I don't normally leave comments, but I just wanted to tell you you did a great job. Projects like this are as much about the journey - including the skills and knowledge you acquire - as the destination. Problem-solving your way through things is also extremely satisfying. Keep it up!
@@BrendonBelle Agreed. I took the used hard drive plunge last year and bought five 8TB drives with a 5 year warranty for the price of 2 new. As long as they honor the warranty, I'm willing to risk it for the cost savings. I've not tried this vendor but I have used goharddrives and can attest to their customer service. I had a drive doa and they replaced it quickly and without a lot of red tape. I have four 12TB drives from them in transit for my 2nd NAS
Just purchased 4x 12TB seagate drives. I found the same refurb drive on Amazon with the same price but decided to buy direct since they had free shipping too.
@@jonas000111 At least this way you'll get drives packed appropriately, Amazon can be VERY hit or miss for fragile items (seems usually they hit it with a large hammer). I've used Serverpartsdeals several times with GREAT success to the point I've pretty much stopped buying drives anywhere else with the exception of clients that want to buy new.
LOVE the fact that you used a NUC board for this (even though it wasn't originally intended). Channeling early 2000's case modder culture, if they had access to 3D printers 😁👍
appreciate that you didn't cut out the parts of the build that did not go as planned, it shows that despite you being perfectly capable to make the HP station great again, you are still a human being and it takes a lot of time and mainly effort to not give up despite so many troubles disappointments along the way as always awesome project and a cool sleeper NAS :)
Dude you surely didnt disappoint! This project is insanely creative and ingenious. Suggestion: follow up this series by recording the whole software part of it, installing stuff and configuring.
Gotta say this is the first sponsored video that actually convinced me u explained the goal perfectly and explained all the points I made in my head I think u or whoever made the script will have a very successful future
I just got myself on of these for cheap (19€ + 10€ shipping) without a power supply as it was dead after a power outage. I gave it a try with an ATX PSU, and it works like a charm! I'm also planning to put some more modern hardware into it, I'm hoping I can somehow fit an M-ITX board in there, but I'll need to do a bit of measuring for that!
I'm sure some folks will say you shouldn't have bothered but it's always fun to learn and try to stretch your skills. If you just buy a new thing every time you need something you never have the chance to grow or learn. I've done intricate soldering work because it was a chance to learn, then later when I did need to know I had those skills. I think you did a great job and you're an inspiration for the hobbyists out there!
As someone who has been theorycrafting a similar NAS setup for a long while, this is super inspiring! The finished product looks great and I love that you took the extra steps to paint and update the look of the build.
This is the kind of stuff that deserves to have videos made about it. Great job pulling through the finish. Perfect or not, I sure as hell could never pull this off!
I must say this is one of my all-time videos that I have been waiting to be released, since watching part 1 😅. Excellent work and nothing wrong with worrying about cooling later, especially with those current temps. Thanks again for such excellent content.
Man, give yourself more credit. That proto board is pretty good. To make it even better, you could try your hand at kicad and get some pcbs manufactured for cheap 😎👍
A few tips from personal experience: 5:09 It's easy to fabricate a nice and reliable cable connector when you have to solder directly to the connector that's intended to be soldered to a PCB, in fact you were already quite close - cover the solder connections with hot glue, put a piece of heatshrinking tube over the hot glue blob, and evenly heat it up with hot air gun at 150 C. The tube will start shrinking, while at the same time the glue will start melting. As a result, it will form a nice connector shell, while squeezing out all the extraneous hot glue, which can be removed with a cotton swab while still hot. It takes a bit of practice, but when you master it, the results are quite pleasant! 8:38 To remove a hotglue blob, simply soak it in isopropyl alcohol. After that, you'll be able to easily crumble it away 11:52 There's an option to get a CA glue bundled with an activator spray which cures the glue immediately after applying. Highly recommend to try it out! Regardless of the aforementioned, that's a very nice project, congrats with finishing it!
Can't get enough of your vidoes man. I love that you show your thought process, and why you did the things you do, also highlighting errors that you made along the way and how you rectified them (or why you didn't). Educational, and inspirational. You turn hardware people wouldn't like twice at into something useable and practical. I also love the little bit 'In real life, things are rarely perfect. And I love this imperfect little system.' We should all strive to have that same outlook, in the many things we do daily. Keep up the awesome videos!
Man I'm glad I'm not the only one that has issues like this throughout my projects. I watch so many RU-vid videos that make it seem like they never run into issues
Keystone HDMI coupler, a short jumper cable and done. I've even cut a rectangle set the HDMI Keystone in there and hot melt it in place since I can't 3d print anything. Works awesome looks like a regular jack on outside
Neat project. I like some of the things you are doing. I am going with the M-ATX form factor for my home servers. I personally just build home servers and give them to friends and family. All you have to do is slap Home Assistant on it, and everyone starts to see what they are missing. Combine that network-attached storage with a backup system for their PCs and cellphones, and they are sold.
Colton, I love the learning journey you took us on in these videos. Your curiosity and willingness to experiment fail and learn from your mistakes is inspiring. Thanks for sharing with us.
LACK-OF-FAN...TASTIC! Great video! I want to see version 2. Seriously though watching seat-of-the-pants engineering is one of my favorite things. I could see you adding a magnetically mountable fan on the back to match your custom I/O shield. Great job!
Those that ask why, just don't seem to understand the fun of making something new(er) from something old. I personally love this and even though it's not perfect, it's a really cool project and something I've wanted to do for many moons.
I do love this project it really is perfectly inline with the spirit of the channel. Take something beat up and outdated and make it not just modern but usably versatile. Great video!
