Old Gaming Computer transformed to Server

The King5625 · December 3, 2020

Budget (including currency): $500-$750 USD

Country: United States (Alabama)

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Storage and in the future media server.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

Hi guys,

I am wanting to build a home server out of parts from my father-in-law's old gaming computer. I have a total of 15 hard drives (mechanical 3.5"). Their storage breakdown is as follows: 3 2tb drives, 8 1.5 tb drives, 2 300gb drives, & 2 1tb drives. There are a couple others that are in another gaming computer that is older than the one I want to use, but I am not sure of the size of them (they are in a storage unit). Most if not all of these Drives are Western Digital Black. I know all the 1.5tb drives and the 1tb drives are all WD Black. Many were manufactured in 2009.

My primary computer is a 2020 27" iMac with the following hardware:

64gb ddr4 ram,

10g ethernet,

4tb hard drive with 500gb reserved for Windows10 Pro in bootcamp,

3.6 ghz 10-core Intel Core i9,

AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16gb.

I also have software to read NTFS drives, however I would like something that would work natively across platforms.

The specs of the old gaming pc are as follows:

ASUS Rampage II Extreme Mother Board

3.33ghz Intel Core i7 975

8gb ram

64bit OS

STRIX GTX 1080

Running Windows 7 Ultimate (I cannot upgrade to Windows 10, It gives me a "FIRST BOOT" error all 6 times I tried.)

I also have a spare 2012 Retina MacBook Pro. It is past its life with macOS but I have to keep macOS on it.

I have a 1gb backbone for my home internet and my Mac is plugged in directly to the router in an aggregate 2.5gb port. My internet speed is no where near fast enough to saturate it but I am mainly looking to have a very fast home storage server and maybe in the future a storage/media server. This server can be headless or share an existing monitor I use for my Mac. I will not be constantly doing things on the server. I would like to setup remote desktop if possible.

The server will be used for storing multiple terabytes of files. If I could have another drive where I could keep a very redundant drive for storing priceless pictures that would be good as well.

I am new to this forum so forgive me if I don't know all the rules.

Any help or direction you can give me would be much appreciated.

jaslion · December 3, 2020

I would sell it and get a more efficient system as this thing is gonna consume a fair bit of power doing little

charlie_root · December 3, 2020

First thing you need to determine is how many of those hard drives you can actually use (i.e, how many will fit in your case or externally). Then, determine how much storage the whole system needs. Once you know that, you can plan a RAID setup around it.

I would put the OS on a RAID 1 array with 2 disks and keep an extra disk as a spare. These don't need to be very big; it's just going to hold the OS. Then make a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array out of the 8 1.5 TB drives and put your data on that.

You can calculate the usable storage for RAID at this site: http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

The King5625 · December 5, 2020

On 12/3/2020 at 2:45 PM, charlie_root said:

First thing you need to determine is how many of those hard drives you can actually use (i.e, how many will fit in your case or externally). Then, determine how much storage the whole system needs. Once you know that, you can plan a RAID setup around it.

I would put the OS on a RAID 1 array with 2 disks and keep an extra disk as a spare. These don't need to be very big; it's just going to hold the OS. Then make a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array out of the 8 1.5 TB drives and put your data on that.

You can calculate the usable storage for RAID at this site: http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

Thank you for the insight. Do you have an OS you recommend?

I am more than likely going to have to get another case. The one everything is in is extremely large at 1.5 feet x 3.5 feet x 3.5 feet.
I was wondering about converting it to a rack mounted setup. I have a 1 foot overhang behind my desk (old style teacher desk) where I can mount it.

I will be using Raid 6 for 9tb of storage. I would like to have multiple raid drives in one machine. I want to use the 2 2tb drives in a raid 1 config for priceless photos. I will also try to expand the 2 2tb to 5 2tb for extreme redundancy. I will probably run the 1tb drives in a raid 0 for fast retrieval for data that’s saved elsewhere.