The Ideal Home Server! Is it Possible? 

I am noticing a pattern where I will watch a Level1 video then spend the following 2 or 3 hours researching a build list.

Let's all imagine how filthy rich Wendel would need to be to have more money than sense.

I'm a huge fan of 5.25" bays because they're so versatile and so easy to access and bloody annoyed that the industry has gone in a generally form over function RGB bling direction in recent years.

Every video somehow gets better. This channel is an absolute GOLDMINE of top-quality content.

I'd love to see two different videos on home storage servers. One covering 2 - 4u power-efficient, rack-mounted servers that hold as much storage as possible and are suitable for media, virtualization and even hosting VM's via TrueNAS scale. The second video covering power-efficient storage servers for people who don't have a rack and need a good looking quiet server that has a lot of capacity.

As far as I can tell, ATX in a tower with room for a lot of HDDs is the best value still. It takes up a bit more space but everything costs less than MATX or ITX. The ICYDOCK stuff is really cool, but also really expensive for what it is.

I love that Wendell just casually suggests writing a system linux module for getting your memory errors into ipmi, that's not level1 that's graybeard level lol

I think we need to see a Sliger and Level 1 Techs team up for the ultimate home nas/server case!

The ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T looks real interesting for that Jonesbo case - The 2 OCuLink connectors will connect 4 SATA drives each, or you can use them for PCIe4 x4 for some kind of U.2 functionality. And as it has dual 10GBe networking, it certainly has the throughput. Finally, you can bifurcate it's x16 slot into x8x8, x8x4x4 or x4x4x4x4 for NVMe caching. Or even a half-height GPU for HW transcoding as part of a FreeNAS SCALE box.

The follow on builds / videos to this one can't come fast enough for me. I am so very ready to do this same thing.

Love my U-NAS NSC-810A. MicroATX, dual full size PCIe slots, 8x3.5 hotswap bays. Little tough to build it but now that I'm done it's been awesome.

I think the Ideal Home Server would be something like: -The best performance/watt CPU to be energy efficient, I think the 7950x or 7900? -The most ECC ram you can get -2 SSD/NVME in raid for the host hypervisor. Proxmox, xcp-ng, unraid or whatever is your choice -5 HDD's with RAIDZ2 passthough to a Truenas VM as a target for the storage, with NFS or SCSi for easier ZFS management. -About GPU.. I'm not sure the iGPU in the AM5 is supported for HW encoding yet, I don't do much encoding as I mainly use direct playback, and for the little encoding I need the CPU is fine. So I don't think a dGPU is needed for the ideal Home Server...unless -Unless you want to do a Jack-of-all-trades Home Server and use it as a Gaming PC, locally or via Parsec/Moonlight. My current "main" Home Server is also my gaming PC as I can't have multiple computers (space+money). And passthough the dGPU to a VM that I turn on for gaming. It is in it's own nvme disk so if I need to play a anticheat game I can dual boot to it, I do loose all my "server" stuff while dual booted though, like media, password manager(though it's cached in each bitwarden device), etc... So this setup would be ideal for a Home Server-only machine.

My first homelab server for plex and Nas functionality was a node 304 with old core i3 and quadro p2000. I'm out growing that 6 drive bay limit so I decided to go ryzen with a fractal define 7. It holds so many 3.5 drives. This enables me to use lsi hba adapters with SAS expanders to scale out. It's not same use case as your living room server scenario but I'd love to see some content on expanding bay enclosures that don't take up a lot of space and cost effective to another 16 drives etc. Especially considering we have to prepare for the apocalypse 😂

I want two different form factors. One is a hypervisor node that only needs to support a handful of M.2 drives (22110 size would be ideal), and then a larger chassis that would be the storage server with both flash and spinning rust.

Left the Mac world and loving my first awesome PC build.. I was thinking adventures when I stumbled on this channel.. now I’m excited but just more confused with so many options.. I fell into a wormhole looking up raid setups and networking.. 😅

Also please don't stop reading my mind about these insane machination such as using many of those ICY dock 5.2" bays. I was going to put it in the basement of my Dual PC (Desktop / Server) P600S. Filling the other 3.5" bays with 20TB EXOS drives.

