary, but it’s speed isn’t that critical. I decided to go with 2GB of A-DATA RAM. Price=33.98
Now for the processor. This one was kind of tricky - while I didn’t want to go overboard on processing speed, I also wanted copying of to go quickly, even if several people were backing stuff up at once. I decided to go with a low end Athlon dual core - 1.9Ghz. Price=55.99
Finally, what I built this for - storage. With the price of hard drives falling so quickly lately, there’s really no reason to get one smaller than 500GB. After considering the E-peen possibilities of terabyte, I decided to just go with one Western Digital harddrive for now. Price=89.99
That’s everything! Let’s total it up.
Total=$273.94
Not bad.