Using your advice I'm making a cheap server for our church. Save them for paying for yet another subscription for some software. Hopefully I can find a way to automate their RU-vid and Facebook streaming as they pay for that now.
This is amazing. Thanks for sharing. I have this micro server and it’s been sitting I the floor because i moved in with synology. But when I had this new, it was a great little server. I had freenas running on it back then. I was able to use 6 HDD. 5x 3.5” drives and 1x 2.5” drive. I ran freenas on a USB thumb drive
This exemplifies the origin of the term "hacking". Literally hacking (with a Dremel) to get a piece of hardware to do something it wasn't originally intended to do, and I love it.
this is the best type of homelab content imo. It's a major challenge to upgrade older things and this showcases a lot of major negatives of having/using proprietary stuff. Wonder how difficult it would be to turn one of these old systems into a DAS that is connected to a NUC.
Warts and all, this is pretty slick. Love the journey as well, probably more fun to watch than for you to do, but satisfying to see it come together. Great work out of you!
May have been frustrating and not perfect but the idea is excellent. I wonder how many of those HP mini proliant machines are out there wasting away in a closet unused. Really a shame HP didn't use industry standards for the parts as I think this case is worthy of living on with modern PC parts. I had one of these ten yesrs ago and really liked it except for the performance as time marched on. If I could have easily updated it, I would have. Quality metal cases like this would cost a fortune today so recycling these seems like a good idea to me. I'm glad you did it and hope you decide to being it back in another video with the small issues worked out.
@@lucasrem dont need metal, just appreciate the sturdiness it adds. It's more expensive than plastic so I thought it would be nice to recycle cases like this HP.
10:10 I'm not sure who but someone definitely makes USB hubs in a single circuit board that you wire up yourself. The hub board breaks a single USB connection into two so two could be used to get all 4 ports working.
Hello! Two things : This may be the first time in forever long that i was interested by the sponsor. Prices are super low, and they ship to my caribbean island, so super cool! Second thing : nice case mod and all! Although at some point, after doing so much modding, you might have been able to make your own case :) I do mine out of wood, either with traditional wood working techniques, or even with a laser cutter. The cool thing is that if you design the case, well you decide the form factor, and thus can adapt whatever you want to whatever you have :) Currently on my wooden, home made rack, i have 6 servers, all with wooden, home made cases. And with a bit of electronics, they even have rgb, and temp monitoring that is tied to my home assistant setup. I also use aluminium mesh for the fan grills, and it also adds a "pixelated" effect to the RGB.
i hope you keep the case and make adjustments to make it more compact so can install a fan at the back. This is amazing, I enjoyed watching this project
Since the back IO panel isn’t exposed, you might be able to use those USB connections for the top two in the front, and that shouldn’t require any glue to do!
I loved every bit of it-this is basically every real-life project! By the way, we're not doing these because they make sense; we're doing them because it's fun!
This is an amazing little build! The two surprise's for me were: 1) I really wasn't expecting the tiny NUC to do all that much! And 2) Glad to finally know you can actually add a PCIE Slot to an Intel NUC!!! I would like to (one day) do a similar ultra low power build (e.g. N100) that also packs a punch while, still being just as compact (that way I can also add a compact UPS too). All in all, I really enjoyed part 1 & 2 it's quite different from the usual :D
This Microserver is pretty awesome, I still have one in my parents basement, sadly the power supply blew up like 10 years ago when I used this and replacements were pretty expensive due to their special size, so I never fixed it. But it was great, 4 HDD bays and the CPU only had around 15W TDP. It was perfect as a home server.
So just as a small suggestion you can actually get an adapter that converts the header back into the port. Doing so will allow you to plug all four of the USB ports into the motherboard just by using the actual USB ports instead of the headers.
Super cool Stormtrooper machine 😎 The only thing, that would bother me a little bit, would be that big bulky hole cover on the back. I know, it's the result of a project that evolved during its making. Everything else is super cool, great job!
I love watching you go through the process of solving problems and the clever solutions you come up with. Have you ever thought about vinyl wrapping a case? Like people vinyl wrap there cars?
Useful skills like those learned here cost time, money, and a little failure here and there. This was a great little project with a cool style. Imagine how amazing the NAS you'll make next year will be.
Yet another great video. One thing I would consider doing is adding a HDMI extension cable to the NUC motherboard and adding it to the rear I/O plate with the power and network plug. This way if you need to access the BIOS you can using the NUCs HDMI port. It will still allow you to use the graphics card the rest of the time.
With the external bump out for the 'back plate' I would do the same and add in like a 120mm slim fan as an exhaust just to help a bit on the temps. But I can never leave good enough alone.
Really cool project, and an awsome case! Next you should make a video on how to set it up to "backup" bluray discs with special software on the drive! That would be cool! I think LTT made a video about that.
For what it's worth, I think this ProLiant MicroServer is probably the least proprietary and most technician-friendly ProLiant out there 😂compared to my DL320 G6 and ML350 G4p, but those are different beasts altogether
For the USB ports you could get one of these internal USB hubs that connect to a USB header and give you more USB headers. That should be a fairly easy addition to make the other two ports useable.
Ok, first: I would have left it pure black, thatÄs just a personal preference. Next: I like the inclusion of the blueray-drive, it just enables that ripping of bluerays without having to setup the external drive. I'm not quite happy with the rear and the part that sticks out, but even I can see, that the clearance was just too small. I probably would have chosen a different OS, but unraid is fine (again: just my personal preference). I over all like the build, it really turned out good. It also gave me the final push I needed to get a soldering iron.
![This Custom MicroServer is NUTS [HP Overhaul Pt.2]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