Putting aside hot swap ability, what you describe as the ideal mATX server case is pretty close to the Fractal Design Node 804. Room for nine 3.5” drives plus two more 2.5” drives. With a 3D printed adapter, you could add a tenth 3.5” drive. An extra bonus is that it looks good enough that you can put it anywhere. For filling all those drive bays, I’ve got a Supermicro X10sl7 which has 6 SATA ports, plus an onboard 8 port LSI SAS controller.

My normal go-to platform for home server stuff would be an old gaming system that myself or a friend is trying to get rid of for cheap.

I really like FD Node 804 with micro ATC MB support and 8x 3.5" drives (+ enough space to mod some extra 3.5" bays into it).

Totally agree with the idea of 6-5.25” drive bays.

That RAM tester is absolute genius

So I built a "server" in the jonsbo n1, 5x 12tb drives, 2x 2tb name, 1x 1TB sata ssd. Gigabyte b650 its board, 64gb ddr5-6000 memory kit, Ryzen 7900. I ended up using an HBA in the pci slot. This thing flies. Running trueness scale on it so far and it flies. I am interested to see Wendells take on it when he builds.

I would like to see the "budget home NAS that can be upgraded in the same case to the Best cost/efficient Home NAS" because I believe a lot of people who don't know they need a NAS if they are presented with a compelling option they will join the datahoarder club and with it they will join this channel, the best one for this type of content! Magnificent work! I have known your channel for a while, but I joined recently and I am glad that I did because enjoying the content even thought neither do I have more money than sense.

I'd actually love to see this case created. This was one of my struggles in find a small case that had expansive storage solutions.

Very happy to see Sliger getting a mention, there cases are underrated and under reviewed, love my SM550 case.

It's just a little less space efficient than this extruded aluminum idea, but my old Bitfenix Prodigy continues to be my favorite case for small home server. 5 hard drives, cheap full size power supply, room for a big tower cooler so you can have a chonky cpu doing hard work, and then you just use that one pcie slot for an hba.

FANTASTIC VIDEO! - I just built in a Node304 case with a AXZEZ ITX carrier board (with 5 SATA ports - yes!!) & a RasPi CM4 module (available as a combo!) and I wish I saw this sooner! The only thing missing is ECC memory. I'd also look at the Silverstone DS case which comes with a SATA/SAS backplane (if money is more important than time for you) . Thanks for thinking of us mere mortals Wendel! :D

For my server, I'm still rocking a Fractal Design R5 I bought a couple of years ago. It's using a couple of IcyDock adapter bays as well (two 5.25" bay to 2x 2.5" SATA + 1x 3.5" SATA adapter). I currently have 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs on it.

Yes the Intel 4x3.5" or even 8x3.5" and 8x2.5" hot swap drive cages are available for cheap, but they can be a pain to use. Drive access is controlled (via signals on the SATA / SAS connectors) by the micro (typically a Cypress CY8C22545) on the PCB which is usually controlled by the Intel motherboards BMC via the I2C interface (white 5 pin connectors). So to use these cages you need to either hack the I2C, micro or PCB. None of which are great options for the uninitiated. Another options is to just remove the PCB and use regular cables to the drives which is easily done but also removes the hot swap option.

I got an OG Antec Nine Hundred in 2007 or 2008 for gaming and used it as a fileserver enclosure until a few years ago. Still have it standing around here somewhere too. The Antec Nine Hundred was a "Premium" gaming case back then, going for the spectacularly high 100€ mark. (for the time 100€ was expensive for a case ...) Man, our hobby has gotten silly expensive.

By the way, SATA Ports wise, you can always get a couple 1 to 5 sata port expanders, I actually used one with a BananaPI M1 so I could connect 5 disks to a single SATA Port with SATA PMP enabled being the one trick needing to be done. Not the fastest solution though will work in most cases where the disks do not saturate the single sata port.

