A 12-Bay, 1U Storage Server for $120?!? 

"it's new server day". This got me so excited to see what you planned

Congratulations! your AC duct is now grounded :P

Thats a terrific find. The fact that at 1U the fans don't wail like an unending horde of evil banshees on a night out gets triple bonus points.

I bought one of these, so I thought I'd share my experience so far: #1) I should have gotten the 16GB version (was only $16 more when I ordered) #2) the CPU heatsink had the wrong orientation (was perpendicular to fan airflow, blew the fan shroud right off as soon as it powered up :) #3) the HD screw mounting holes have been changed for high capacity drives (6+TB, I believe) so I could only use two screws on my 14TB drives (screw and grommet technique works well) #4) IPMI works (pw root/root) *but* Java client for remote viewing is a problem (I couldn't get it working on Windows 10) #5) BIOS defaults enable VT-d, so I didn't need to change anything for my use case #6) ProxMox installs without trouble, all hardware including Intel NICs supported (just need to add "intel_iommu=on" to grub config, for hw pass through) #7) added a PCIe x1 2-port SATA controller using riser cable, for system (ProxMox boot drive) #8) I installed TrueNAS in a VM (why I should have gotten the 16GB version), and passed through both the LSI controller (handles 8 of the drive bays) and the regular SATA controller (handles other 4 bays plus 2 more ports) #9) on first boot TrueNAS updated the LSI firmware (from 13->20) #10) at idle, with only SSD system drive, power consumption was 35W. After adding 3 14TB WDs, power consumption was 68W under load (which matches similar results of 10W per USB enclosure for the WD drives). I believe TrueNAS has some options for power savings and idle drives, will experiment. #11) I added a 10Gb Solarflare S7120 (riser card), which works great. However, I didn't expect that adding it would disable the two onboard Intel NICs (maybe a BIOS setting?). This might explain his trouble with the onboard NICs and TrueNAS. #12) build quality is excellent! Fans spin up loud, but then throttle down to "audible but quiet". Temps are very good (Xeon running at 40C under load), LSI and SATA controller heatsinks just warm to touch. PSU is labelled 400W 80+ Gold (but lshw reports "product: FSP500-701UP"?). I'll be using this as my shared storage iSCSI server. I only put ProxMox on it so I could manage it along with my ProxMox cluster from a single web page (also, I'm not familiar with FreeBSD, so having a "Linux layer" underneath TrueNAS gives me some more power in dealing with the hardware, just in case). I installed the "iSCSI over ZFS" patch for FreeNAS/TrueNAS in ProxMox, which works great - so once my initial configuration of TrueNAS is complete, I'll only use it for monitoring purposes (ProxMox can do everything else). Was going to buy another 16GB of RAM, but it cost $73, so I decided to order another entire Chenbro with 16GB (and no CPU) for $120 instead - and just keep it for parts :O

For those who may need it, the NIC issue is with the BIOS, not TrueNAS. In "Advanced" -> "Onboard Device Configuration" change the "Dynamic Onboard LAN Control" to "Disabled". When this is "Enabled", the BIOS will automatically Disable Onboard NICs when the BIOS detects an installed NIC card. I'm currently running the same 10Gbe card in the video along side the onboard LAN, with no issues on TruNAS 12.0-U1

I wonder what comes first, TrueNAS sees this and fixes the driver for this NIC, Jeff mod's this chassis for ATX and a different FLEX ATX PSU, or all the Chenbro NR12000's go out of stock on eBay?

They also have a 1u dual LGA 2011 gen 1 called the “hyve Zeus” for around $100 barebones. It’s the size of a switch, with 2x 2.5” bays. I had a cluster of 3 of them for esxi, and they were surprisingly quiet

For anyone wondering the default IMPI user/pass is root/root . Also the interface is DHCP out the box.

I just keep telling myself "I don't need it. I don't need it. I don't need it." Hopefully I'll be able to convince myself 😬

Therapist: "So, tell me, why do you think you are ... strange?" Me: "I am watching young(er) men building servers and putting them into racks... and enjoy it..." :P Having worked in the industry for over 20 yrs, pushing a lot servers in myself, I can feel what you felt... :D

Oh dear friend when you hold your glass and wave it over the server, a fright takes me.

My 1U almost never is on. I can here it in the room above, my kids' bedroom, like an F14 ready for a cat shot.

Wait, you got that for $120 with shipping included? The seller basically paid YOU to take it off their hands? This is one of the few channels on RU-vid where you can proudly say you are showing off your rack.

I came for the build and stayed for the music. Pretty damn cool vid bro😎

Thanks, I didn't know I wanted to buy my Christmas gift for myself already.

