I’ve been thinking for a long time about building a home server and this month I’ve finally done it. The idea behind it is to serve as a NAS but also to be some sort of playground that allows me to install whatever tools I need, like VPN, DNS, etc. With that in mind, I came up with the following requirements:

• Must be small
• Must be silent
• Must be relatively cheap
• Must consume a reasonable amount of power
• Must have at least 2TB available space

After some research I came up with a list of components that might do the job:

Component	Link
Case	Fractal Design Node 304
Motherboard	ASRock Fatal1ty B450 GAMING-ITX/AC
Processor	AMD Athlon 3000G
HDDs	2X WD Red 2TB SATA-III
SSD	Kingston A400 120GB SATA-III M.2 2280
Memory	Kingston 8GB DDR4
PSU	Corsair CV450
	Total: ~$530

The Case

I chose this case because it has a lot of advantages:

• It’s small(250 x 210 x 374 mm)
• Comes with 3 fans that are pretty silent. It also has a fan controller directly on the case.
• Because it has space for 6 3.5” drives, the possibility for future upgrades is great.

The biggest disadvantage is that you need to have a mini ITX motherboard, but that is not a surprise given the size.

The Motherboard

I think the ASRock Fatal1ty B450 was a very good choice because it has a lot of features that you would need for a home server. Some will say that it is a bit overkill and I could get around with a cheaper one but because the mini ITX requirement, you don’t have many options to choose from. Another idea will be to get a motherboard with an integrated CPU, like an ASRock J4105B-ITX because it cheaper and it consumes less power but you can no longer upgrade the CPU if you need to and the performance is not that great. Let’s take a look at some interesting features that this motherboard has:

• AM4 Socket, so you have a lot of options when it comes to the CPU
• 4 SATA3 slots: it might not be enough if you are planning on having the maximum capacity of the case filled, but you can always get a PCI SATA card.
• M.2 slot: it is a good idea to have another drive for your OS.
• LAN and WiFi: this means that you can get away without connecting it to an Ehernet cable.
• DisplayPort and HDMI: in case you want to connect it directly to a TV.
• Bluetooth support: because, why not? Maybe you want to install a retro console emulator and you need to set up a wireless controller.

Note: It does not have an integrated video card so you would need a processor with AMD Radeon Vega Graphics.

The Processor

The choice was simple, because the 3000G has decent performance for its price tag and it also comes with Radeon Vega Graphics. With a TDP of 35W, it should consume little power and stay cool.

HDDs

The WD Red drives are supposed to be especially designed for NAS/RAID environments, so they should have improved reliability and performance. I don’t know it that is entirely accurate but we will see that in time.

#The PSU Nothing much to say here. Because the server will be up 24/7 I needed a relatively efficient power supply.

The SSD and memory were randomly chosen.

Conclusion

I am pretty happy with this setup for now. It doesn’t have that much processing power or memory but it is highly upgradable. The two 2TB drives give me the flexibility of using RAID 0 or 1 so it will do for a while. The next objective is to install something on it, but I will do that in a later article.