"Don't speak to me or my son again" perfect.

I want to see the Toptron (or AliExpress equivalent) mini-ITX NAS mobo with 6x SATA, 4x 2.5 GbE NICs, and the Intel 5105 CPU! Crazy cheap and functional! Gracemont stuff is right around the corner, too... Mini home server hardware market is heating up!!!

I have this case and the Node 304, but now my go to home server case is the SilverStone Technology CS351. It supports mATX motherboards while still being compact, so you can have a GPU and a 10gbe nic. Plus the 5 bays are hot swappable.

I love your idea of the 5.25 inch focussed case. Maybe someone can 3D print it as a proof of concept? On the motherboard to test I'd love to see a focus given to power efficiency.

I have a cheap Rosewill case with my old main PC guts as a home sever. Recently moved to a pair of sata SSDs instead of my failing spinning rust for storage. Its great, but loud, and gets so dusty. I like those little NAS box options.

I've ended up with a Synology NAS and a separate mini PC setup. I went through all this home server stuff before realizing I wanted two different things from my home server setup. Firstly I wanted absolute stability and availability for my storage. I didn't like the opportunity for backups to fail, lost data, or even slow data access. Separately, though, I wanted a server I could absolutely hammer with transcoding and compiling something I could do experiments with and not think in the back of my mind. Eventually I would like like to upgrade my mini PC into something more SFF sized so I can gain some extra performance but mini PCs consume so little power that there will always be some use for one.

I love the idea, I didn't even realize the 5.25" bay thing until you brought it up, and I think its genius.

I would pay for a "Wendell Home Server" solution, maybe something similar to Synology or other nas but with Wendells own curated software packs and with scripts that sets the server up. On the hardware side have a list of suggested motherboards / backplanes with different features. Maybe there is room for another insanity project like the L1Tech KVM but for the nas solution to have a L1Tech Backplane (that perhaps gets attached to the motherboard PCIe slots?). Regardless, a simple and easy solution to set up initially AND foremost being easily manageable for software updates, hardware upgrades and in case of drive failures, that I would pay for, pay as donation for software solution and special things from L1Tech store.

You are hitting all the right pain points. I ended up getting a used case off of facebook marketplace. The kid I bought it from seemed like he never did anything but pull it out of the box to look at it. I can't remember the brand or model for the case but it has room for 10 HDD's and more expansion for the 5 inch bays. I'm ready to get it up and running but the old i5 4000 motherboard I have for it only has 4 sata ports. The only motherboard that really interested me were the ASRock ones used here. I haven't convinced myself to put the money up for a new motherboard, cpu and ram just yet.

I'd like to see a run-down of the USB DAS boxes (mediasonic, sabrent, terramaster) , as there's a lot of real-world usability issues regarding disconnections and drive ID naming. It'd be nice to know what's good/bad to use. I have no horse in this race other than being a r/HTPC mod recommending storage solutions to our users across the breath of the pre-built/diy/hybrid space.

Oooooooh, you know exactly the words that excite us. You had me at 'Hi' but all the stuff after was icing on the cake. "hoarding" "reconstruct society after the fall 💦" "addiction"

I know it was designed for HTPC duties, but the Silverstone GD08 doubles extremely well as a home server. From memory holds up to 12 x 3.5"drives, and plenty of room for add in cards. And it can live beneath your TV and look good while doing it.

That mini server looks pretty nice for people with limited space, I'm still happy with my generic late 90s ATX tower filled with drives and cheap used Supermicro board for that ECC goodness.

My home server is in a 15+ year old Lian Li PCv1000. Back when Lian Li made nice cases. Picked up a bunch of their old HDD cages that match the design of the case from some random PC parts stores that carried ancient stuff.

I've got 2 of those Antec 900's with a load of 5.25in trayless caddys. Great thing and it was super cheap a few years ago.

