remember that old PC you stuffed in the closet yeah that one today it's been
given a second chance this old
machine isn't worthless even with its
9-year-old CPU and complete lack of a graphics card why I'll let you in on a
little secret not all PCS need to be for
gaming tired of paying for Google Drive host your own cloud storage hate running
USB drives through your TV host your own media server the possibilities are
endless with the help of pulseway that sponsored today's video we're going to
show you how to repurpose that old rig into your own personal server for cheap
or even
free the first thing to learn is that servers are just computers the word
describes a role not a specific type of Hardware sure the servers in Big Data
Centers do look different than your home PC they're built for reliability with
redundant power supplies and ECC memory they prefer many slower cores rather
than a few fast ones and they lock consumer IO like tons of USB audio or
display outputs but that's because they're serving hundreds if not
thousands of clients we're not which is
why even our aging closet PC an old laptop or even a $30 Raspberry Pi can
all act as our first Home Server this this Optiplex 710 we picked up from our
local recycler free geek is the perfect candidate not just because it's cheap
at1 176 us but because the bones are
solid it's got a hyperthreaded quad core Intel i7 3770 128 gig SATA SSD for a
boot drive and a reasonable 1 TB of bulk
storage at this price point though there
are some compromises we have to make it's 12 gigs of RAM or mismatch and
predictably it doesn't have a GPU and even if we did add one we would likely
run into issues with the power supply because value engineered power supplies
like this 250 watt one while they're
generally pretty solid they don't leave a whole lot of head room to play with
nor does it offer additional PCI Express power cables but don't fret what really
matters here is that we have a blank canvas to work from and by the way now
is a great time to open up your rig and give it a good dusting and you maybe
refresh your thermal paste while you're at it it's it needs some love now let's
set up our OS so before you say it we're not going to install Linux today we know
that moving to a Linux or FreeBSD based option does have both performance and
feature benefits over Windows however if you're just starting out and you've got
an old Windows-based machine already around this is the easiest way to get
your foot in the door and that's what we want this video to be a start not the
end if you guys want to see a followup where we we use traz or similar rattle
your Sabers in the comments and get subscribed the first thing you're going
to want to do is factory reset the PC now if you're running Windows 7 or 8 now
is a good time to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11 keep in mind that a lot of those
old Windows keys will still work to activate newer versions of Windows if
you're already there hit the Windows key and type
reset H it's slow then click on get
started all you need to do from here is run through the prompts and until you have a fresh Windows install we ran win
Arrow tweaker to disable automatic updates and kill Cortana and also
disable a lot of the extra bloat like Telemetry that can suck away valuable
resources from an older system like this now we're ready to set up our server to
actually do stuff for starters we're going to download Plex Media Server for
our media and pulseway to manage our system remotely if you're thinking why
would I need remote access to this dinosaur well it's not because we plan
on accessing it from across the world but rather because we may not have a
Speare monitor keyboard and mouse to leave connected to it let alone the
space instead we can operate it headlessly that is completely controlled
via any web browser or the pulseway app neat setting up Plex is simple install
the application run through the prompts and definitely read that Ula am I right
they are very legally binding the beauty of using a Windows PC to start your
server hosting journey is that the user experience isn't and I mean this with
the utmost most respect to all command line Warriors complete crap usually you
just download what you need the links are in the description and install and configure it with a goey and then you're
done it really is that easy we can't cover all the options here of course you
could run a remote torrenting box or an ad blocking server for instance but if
you're following along and you do hit some roadblocks hop on over to our Forum
where there are tons of friendly fellow nerds willing to help you out love you
guys pulseway setup is similarly easy just click through the wizard and sign
in at this point you'll have full access to your files and settings from whatever
web browser you use to access pulseway and we're done service is running
pulseway is up you can actually get away with not even setting up a network share
or anything and just using pulseway to manage your files remotely but having a
direct folder share on your local network is pretty nice so we're going to
do that too it just takes a few more steps and you won't be able to access it
