During last month I had build a home server from scratch, of course I could buy one already build. But after careful exam of most home server sold out there, I notice that:
- Lack of ram, most of then only have 512mb or the best is 1gb. If i want for instance have a VM running on, that might be a problem
- All home server I’ve saw, most uses the intel atom CPU with just one core.
- Power consuming
- Expansion. I want a home server that I can add disks, if I want, let me just say that my option is not the best but I have 2 sata and 1 ide. So to me it’s enough.
- Silence, I want a home server silent. My choices were not very good at the beginning but now it’s silent enough.
- Network card, I wanted to be a gigabit Ethernet card.
- Price. I didn’t want to spent too much money.
So what were my choices:
First, the case. I choose the the Apex mi-008
It’s a small case, and silent. You can check the review here.
Second, the board. For the board I had choose the Intel D945GCLF2D, it’s a mini-itx board very small, but it had a Intel dual core Atom CPU, each core has hyper-thread. It has 2 sata, 1 ide, 8 usb, vga, 1 gigabit Ethernet connection. More info check here.
This board has a big big problem… do you see that small cooler on the board. That is definitely the loudest GPU cooler I’ve ever saw. Believe me when I say it’s loud.
Third , the ram, I have a 2gb ram ddr2.
Finally the disk is a WDC 640gb.
Put all of this together and you have a home server.
Now you can choose either install some linux distribution like freenas, or Windows home server, or something else. I decided to buy a license of home server.
All of these have some pros and cons.
So the pros are:
- It’s a fast home server. Faster than most home servers sold out there with a fraction of the price. By the way I’ve only spent 230€ here in Portugal for the hardware, plus a license of WHS bought on Amazon.
- I have dual core CPU with 2 gb of ram.
- The CPU is fan less, so it’s silent
Cons:
- Definitely the worst thing in this home server is the GPU cooler
So, after every thing is built I start making changes.
- I’ve turned of the GPU cooler, this is not a very smart idea but after I measure temperatures, in speedfan, with fan and without fan, differences were not very different.
- Since I’ve turned off the cooler I bought a 120mm very silent fun from Noctua and installed on the side. This way I’m able to cool CPU and a GPU.
- Very soon I will buy a silent GPU cooler to replace that “thing”
So my current values of temperatures, on idle, are:
| Ambient | 37ºC |
| Remote 1 | 49ºC |
| Remote 2 | 47ºC |
| HD0 | 38ºC |
| Core 1 | 8ºC |
| Core 2 | 16ºC |
| Core 3 | 8ºC |
| Core 4 | 16ºC |
My opinion, is that, if you have time a patience you can build a better server that those sold out there…