This is where ASRock Rack mITX Epyc board comes to the rescue... with PCIe4x16 slot standard and 6xPCIe4x8 over miniSAS if I recall correctly... with 2x of those PCIe4x8 being splittable to a total of like 16xSATA drives... before you factor in any AiCs with storage controllers or networking or eg. media transcoding acceleration (maybe Intel ARCs or similar, once some lower power option becomes available, elsewise T400 or T600, or - wishful thinking - Alveo u30), this looks great, only the cost of the mITX ASRock Rack board with Rome (or newer) even lower-core-count lower-TDP Epycs may scare most... And that's before you factor DIMMs and storage itself.

glad to see I m not the only one searching for a case design that does not exist

For me the ideal server is one that takes up as little space as possible while still being powerful. A cluster of n100 mini pcs actually has fit that bill quite nicely

I would love to find a series that dealt with a solid state setup. I am looking at something that would be good in an RV or on a boat as I am looking to put movies and music on it. It needs to handle vibration and preferably have a passive cooling setup. This would mainly be a NAS setup and then duplicated for a pfSense node. Passive cooling because moist saltwater air eats electronics and passive would slow that down a bit. Also would like to do SFP+ connections.

I definitely agree I wish the Seeed reServer was a 3 bay 3.5" drive system. That would be an excellent NAS product!

I'm still rocking a 10+ year old Thermaltake case with 9x 5.25" front facing drive bays. Mounted 9x 3.5" drives in the bottom 6, DVD drive up top, and room for 3 more 3.5" drives for the future. Don't think I'll ever get rid of that case.

I'm SO excited for you to do a Jonsbo N1 Media server build because I picked up the case to do exactly that! I did some research and apparently you can also grab a m.2 to SATA converter card to do the last 2 SATA ports in the Jonsbo and if its a ITX with 2+ NVME slots you should be golden to run 6 SATA + 1 NVME Boot. I definitely plan to go AM5 in only for having the onboard graphics so that I can free up the PCIE slot for extra networking. No idea what Motherboard I would go for. Hell it might not even exist till Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 6 comes out with the AM5 platform

I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with icydocks for sometime. I already have the Rosewill server case with the hotswap bays but I've been considering buying a couple more with 5.25" bays for this reason. The front panel on those cases is all modular.

Would love to see a video about building in the Jonsbo and/or a slick mATX build!

A+ hilarious intro to this vid 👍 16:48 -- Thank you for the heads up about i225-V being "on the struggle bus." I have one, no issues so far. Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

I have an Antec 900 sitting collecting dust. Funny to see it mentioned here. Have a Fractal Define 7 XL arriving today that will be an all in one media and file server, etc.

You make me glad I still have my old Antec Nine Hundred around. It was my first PC Case and I used it for 11 years. Hoping to repurpose it for a home server.

Nice Wendell. I also managed a steal on a MATX server board for 50 bucks, it goes for 3X that used and $4-500 new. I lucked out !

TrueNAS Scale, for any additional software features either use the containers or set up a VM or two to run those and if need be save any data directly on a TrueNAS share. That's what I have actually done, have a couple VMs for stuff like downloading tools/apps and some other niceties and basically they just store the data directly on the same share I have to my stuff for ease of use.

The real issue about home servers is not hardware; it's software. I've tried a number of different dedicated "home server" operating systems, and I find all of them needlessly complex and fiddly. I don't run Plex or host Minecraft; all I need is a file server, a place to store backups from about a dozen other machines, and a way to copy files and folders to optical drives. Yes, I still have a use case for optical drives. To solve this, I built a Core i3 10100 machine on an ATX B460 board, with a small SATA SSD system drive, six spinning hard drives, and three DVD writers in a Rosewill 4U case. The best part -- it does what I need it to do running plain old Windows 11.

I'm 100% on-board with this line of thinking regarding the expandability of 5.25" bays and having looked around there just aren't good options any more, well not cheap options. Something like the Lian-Li PC-343 would be pretty epic but they were always too rich for me though to fill them out would be super costly anyway, but at least you could do it over time. Of course you'd need a lot of PCI-E lanes to fill out that many bays even if you only went with 30x3.5" spinning rust. Of course the flexibility of 5.25" bays is that you mix and match to your heart's content.