from Starbucks unfortunately or fortunately we've got a drive set up
here called LTT simple server that we'll go into and we have a folder we want to
share what we'll do is we'll right click go to give access to and then click on
specific people from here either you can allow only one person to access the file
like it is normally or in our case we're going to give everyone in our local
network access being sure to change their permissions from read only to read
and write creating a Melting Pot and boom the folder is now
able to be added as a network share by copying the link into the add a network
folder prompt in any network machine on your local network don't forget to go to
the Network and Sharing Center to ensure both network discovery and file and
printer sharing are turned on under the private settings or if your network is
set as public you should set that as private because it won't work on public
networks not by default double check that really that's it for making a basic
file server and with it we can do a Litany of cool things we can point our
Plex server to the storage folders and access the entire drive over the network
we can set up a Windows remote desktop connection or go easy mode and use pulse
ways built-in remote desktop tool to control our server from any in the world
without exposing our IP to the net we can also update Windows without having
to log into the system itself even from your phone and the best part is that
we're still running Windows we're not running Linux you don't have to learn anything new if your main rig BS itself
you have an easy to configure backup PC just waiting in the wings but what if
you want more control or what if you
don't have a Windows license to throw at your pile of spare parts well you could
run a standalone Linux server of course but as we've seen in the Linux challenge
that's not always for the faint of heart UNR and prox MOX are also feature Rich
options but they're not super easy to use either for an intermediate user we
would suggest traz core previously known as frez it's free easy to install and
has a decent UI that's it video over
just kidding let's kick it up by adding more storage and data redundancy these
two 12 TB ironwolf Pro drives can handle
that beautifully at $400 a pop they
aren't cheap but considering that 10 tab of Google storage costs 70 bucks a month
if we did the math this upgrade will pay
itself off in under a year including the PC not to mention you will own and
control all of your data all right we've got the 1 tby drive out and the first 12
TB Iron Wolf in but now we have a
problem where does this go we can't
exactly like just throw it here and be done with it we can't put it here
there's just not enough clearance like there's there's no Provisions there's
not even another s cable
unless this optical drive now serves no
purpose oh there are some screws in there that I need to get rid
of ah okay cool but there's another
problem yes this freed up some room and
yes this is SATA um they're not they're not the same
size so that's where this comes in this
will accept a 3 and 1/2 in drive like
so and slot
in something like so oh yep okay
obviously I need to actually Mount that first but uh that's the plan let's go
let's get to it let's see if it still works next now
with the DVD drive out because who needs one of these these days we have a freed
up SATA power and data cable right where we need it so our second drive now
definitely screwed in is absolutely
plugged into the system and I'm not getting a display this is very troubling
one moment please two things that we learned just now first always check your
cables second a lot of these old machines sometimes have issues with just
like outputting anything via DisplayPort yeah these are the kinds of things
that these old systems will sometimes give you trouble with but once you have
it all set up and running here we go we've got 12 terabytes of storage right
here did I say 12 I meant to say 12 terabytes of redundant storage yes now
it's time to raid these things we're going to be setting up raid one which
means the drives will be mirrored there's no performance benefit on wres
anyway for reads there is but if one dies you get to keep 100% of your data
hit the Windows key and type storage spaces then create a new pool using the
steps we've linked down below you will need to format your
drives first make sure you do that there we go un format
drives I'm I'm allergic to Del storage
space resiliency 2way mirror yep file
system NTFS size okay so 10.9 terabytes
that's 12 terabytes and create storage space formatting the storage space we
are good to go and there we have it a 12
terabyte redundant Nas boox for under
$1,000 and each of these hard drives costs about 400 bucks so that's telling
you something this particular form factor is actually really easy to hide
somewhere inconspicuous especially if you use pulseway to do all of your
remote monitoring and maintenance so huge thanks to pulseway for sponsoring
this video we hope you enjoyed it and if you want to see more of this sort of DIY
server content don't forget to get subscribed and check out all of our
other server videos we'll have those Linked In the End screen for you for now
see you later