Wife is going to be angry again...

AWESOME find! I like this storage chassis, especially as a single storage node. The only downside I see is that it only has 1 PCIe full size slot. I built my TrueNAS (OK it was still FreeNAS when I built it) around a Dell R520 that I added an external RAID controller (flashed to IT mode) to connect to my disk enclosure (NetApp DS4243), and I am also running a Mellanox ConnectX 3 NIC. But I think I may pick up a couple of these to run as additional storage nodes, the price is awesome!

I'm glad I saw this video when I did. I had just bought a Fractal Node 804 and was going to build a new NAS in it with the guts of my daughter's previous Dell workstation. Then I realized there would be more modding than I wanted to do (any at all was going to be too much) to adapt the front panel pins of the case to the board. I bought one of these with the E3-1230v2 instead so I'll build something else in the Node 804 later. My wife was happy that I "saved" money by doing it this way.

Just built a 1U server for replacing an old (and slow) HP Microserver. I saved myself over $1,100 doing it myself. One of your other videos about building rack servers inspired me to build it. Thanks!

Literally bought one of these servers with an E3 1230 V2 for a home NAS. The server with the CPU and 16 GB of RAM was $174 shipped. Picked it specifically because of this video. Nice find!!

Bank account hurting now after purchasing one of these plus 2 Hyve Zeus for the lab. Thanks for the info, Jeff! 👍

I've been needing something like this; thanks for making the video and doing all the research!

Nice ! Wish I was able to pick one of those up in the UK .... Anyone had any luck ?

According to a friend of mine that used to work for amazon, AWS Glacier uses very similar servers to these in their storage datacenters. 1U whiteboxes slap full of internal platter drives, no hot swap. Just the MIN/MAX strategy on storage density with little concern towards any other features. I personally prefer a nice used poweredge or proliant for a home server but if AWS uses setups like these, it is proof there is a VERY valid use case.

47 sold in last 24 hours :DD

Wow, quite a rarity to find so many drive bays in (A) a 1U rack and (B) reasonably priced one too. Thanks for the share Jeff, I'll be checking out your links

Hello! By my calculations a ton of empty space (air) would take up 37,278 cubic feet.

Well i just bought one, and a pair of the 10TB wd red plus drives at Newegg for half price. Gonna be a while before I fill this thing but hopefully it’s good

If your onboard nic isnt working make sure its enabled in the bios and that the dynamic setting that turns off the onboard nic if another network card is detected is disabled.

Sweet. I saw this while researching NAS solutions for the house. I don't have a rack (yet), but after watching this I couldn't pass it up. Got everything home now, the server just arrived. I shelled out for the one with 16GB of memory. The drives go in pretty easy, though I can see how the last two rows are difficult if you populate them both. The only thing I'm missing is.... the 2.5" SSD I know I have somewhere. It's gone MIA. Last time I saw it was when I extricated it out of Son's room (after a discussion about respecting people's property). I guess I'll be out looking. Anyways, server is well labeled. The MAC addresses for the two 1Gb/E are labeled right on the RJ-45 connectors, as is the management port. The labeling of the SATA bays is on the underside of the cover, and the individual SATA connectors are labeled as well. Looking forward to getting TrueNAS on there. The screws and rubber grommets he linked work great. I dropped some $ on new WD Red Plus drives. I want to know they're known good drives. I don't want to have to think about it for the next long while. Already registered the drives to make sure they are new. Anyways, so far so good, pretty happy.

Worked in Africa for 10 years. Talk about beer. The local beer had such a strong formaldehyde smell and taste. I was told that it keeps the Malaria mosquitos away.

Great video, and I LOVE the music during assembling the HDs. Well done.

That is nice and cost efficient NAS for home user. Btw seller raised the price to $133... For an additional $67 one can get higher spec for more hardcore home user. Supermicro 6017R-73THDP+ with X9DRFF-7TG+ mainboard, which supports dual Xeon E5 v2 processors and 16 slots of DDR3 registered dimms (can easily go 512GB ram for faster cache than SSD).

I’ve been meaning to dip into server racks by setting up my own FreeNAS server! I also love a beer, I’ve found my new favourite channel!

Base fan curve resulting in network card on pcie slot overheating. I just bumped the base to 60% fan to hopefully fix.... it was overheating at idle after an hour or so in a cold basement.

I love those server build ups. Cheers from Brazil.

I can't wait till I get a bigger house.. so I can actually have a server rack...

Wow I needed a cheap server solution for storage using 3.5" to replace my Dell R610 because it only takes really expensive 2.5".... and I see your video.

