Re purpose old pc, but limited by case

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Hi,

I’m finishing up a new gaming pc build so I would like to re purpose my old pc as server. Here are the specs of the old pc:

  • AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (14nm) 3.2 GHz 6-Core Processor
  • ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming K4 ATX AM4 Motherboard
  • Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
  • Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
  • Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
  • Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive
  • Toshiba DT01ACA200 2 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive
  • Gigabyte GAMING GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB Video Card
  • Fractal Design Define C ATX Mid Tower Case
  • Corsair CX650M (2021) 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply

As for server use cases I was thinking just a simple NAS with plex(maybe try switching to jellyfin), single node kubernetes for testing some projects before pushing to some public cloud solutions so compute shouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that the Define C case has only a 2 3.5" HDD bays which is quite limiting in storage expansion. I had a 2U server before but I want something that is a lot more quiet and also don’t need any enterprise grade redundancy and reliability as data that I have isn’t critical. If I had enough bays I would go for a RAID Z1 pool, but at this point it looks like LVM is my only option if I want to avoid ZFS overhead. I heard about TrueNAS scale and glusterFS, but don’t have much experience with those. Is that something I should look into if I want to for example get another chassis for expanding the storage bays only?

Is there some other easy solution like a mod for my case or some other inexpensive storage expansion outside the case of my pc?

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Go to the used market…
Look at NZXT H440/H442, Fractal Define R4/R5, Fractal Arc Midi R2… They are old so they should all be cheap used.
All of them have 8 bays and in the fractals there is dual optical bay, that can be repurposed…
All of those are solid cases and quiet at that.

I mean it’s an option…

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I’m from europe and there isn’t much of a used market in my country unfortunately and even if I managed to get a cheap case with more HDD bays I think it would be a waste to throw out my current case. Thx for suggestion

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Consider using one (or more!) PCIe slot(s) to host a PCIe to M.2 adapter card. Add cheap 1 or 2TB NVMe drives for expanded storage.

Here’s one I bought earlier:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005186941984.html
Do note that it does require bifurcation of the 16x slot it resides in. You can find smaller 1x NVMe slot cards that only require a 4x PCIe slot.

As for NVMe drives: the DRAM-less 1 and 2TB versions have seen a significant price drop recently, with 2TB devices now under 100€. I got this exact one 2 months ago for 112€, so prices continue to drop. Not as fast as before, but waiting another month may reduce your spending notably.

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look here they may have extra dive bays for your case.

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