HP Pavilion 500-164 Server/NAS Conversion

0v3rrat3 · January 27, 2022

I recently acquired an HP Pavilion 500-164 that I plan to convert to a home server/NAS but, being a bit of a noob at this, I have a few questions.

I've done some simple stuff like upgrade the RAM, clean the entire inside, removed the CD drive, cleaned and reapplied the thermal paste. But I've noticed that, while there are plenty of SATA ports on the motherboard, there is only room to mount 2 hard drives (after replacing the CD drive with an HDD drive bay).

I would like to have room for at least 1 more drive since I'm planning on using TrueNAS and it's my understanding that you can't use the drive it's installed in for storage. I've found a few different drive cages on Amazon and other places but I'm not completely sure that they'd fit. Does anyone know for sure which ones will fit in this case or am I going to have to transplant the whole system into a new case? Ideally I'd like to have a total of 5 drives. 1 boot drive, and 4 data drives in a RAID 10 array. If I can't fit that many though I need at least 3 drives, 1 boot and 2 in a RAID 1 array.

Any and all tips and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.