In my last post I talked about why I started this project to build a personal server, today I am going to dive a little deeper into the initial builds.
When I started to look at hardware availability, cost, and requirements to run unRAID, there was a lot of information to unpack. I could run unRAID on basically any PC built in the past 10 years, so I had to start to research what I intended this machine to do. I could have gone super simple and have it run just my data storage or go for gold with virtualization and docker containers. I ended up sliding between the wants and needs tables to build a machine that put me comfortably in the middle.
The first place I started was on eBay where I purchased an older Dell Optiplex tower with a 6th generation i7-6700k and 8gb of memory. It also had a 1tb HDD and a copy of windows installed, but I had no intention of keeping either of those. Only thing I needed to make this an operational server was a copy of unRAID, a flash drive, and some hard drives. I was able to slow roll the purchase of all these components due to being about 7,000 miles away from home at the time and wouldn’t be able to get home and build the server for a few months. I found some decent deals on Amazon and Best Buy for Western Digital Red 4tb hard drives and had acquired 7 drives by the time it was time to build.
Being as I was so far away for work and couldn’t actually build anything, it gave me a lot of time to research and watch YouTube videos on home labs. Over the course of the next 2-3 months, I had also purchased all the components necessary to build a 2nd unRAID server and also a pfsense router. The second unRAID server was built on the same i7-6700k CPU and an MSI Z270 gaming motherboard. I found a lot of several DDR3 memory on eBay so both PCs would end up having 32gb of memory.
After those few months of waiting patiently to come home, I had a plan formed for what I was going to do with these machines, and it was time to put it all into motion. I built both unRAID servers and named them phonetically to keep them straight. I usually name my laptops and desktops phonetically, but I started from the beginning of the alphabet for those. I decided for my servers, I would start at the end of the alphabet and work backwards. The first server was named Zulu and the second was named Yankee. Zulu was the MSI board and had 4 4tb drives and Yankee would be my backup server with only 3 drives.
unRAID works in a way that the entire storage array can be protected by a single hard drive with the only requirement being that it is the same size or bigger than the biggest drive in the storage array. Beings as I opted to use all 4tb drives, this wasn’t an issue. With the storage array protected with the single parity disk, I now had Zulu running with 12tb of useable storage and Yankee running with 8tb.
I built 2 servers so that eventually I could move one of them to an offsite location and have a backup of all my data protected where a fire or natural disaster could not destroy it. After playing around with the servers for about 6 months, I decided that the best option for Yankee was to send it to my childhood best friend back home where he still lives. He was running an Etsy business and needed some protected storage space for his graphic design work so I traded him Yankee for the service of running it in his house. He supplied his own WD Red 4tb drives for the build which meant that I was able to relocate the 3 original drives from Yankee to Zulu, bringing the useable storage space in Zulu to 24tb. By running this server in an offsite location, we were both able to use the docker container Lucky Backup to synchronize our data from hundreds of miles away to ensure that we never lost anything.
During the purchase of Zulu and Yankee, I had also bought an older Lenovo thin client and a NIC to build a pfsense router to replace my aging nighthawk Wi-Fi router. That process was quite simple and once I saw the freedom inside the options in my new router, I knew that would have to be a project for another day.
My family and I moved across the country to Las Vegas, and we downsized a little during the move and one of the things I let go was the old Lenovo router because I already had plans to rebuild Zulu and the repurpose the older hardware into a new pfsense router. I also added a new Eero mesh Wi-Fi system to our new house. I knew that ethernet wiring was a better option but we chose to rent a house in Las Vegas so I couldn’t easily run new ethernet throughout a place that didn’t belong to me.
Zulu was retired after only about 6 months of being in service. It had served its purpose to me; it was a great way to play with a system and learn how to manage a server in my home. By this time, Intel had released their 13th generation of chips and Best Buy was having a fire sale on the 11th generation of equipment. I picked up an i7-11700k and an Asus motherboard along with 32gb of DDR4 memory. It still had the 7 4tb drives and got a new 500gb m.2 drive for a cache drive and a 1tb 2.5″ SSD for virtual machine storage. With the new internals came a new name, Whiskey. With 8 cores and 16 threads and a core clock of 3.6 GHz, boostable to 5.0 GHz, Whiskey could handle most anything I wanted it to do. Since building it, I have upgraded the memory to 64gb and added an RTX 3060 for AI horsepower. I will write a post on building my own personal AI website soon.
The old MSI Z170 and 6th gen i7 now reside inside my pfsense router and its extreme overkill, but it was laying around so why not. I picked up a Thermaltake WP200 case to fit both Whiskey and the pfsense router into one giant server from Facebook Marketplace and was not disappointed in the case. If you have never seen this case, a google search might be worth it to you, it is seriously awesome if you do not want an actual server rack in your office or garage. I purchased a 2 post 19″ server rack to mount to the top of the WP200 for networking equipment and then populated it with a patch panel, Linksys 24 port 1gb switch and a Trend net 6 port switch for 5 2.5gb connections and one 10gb connection. The Eero mesh system was loaded into bridge mode and now serves as the Wi-Fi access points to my network, I gave all the routing function to the i7 powered pfsense router in the other side of the WP200 case.
The most recent PC I have built to add to my network is a new gaming PC. It is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X on an Asus Tuf B650-Plus board with 64gb of DDR5 memory and a Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card. It is easily the most powerful PC I have personally ever built and I love this beast.
As for the function of the servers running unRAID, I have proven that it is easily capable of running all of your storage needs and even a couple virtual machines off an older $100 Dell computer from eBay. Just keep in mind that these older computers may only have a couple sata connectors for drives and missing things like a slot on the board for an m.2 cache drive. You also may not be able to utilize a graphics card depending on what kind of power cords are available. If you have a little more in the budget for a server, someone’s older gaming rig would be an awesome way to go for your first build and depending on how old it is, you may be able to pick it up on the more affordable side. Whatever you can afford to begin with will be enough to start learning. You can expand later just like I did over 3 years. There is so much you can do and learn in the IT world that if this interests you, you should never be bored again. I am constantly learning about IT and deploying new solutions. Even this website is running on my network. I am hosting this blog from Whiskey and using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Tunnels to deploy this so you can read all about my journey. This will also be a topic of a future blog post so you can learn how to host your own site too.
I hope you will come back again and learn something new with me.
Travis
