Need help making home server from old computer

[GrapeLesbian]

Hello!

 

I have an old desktop computer with

• Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H
• i3-3220
• Nvidia GTX 650
• 16GB DDR3

that I have no use for, but I would like to turn into a house data storage solution, as well as use for hosting game servers.

 

What are my best options? I need to be able to access it locally as a data storage device on my network (and possible from outside the house using a VPN or other solution(tell me if you know any good ones!)), quite likely have game servers running that can be accessed online (Planning on getting a fixed IP address, it's relatively cheap from my internet provider), as well as maybe having some video connection to a TV for watching movies from.

 

I know that my motherboard has RAID 5 support, and that's what I'm most likely to be getting, as I want some added security. It has support for 2x SATA 3 and 4x SATA 2. I'm thinking of getting 4-6 HDD Drives (any recommendations? Will be looking into separately), as well as an SSD card (possibly taking my old 120GB M.2 PCIe SSD from my laptop in order to upgrade it, would that be sufficient?).

 

 Do I need any other hardware to make this work? How does one go about setting a system like this up?

(I looked online and most guides were from 2010...)

[Firewrath9]

4 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Hello!

 

I have an old desktop computer with

• Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H
• i3-3220
• Nvidia GTX 650
• 16GB DDR3

that I have no use for, but I would like to turn into a house data storage solution, as well as use for hosting game servers.

 

What are my best options? I need to be able to access it locally as a data storage device on my network (and possible from outside the house using a VPN or other solution(tell me if you know any good ones!)), quite likely have game servers running that can be accessed online (Planning on getting a fixed IP address, it's relatively cheap from my internet provider), as well as maybe having some video connection to a TV for watching movies from.

 

I know that my motherboard has RAID 5 support, and that's what I'm most likely to be getting, as I want some added security. It has support for 2x SATA 3 and 4x SATA 2. I'm thinking of getting 4-6 HDD Drives (any recommendations? Will be looking into separately), as well as an SSD card (possibly taking my old 120GB M.2 PCIe SSD from my laptop in order to upgrade it, would that be sufficient?).

 

 Do I need any other hardware to make this work? How does one go about setting a system like this up?

(I looked online and most guides were from 2010...)

WD reds are good drives, so are WD golds.

[Electronics Wizardy]

48 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

I know that my motherboard has RAID 5 support, and that's what I'm most likely to be getting,

Don't use raid on your motherboard, it sucks.

 

What os do you want to use?

 

How much do you care about performance?

 

50 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

(possibly taking my old 120GB M.2 PCIe SSD from my laptop in order to upgrade it, would that be sufficient?

Just saying you probably can't boot from this.

 

 

 

Id look into unraid here.

[GrapeLesbian]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

 

What os do you want to use?

 

How much do you care about performance?

 

I would like to use Windows.

 

Performance for what exactly? Data transfer rates? Processor speeds for servers?

In terms of transfer rates I would like it to be at least as fast as a USB 3 external drive, preferably much faster. I have gigabit cabling throughout my house, and a 200mb/s internet connection.

Performance in terms of processing for the game servers would be pretty important for me, I'd like it to not be slowed down by the storage. I'd mostly be hosting Minecraft, TF2, other game servers, not simultaneously though, but switching to other ones probably like Terraria or Starbound, as needed. It's for my Discord server, probably 30-40 people max at a time.

 

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

Just saying you probably can't boot from this.

 

Really? What's the limitation for this? I use it just fine for my i7-7700HQ GTX1050 Ti Laptop, though it is starting to fill up.

 

What's up with Motherboard RAID? Will look into Unraid

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Performance for what exactly? Data transfer rates? Processor speeds for servers?

data transfer speeds

 

1 minute ago, GrapeLesbian said:

In terms of transfer rates I would like it to be at least as fast as a USB 3 external drive, preferably much faster.

gigabit is about 1/5 of the speed of usb3, so your not getting those speeds unless your paying for 10gbe.

 

2 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Really? What's the limitation for this? I use it just fine for my i7-7700HQ GTX1050 Ti Laptop, though it is starting to fill up.

What drive is it?

 

Its probably a nvme drive and that board can't boot from a nvme drive.

 

2 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

What's up with Motherboard RAID? Will look into Unraid

Motherboard raid is known for having issues and being a bad software raid solution.

 

If your on windows just use storage spaces, it will work much better here.

 

Unraid is a different linux distro that works well for home servers, but since you want windows, you not using it. You can run a windows vm on unraid if you want though.

[GrapeLesbian]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

data transfer speeds

 

gigabit is about 1/5 of the speed of usb3, so your not getting those speeds unless your paying for 10gbe.

 

What drive is it?

 

Its probably a nvme drive and that board can't boot from a nvme drive.

 

Motherboard raid is known for having issues and being a bad software raid solution.

 

If your on windows just use storage spaces, it will work much better here.

 

Unraid is a different linux distro that works well for home servers, but since you want windows, you not using it. You can run a windows vm on unraid if you want though.