8:46 that yellow cord looks burnt... id check that out

I just built my first home server and actually went with a ITX build 8 bay case because my rack isn't deep enough for a server mounted option like this. Great Build

Bought a $200 low end NAS and this is a much more appealing solution (4 bay vs 12 bay) if power consumption is not a concern. I may just return the unit and go with this instead. Thanks mate.

I would have mounted with foam double-sided tape... It's crazy how much used hardware is available due to the lease / replenish cycles of enterprises. Great build.

How have I watched 20+ of your videos and not subscribed yet?!? That's on me! lover your content!

This video is popular enough that on the Amazon page for the screws, amazon tells me that "Frequently bought together" are the rubber grommets, PCI-E riser, and said screws. 😂

Does it take sas drive or only sata?

I love New Server Day. It's my favorite Day.

This works with UNRAID right out of the box no issues. On board nic works fine. Internal usb headers nice touch.

Just because you have to pull the server out and remove the enclosure does not "no hot swap" a server make. You could absolutely still ESD secure yourself, and make sure the server is mounted with an appropriate run length of cabling to accomodate being pulled partially out on a rack rail for online maintenance including hot swapping disk drives.

You could have gotten an additional hard drive in there with the 2x 2.5" mount, but then again, not sure how many sata connections you have available. I may have to duplicate this build as I can always use more storage.

At this point I have more servers than I need, but I cant get myself to sell any of them :(

Every time I watch this channel I want to get another server for my homelab!! Thanks for sharing

High Availability, storage is single point of failure. The most critical part that should be available always. Like your videos.. but I want to see a 2 node GlusterFS cluster for storage or a 4 node CEPH Cluster if you're using Unix-based OS's for your solutions. Outside of that I highly recommend S2D from MSFT. I have a 2 node hyperconverged cluster for storage (40 TB RAW, 20 TB usable) and virtualizing my directory controllers. That storage is shared out via SMB3 to two compute nodes in a cluster setup for high availability on compute. My only single point of failures are power source, switch, and gateway to internet.

Reading about a similarly branded server, if it detects any network card it will disable the on-board network ports. Apparently this can be changed in setup. Worth checking into if you haven't already.

Jeff, try solving your onboard ethernet ports not being found by going into the BIOS>ADVANCED>Onboard Device Configuration> turn off Dynamic Onboard LAN Control. That lan control will disable the 2 gigabit ports when it detects an add on NIC.

Wonderful video! I really like your content. Out of curiosity, do you know how much electricity it would cost to run one of these? I needed a small server and was debating if I should self-host or rent a VPS, and I concluded that a VPS makes a lot of sense because of high electricity prices.

Man... I wish we have the same hardware available at these prices in Brazil. Nevertheless, I enjoy every video that you make, especially putting a server together.

Could you give a tour of your garage server install? What are the temperature ranges in the garage? And how is the dust and critters on your server install? Thanks! (I am in Florida so I feel a garage server would overheat)

This is one of those golden videos! Great find brother thanks for sharing.

this server ticks every box for what I want in one may end up buying one my self.

me: I only have a single mech drive and an SSD. (don't need more) Also me: oeeeeeh server! this is everytime you upload btw.. i click to see cool projects and explanations

Nice. Quick. All information that you Need in this short time. High Quality content.

$120 doesn't include the drives, of course, but that's still truly insane at that price. VERY interested to hear what kind of throughput you can get from this thing!

Thankyou for this video, certainly makes you wonder why more people aren’t buying this hardware for home use. At this price point it’s almost worth we having this as a drive graveyard or backup server, especially if it can be programmed to turn on, backup to, then turned off! One thing I’d love to see included is what the power consumption of the unit is please?

Hmm... didn't think to use shelves instead of rails for servers. I was already planning to buy a set for my UPS, so I'll have to consider the same instead of rails for my NAS and ProxMox server since it appears to be a HELL of a lot easier to install. Plus they're servers I largely don't touch except to clean out dust. Right now nothing is in a rack as I'd been putting off putting everything back into the rack after moving because I wanted to get them on rails, as they weren't previously. Instead I had a couple 2x4s under the UPS to support its weight, and then everything was more or less being supported by the UPS. Bad setup, I know...

ive seen Proxmox vm support pxe boot, would be pretty amazing to setup a FreeNAS / Proxmox server for a business to power thin clients. I personally would like to setup my home computers to run diskless with something like ccboot.

have a great week jeff , that blooper word is dutch for server.....