Can't wait to see what motherboard you use for the N1, I built a TrueNAS Scale server with it using an older gigabyte b-chipset motherboard and a ryzen 3400g I got with a system I bought for a 3090 back in the dark days. I put an asm1166 chipset sata expansion card in it and it's been pretty solid.

Firstly Wendell, this video was my tech wet dream of doing my home server setup 🤤🤤🥰😇👍💪with the said itx Jonsbo case 😱🤩🤯! Secondly, good to see you looking healthier, better and taking better care of yourself 😇👍.

For mass storage needs, I'm quite happy with my HP N40Ls, which have up to 4 3.5 SATA each. Then there is a Lenovo T420 with 2TB in the optical bay and some USB hard drives as a streaming server.

m-ATX is the way to go, totally agree. I have an Asrock b450m pro4 with 32GB of DDR4 ECC unbuffered and a R5 2600. Works great with Truenas.

The main obstacle to the ultimate home server build is that it still needs to be a home server, so it needs to be (relativity) affordable. The main obstacle that I am encountering is lack of PCIe, ideally I would want a PCIe switch/router since while I need a significant amount of port I don't need to hit them all at full speed at the same time, but that does not exist (at a reasonable price). In my home server I'm orienting myself to buy sata SSD since I can more easily multiplex port, but is not ideal.

Now that everything is smaller; we need a new standard for PCIe; always liked the idea of using SFF-8643 for PCIE 3.0 x4; oculink was also on the right track but seems like it didn't stick yet. Thunderbolt technically without all the cost, licensing and have it internal and have a standard for (1) exposing ports and (2) screwing these things to something; we need to combine the flexability of 5.25 and pcie slots into a single thing now; think "pcie backplane" in the same way we have sata backplanes... :D; And sure... there might not be enough pcie lanes directly; but make the PEX chips more mainstream to lower the price and have "switch" blocks that you can add to multiplex them together; not every device needs all the bandwidth all the time; especially for home/smb use... just feel like we could do SO much more than what we're doing with the tech we have.

My Jonsbo N1 is absolutely stuffed. 5x 3.5" hard drives, 4x 2.5" SSDs, 1x LSI HBA to connect all the drives, 1x M.2 SSD, and because I've already run out of PCIe slots, 1x M.2 to PCIe riser to connect a Mellanox 10gig SFP+ NIC. This case is a monster.

I'd like something like the Antec 900 but I want it in a rack mount. Something I could use standard (120mm) fans, populate the whole front with those icy dock bays. Then I could mix and match the front hotswap as I need and it'd be a case that could grow. Make it a shallow depth and allow it to accommodate add-in cards for more customization. I love rack mount and even a small rack is pretty cheap for your home. A 12u on rollers or something is amazing but what isn't amazing is your typical rack mount fans. I want something that you could have in a room and still be able to use that room for something.

I have an ASRock Rack EPYC3451D4I2-2T motherboard in a Silverstone CS-01 as my current storage server. The CS-01 only has two 3.5 inch bays and two 2.5 inch bays, but I couldn't easily get any other case (such as the Jonsbo N1) for a reasonable price here in Australia. The motherboard is admittedly pretty expensive and only takes RDIMMS, but it has an incredible 14 SATA ports on an ITX board, 12 via OCuLink ports (one x4 and one x8) using octopus cables. I wish using connectors and cables like that was done in the consumer space - we could have so many more ports on ITX motherboards! I notice others are mentioning the X570D4I-2T, which does similar with two x4 OCuLink ports and is probably a less expensive way to get enough ports for most uses. I really wanted the Lian Li PC-Q26 as shown on this channel years ago (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-K8HMLi7pt3I.html) with 10 3.5 inch bays, but I couldn't find it anywhere. It would've been the perfect case for that motherboard!

I still have two Chenbro SR30169 cases and, honestly, with the 4 front-load hot-swap SATA bays, they make fabulous SFF servers.