I'm not sure if I have cat 5e or cat6 in my house, is there any way to check? might have 10gb, but not sure...

 

The specs say it's an M.2 PCIe SSD. Can't really say any more without opening my laptop up.

 

I'll look into setting up Storage Spaces then. Is it necessary to get a server version of Windows, or is regular Windows 10 enough? Know any good guides for it?

Can it be set up to use a RAID5 setup? I want to have some security without just mirroring every drive.

 

Also, do you know any good guides for setting something like this up? Do the guides from 2010 or 2013 still apply?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

'm not sure if I have cat 5e or cat6 in my house, is there any way to check? might have 10gb, but not sure...

Probably 1gbe, 10gbe is still very expensive and rare.

 

7 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

The specs say it's an M.2 PCIe SSD. Can't really say any more without opening my laptop up.

You can check in software. Task manager will tell you.

 

Probably nvme and you can't boot from it.

 

7 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

'll look into setting up Storage Spaces then. Is it necessary to get a server version of Windows, or is regular Windows 10 enough? Know any good guides for it?

Regular windows 10 is fine. The built in gui is fine for most things, but if your doing more advanced things like ssd caching you need to use powershell

 

I would suggest looking into unraid though. Run game serveres in a vm and it has a nice storage system that lets you easily add drives later on and mix drive sizes.

8 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Can it be set up to use a RAID5 setup? I want to have some security without just mirroring every drive.

Yep you can have what is basically a raid 5.

 

8 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Also, do you know any good guides for setting something like this up? Do the guides from 2010 or 2013 still apply?

I don't know of a good single guide as every one does something different. Basically setup storage and install the programs you want. not to much to it.

 

 

[Mayaa]

Also worth to mention that your CPU has integrated graphics so you can most likely drop the GPU unless you have some other plans for it.

But yeah it seems like you are going for what i did a few years ago, i turned my old Phenom II x4 pc into my home server, bought 2 WD reds for it and its been going for 3 or so years.

[GrapeLesbian]

3 minutes ago, Mayaa said:

Also worth to mention that your CPU has integrated graphics so you can most likely drop the GPU unless you have some other plans for it.

Thank you! I was thinking as much myself. I'll keep it for the time being, but yeah, I don't know if there'll be much need for it.

(I do Heavily prefer external graphics just for outputting a video signal, tho. I've had bad experiences with my laptop using the integrated graphics as the video output...)

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Thank you! I was thinking as much myself. I'll keep it for the time being, but yeah, I don't know if there'll be much need for it.

(I do Heavily prefer external graphics just for outputting a video signal, tho. I've had bad experiences with my laptop using the integrated graphics as the video output...)

really just take it out. The intel gpu will be fine here and your wasting a good amount of power with the gpu in with no benfit.

 

What type of bad experiences?

[GrapeLesbian]

16 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

 

You can check in software. Task manager will tell you.

 

Probably nvme and you can't boot from it.

 

MZVLW128HEGR - is that NVME? I don't really know how to tell

 

And yeah, I was thinking about it and tbh I can do most of what I'd want just in linux, so I'll definitely be looking into Unraid now.

How difficult/processor intensive is Virtualization, btw? Can it do simple tasks like play videos natively? And if a game server has a linux version, can it run natively, or does it still have to be VM'ed? Does it lose much performance because of Virtualization?

[GrapeLesbian]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

really just take it out. The intel gpu will be fine here and your wasting a good amount of power with the gpu in with no benfit.

 

What type of bad experiences?

Monitors not being compatible for whatever reason, passive video adapters not working due to limitations in what the iGPU can do (literally what Tech Support told me, also tested it on external GPU's and it worked just fine), bottlenecking for more video-intensive tasks. But yeah, I guess I'll at least try it out without it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

MZVLW128HEGR - is that NVME? I don't really know how to tell

 

And yeah, I was thinking about it and tbh I can do most of what I'd want just in linux, so I'll definitely be looking into Unraid now.

How difficult/processor intensive is Virtualization, btw? Can it do simple tasks like play videos natively? And if a game server has a linux version, can it run natively, or does it still have to be VM'ed? Does it lose much performance because of Virtualization?

yep its nvme

 

virtulization doesn't really need any extra cpu, its about the same cpu load as running it natively

 

The vm performance cut is normally about 3-5%

 

 

[GrapeLesbian]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

yep its nvme

 

virtulization doesn't really need any extra cpu, its about the same cpu load as running it natively

 

The vm performance cut is normally about 3-5%

 

 

Ayy, thank you very much for all the help!

One last question though, does the act of having drives in the pc take up processing power? Is it a lot, or would it still leave plenty of space for what I'm planning (taking into account my CPU)?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, GrapeLesbian said:

Ayy, thank you very much for all the help!

One last question though, does the act of having drives in the pc take up processing power? Is it a lot, or would it still leave plenty of space for what I'm planning (taking into account my CPU)?

Having drives doesn't use any cpu power. But using them all in a file transfer probably uses about 10% depending on settings like compression.