Any idea on where this can be gotten now? eBay is a wasteland now… it’s like this item no longer exists. :(

Had seen these a little bit ago but didn't want to buy one just to spend time and money finding something that worked for drive mounting; might have to get one now

Does anyone have a link for Europe? The import fees and delivery are pretty high

I notice the truenas (bsd) doesn't scale the fan speed based on the CPU temperature, so a CPU stress test will not speed up the fan. Both Windows and Ubuntu are able to scale the fan speed properly, it might be the freebsd telling BMC/BIOS to take control the fan speed but forget to actually control it. The IPMI console redirection is totally broken for me, maybe I just get a bad unit.

Me: I definitely don't need to buy another server this holiday Craft Computing: * posts this video *

Very tempting, I have been looking for a budget NAS build on a server build.

Hello Jeff, at the 7:10 mark you state that truenas does not recognize the onboard nic's there is a setting in the bios that turns off the onboard nic's if an external pci nic is installed. if you disable this feature you will have 4 nic's to work with. i have one of these running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and had the same problem

great.... now I HAVE to do that home ceph cluster....

Back in the day when I was a homebrewer, all the competitions required that you submit two bottles of your entry...just in case something bad had happened to one of them. Given it's in a dark bottle, it wouldn't have been a case of being lightstruck, but who knows? If you ever try a second bottle of that beer, and it's just as bad, then it's probably the beer.

I had a very similar issue with another mobo where the onboard network ports weren't being detected at all and was directed by some kind people to a post about checksum mismatches on the non-volatile memory of the network controller being an issue. This may or may not help: superuser.com/questions/1197908/network-eth0-missing-the-nvm-checksum-is-not-valid-with-asus-maximus-ix-hero

I do wonder if you could get some x4 ribbon cables in underneath that PCI-E riser. If you could - you could even upgrade to NVME cache with some clever routing.

How is the noise? It's quiet in the video, but I've heard reports from other people that these things are loud. Considering it for a home office so loud is a deal breaker.

Awesome find! Can you do a quick update on the 10g card and how you plan to connect it since you had to use the 1g big card in the riser?

Love these economical storage solutions!

Jeff Great video...I see CPU and memory specs but just curious what manuf/model motherboard came in that server? Thanks!

Wish I could find one of these. I need to build a NAS for my rack.

Anywhere to find these still? The ebay link leads to nothing

K u talked me into it and I didn't even get 4 minutes into the video. You guys get me every time. Don't worry I'll deal with the wife after I watch the rest of this video. Wish me luck

an actual diy nas that I actually feel like it might be worth while building/buying; decent price and decent result:)

Reasons why energy consumption has gone up even with energy efficient appliances, this video right here.

I can imagine that cooling for the drives is rather suboptimal in this case.

The don't ship to Canada :( I was at checkout lol

Any worthwhile CPU upgrades available for this motherboard?

Good article and video. I, too, bought this server unit shortly after the video was posted. I did get a number of the components that was suggested (the IronWolf SSD drives, the HP 2-port SFP+ network card, PCIe 1U Riser, Rubber Grommets, drive mount screws, a Mikrotik SFP+ router, etc. As I have 10 2 GB Drives (8 of which are less than 1 year old), I am looking ahead to getting larger drives. Does this unit support drives greater than 4 TB? I saw that 4 TB drives were used. Are there any limitation with larger drives (greater than 4 GB).

Mine just came in today and the built in ethernet ports were recognized just fine by the em driver in truenas, so now I have a spare dual port intel nic on hand that I didn't need to buy. Oh well, ill find something for it to packetize someday. I did notice there are options in the bios to turn on and off the nics, so, might want to double check to see that they are enabled on yours.

A bit of hammering on that duct could give you the extra space you need😁.

Cool build. I always buy old xeon servers for this use. I prefer openmediavault to truenas. I usually buy old dell servers, but my setups don't have nearly the drive bays yours do.

Thanks for the build! Great Video. Just one question. What is the second cache drive for? Are you using it for ZIL or do you have two zpools?

How many watts is the included power supply?? Thanks

Wish I knew exactly how deep it is because if you find it tight I’m equally as afraid it won’t fit in my rack.

😂 Did I just see a butterfly bottle top opener, you've made my day that's so kool 😂😂

Oh god the NC523SFP... I have bought araound a metric ton of these for fairly cheap. Only Problem: esxi 6.7 straight up refuses to use them. you can install the vib to let them show up, but i never got them working. also they seem to be a little slow for 10gbe... Just a heads up for anyone buying them.

I just bought one of these and I am liking it so far hat are the max drive capacities you can use. My servers onboard NICs did work and they are 1gig.

I love this channel learned so much from you Jeff thank you and for about $600 including hard drives (just a guess on price) someojne could have a nice little home server and build up from there