I'm half tempted to go towards a rack mount system. My biggest problem is space in de house (so have to hang it vertical which I'm not happy with). I'm now rocking a Fractal Design Define R5 and I'm out of 3 1/2 slots (this is including the 5 1/4 repurposed, tho I could go for an icy 2 5 1/4 -> 3 3 1/2, as now I''m only using 2, but yeh that's a minor step) Your aluminium extrusion intrigues me. That opens up the options that I can expand / resize at will. I still have a lot of them (for my never finished 3d printer project) but that changes my thought on my Define R5, would be a bit more space effecient if I'd go a small case for my server (althought it's an ATX mobo, it feels like it's a tiny bit bigger.. I think they cheated with specs to fit as much stuff on it as possible, it's the ROMED8-2T from Asrock)

The Gigabyte B650I AORUS ULTRA has 2.5Gb intel, wifi 6E, 4 SATA ports and 3 m.2 ports. you could put in the m.2 slots a boot drive, a sata to m.2 adapter and a network adapter.

You're overthinking it... My home/nas server is just a Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple external drives plugged into it running OpenMediaVault, lol. I also run Jellyfin as my media server on a PC I built out of spare parts laying around that's plugged into the TV. I agree that's the best place for the media server to live, just makes sense. Although I must admit, watching this got me excited to upgrade when it's time.

I am looking to lessen my dependence on Adobe and Google cloud services for storing achieved projects. Great information and gave me some ideas for configurations.

I like that coffee can server look against thieves. You put a i3 with RGB and internal GPU next to that tin can with a xeon ITX or threadripper ITX...you good to go.

I've watched at least 100 to 150 videos kinda like this but this was exactly what I was looking for.

I‘m happy with my Dell T320. 8x LFF bays, 3x 5,25, cheap and enough slots for PCIe cards. Redundant PSU if you like. Little bit noisy but everything else for very little budget without any headaches

My home server chassis is a Compaq Evo Tower with a Win 98SE activation sticker.

Been looking at the Sliger Cerberus mATX case for a nice compact home server. If you could fit 6 3.5" drives in it that would be amazing, I dunno why everyone always stops at 5 hdd's but it's been driving me insane! Y'all should do a build in one at some point and figure out just how many disks you can cram into it!

Like you, my only lament of these home NAS and media server cases is the lack of drive bay accessibility from outside. Opening up the whole machine for a drive swap is inconvenient, even if it makes for a prettier looking system. I currently use and old Acer EasyStore H340 chassis (4 bays). It is standard ITX but needs (a) some wiring modification for (some of) the front panel buttons/lights to work, (b) a really low profile CPU cooler, and (c) a carefully measured out flex PSU or a pico-PSU. I have it running intel 6th gen, mostly for NAS, non-transcoding media, and VM duties.

I have the CoolerMaster Centurion 590, also 9x 5.25" drive bays, and about the same space inside as the Antec.

I'm upgrading to am5 and using my old hardware for a home server build. I would love more home server content

Very interesting video Wendell and Level1! You definitely got my idea cog wheels turning. I'd love to build a home server to work as a NAS and use as a remote server to learn Linux!

Asrock has a mini-ITX board that supports LGA 3647, looks interesting and those 2nd-gen Scalable processors are fairly inexpensive on the used market these days

I agree with mATX for home servers. The extra space at the bottom is perfect for some extra drives. What I did with my racked NAS was 3D print some hotswap cages and stick them to the bottom with double sided tape. Pick an mATX board with extra PCIe slots rather than extra M.2 though, even if they are only a single lane. Each PCIe3 lane can do 1GB/s, meaning it’ll support 3-5 SATA HDDs before becoming bottlenecked (assuming each drive does between 200 and 300 MB/s in a sequential read, which is my experience with NAS drives). Each M.2 slot then is costing you an awful lot of potential 20TB HDDs. Kudos to Wendell for making me get Optane for a metadata special device, too. I didn’t think it would do anything noticeable over Ethernet, but that was entirely wrong and the improvement in latency is nothing short of incredible. Definitely you want two M.2 slots, so you can use fast modern storage for your metadata and small files. Even if you’re not getting optane it’ll be a huge boost.

