Latest Home File Server Build [new to Level1]

Been watching @wendell on the YouTubes for a while now and joined the forum a couple months back but this is my first post.

I wanted to share my custom built Thin-ITX open air case that’s used for my home file server. This case is made from stainless sheet metal that I bent and riveted together.

Overall the fabrication was fairly straightforward albeit somewhat crude. I wasn’t so much concerned with overall looks, so you’ll see scratches here and there on the surface finish. Function over form, that’s my motto.

This machine is used to host SMB file shares, a couple VMs, Plex service, onsite and offsite backups, as well as other odds and ends. This is the second hardware iteration since building the case.

Previously I was using an Ivy Bridge 3770S which offers 4c/8t at 65w, up until a couple weeks ago, with 16GB of DDR3 and a 5TB WD HDD. That was a good system but it was a little more power hungry than I’d like for idle power, while also not offering TPM2.0 security, not to mention being 12+ years old.

This latest build utilizes AsRock’s industrial Thin-ITX IMB-1232-WV (specs), which is a really solid LGA-1200 SFF motherboard with loads of connectivity. I went with Intel’s i5-12600 6c/12t CPU and this has proven to be a great choice on idle power and excellent single threaded performance for more demanding tasks. Unfortunately, this motherboard only offers DDR4. I went with 32GB (2x16GB) of Silicon Power 3200 SODIMMs and a 512GB Team Group Gen3x4 NVMe boot drive, paired with a 12TB Ultrastar enterprise HDD (renewed). The gen4x16 slot will give me the option to upgrade the NIC to 10gb if/when needed or something else.

This build drops idle power draw from 50 watts down to about 20 watts, powered through an Eaton UPS, along with the networking hardware for clean power backup.

I recently upgraded my network to WiFi 7 and 2.5gb with 10gb fiber back-haul between switches. Here’s where most of that hardware lives.

Feel free to ask questions or comment on what I could have done differently.

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leonardo-di-caprio-one-of-us

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welcome to the forum

only thing I’d have done different is use a sata ssd for boot, NVME for VM hosting, and an additional drive for redundancy if budget allowed

Appreciate the welcome and thanks for the suggestions, I hadn’t considered separating the boot and VM drive, I may have to make this change!

As for the drive redundancy, I have an external USB drive in a fireproof safe for onsite backups and additionally I’m backing up offsite as well.

your backups are good enough for home shenanigans or media server

Yeah, you want your VM’s to have every advantage so we host on the fastest media with hypervisor on second fastest media available.

What’s your hypervisor host?

I’m using Windows 11 Pro and native Hyper-V. I’ve dabbled a bit with Linux, mainly with my PiHole but don’t yet feel confident enough to move this machine to Linux.

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Nice!
The scratch built case threads are always interesting. When I make cases I’m usually pretty rough with the metal but I just hit them with a metal surface conditioning tool at the end to make them look good.

I considered hitting the metal with a scotch-brite pad/wheel but preferred to keep the OG uniform brush marks and knew I couldn’t replicate them easily so, a few scratches here and there are what remains.

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