My dream case is 4u tall and 12" deep with two hotswap hdd using an itx/mini motherboard and a full size gpu

what I'd like to see. A homemade server with 8 3.5" drives, and a modern intel CPU (with quick sync). 2.5Gb network. In a case like the Silverstone CS381. I'm planning to build something like this in the next month

Main things I’m looking for at the moment is a power efficient platform (high energy prices and all that) simple and bullet proof. ZFS on a TrueNAS OS with ECC is a must. A fair few cores so I can virtualise home assistant and a docker host VM for the remainder of the containers. Cheap enough ideally to run two for ZFS backups as not yet found ZFS hosted online for decent money to run the backups too.

Currently migrating to a Node804 for my server, and pairing it with the MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI. With 8 onboard SATA ports and 2 M.2 slots, it's got plenty of storage. Plus the case can fit a slimline optical drive which is perfect for ripping media directly on the server. To top it off, the mobo has 4 16x slots. I'll be adding a 10G card, GPU for transcoding, and maybe down the line some more storage cards.

Picked up a NAS Board N6005 ITX mobo with 6 SATA connectors, 2 m.2 slots and 4x 2.5gbit intel ethernet ports from AliExpress. It cost me right under 200 bucks with shipping and it will be a perfect fit for the jonsbo! 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs via SATA (array and redundant cache) and 2 nvme drives for docker and VM storage / cache. Hoping to build a nice sfx mediaserver for the living room. In the office there will be my larger NAS in a Define R5 for all the other services. Lastly a basic Synology DS for the backup of both systems. Ideal low powered tiered solution I guess!

Wendel I haven't been able to watch a video in awhile but I just wanted to say, you're so damn skinny! Way to go! I know that's insanely hard work that barely gets noticed over time but seeing it all in one go, like damn you're almost another person! Congrats, and I hope you keep it up.

"right now it's a virtual machine on a more powerful system." If it's Wendell then it's Threadripper!

Love this. But, maybe save some space in the base with only single or double 5.25" bays "side-by-side." Add an expansion piece at the bottom with the 3+ 5.25" bays or some basic hotswap cages with simple handles like the Jonsbo has? Give it enough room to mount a SAS Expander, then fill the drives up as much as you want. Targeting a 1 to 2 stack of 5.25" bays will leave a lot of room for fans and/or 2.5" adapters that are much cheaper than the Icy Dock devices, that have shot up by $100 or so in the last year. I've also found myself targeting the SFF form factor as the enterprise stuff comes down. 2TB DC SSDs for sub-$100, 4TB consumer SSDs close to $200, and 960GB of Optane in a U.2 905p for $400... all-flash seems possible for the enthusiast datahoarder, now. Targeting an all-flash primary build with an "expansion" for 3.5" drives and additional 5.25" bays makes a lot of sense to me, and is my current focus. So, that may also just be my bias getting in the way. Regardless, hope we can see some sort of mATX NAS-focused, maybe modular case ala the MASS: modcase.com.au/products/nas

is dude melting away? Looking good my man

I have two of those Intel cages and a rosewill cage in a old atx case. Now lays flat for eventual use in a rack. Adaptec 3016 / omv / mergerfs / snapraid I cut out most of the case front/bays and just bolted the cages in. Sealed the gaps with painters tape so the rear fans pull air across all drives. Ugly, but works. You should list the models of everything mentioned so people can search easier. I snagged my cages for about 35 but that was pre chia

I'd say that for most of us - it start by running plex. Then we start adding drives, move onto hardware encoding, and then start down the path of virtualisating a few vm's for fun. If i were rebuilding, id be looking squarely at a 13th gen motherboard combo. iGPU will mean no need for an extra card, saving those valuable PCI slots for other things. HBA to SAN maybe :-)

Glad to see you getting healthier! Looking good.

Reminds me of the Fractal Design Node 804. Could fit 8x3.5 drives and PSU on one side then on the other is your MATX board and the rest of the system.