I turned an old laptop into a power efficient FreeNAS server using hot glue and duct tape!

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I turned an old laptop into a power efficient FreeNAS server using hot glue and duct tape!

Рет қаралды 42,776

Күн бұрын

A video about my laptop powered 6 hard drive FreeNAS server! It only consumes 56 watts idle, and performs fairly well on a gigabit network.
Power Consumption:
At the end of the video you can see a picture of the power meter with system idle at around 54 watts. I have worked a lot on power management and have come up with the following figures. Not sure if this qualifies as ultra power efficient as I mentioned in the video, but the numbers hold up against many off the shelf models!
Read/Write: 65-70 watts
Idle Disks spinning: 54 watts
HDD Standby: 18.1 watts
(Using powerd - and C2 power state)
System Specs / Hardware:
Lenovo T520 Motherboard
support.lenovo...
Lenovo T520 Docking Station
Intel i7 - 2640m mobile cpu
8 GB Ram
2x 16GB kingston flash drives for boot (configured in raid 1)
6x 2TB Western Digital Red NAS Drives
Old 3u server chassis
I tried the latest version of FreeNAS (11.2) but I was not able to get the system to run correctly due to terrible performance booting from USB. After some research, I discovered I am not the only one with these problems, so I went with 11.1 which works fine.
Performance Results:
Copying large files (30MB +) I was able to maintain about 100MB/s write, and 105-110 MB/S read.
Smaller files such as pictures (not tested in video) was about 40-60 MB/s write, and slightly faster reading.
Reference:
CPU / HDD Temperature Script
pastebin.com/F...
Freenas Setup Guide (Links to another channel)
• Getting Started With F...
PCIE Adapter
(I did not have a lot of confidence that this would even work, but it did!)
www.aliexpress...
BIOS MOD
(This took a lot of reading to find a download link that actually worked!)
www.bios-mods....

Пікірлер: 129

@sageosaka 4 жыл бұрын

This is one of the jankiest things I've ever seen, and I absolutely love it

@crhjorth 4 жыл бұрын

*Looks at empty 1U case. Looks at broken laptop in pieces* ... Hold my beer, Shae.

@WC1376C22 2 жыл бұрын

Like minds

@epicsmg2682 4 жыл бұрын

If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid. Decent job. Wouldn't trust that double sided tape drive mount, but keep an eye on it.

@michaelrichardson8467 3 жыл бұрын

Goes to show how much life "Broken" tech really has left in it. Glad to see someone else do something with old hardware rather than put it into a landfill. This is great and honestly, if you only look at it from the front it's really not that jank lol

@drdeathkitty 2 жыл бұрын

I love seeing the creative ideas people come up with for old laptop hardware. absolutely genius. Just another laptop worth of e-waste saved.

@augurseer 4 жыл бұрын

speaking my language!! love reusing old hardware.

@erichankins2634 4 жыл бұрын

"A" for effort, and you get the Jank Rig of the Year!! Now I want to see Linus pull this one off.

@davidbennett9478 4 жыл бұрын

OMG! I love this. You so need to be invited to the next Junk Yard Wars with Linus at Linus Media Group.

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

He is local to me so you never know! It would be a fun experience, this project was inspired by some of the stuff they have done on junk yard wars.

@RainerTrunk 4 жыл бұрын

Yes now we talking, that's great. Using something and build something better. Loving it! Also you can reuse the screen for about $26 and build a portable monitor!

@michaelhampton6388 4 жыл бұрын

17:15 Your bottleneck is the network, not your drives. The drives can't run any faster because you've maxed out the gigabit Ethernet.

@xxxXXXCH04XXXxxx 3 жыл бұрын

That's what I was thinking.

@666neoselen 2 жыл бұрын

if the laptop has some 3.0 usb, he can install a usb to 2.5gb nic or do some link aggregating, why not.

@dr.peterscroll422 3 жыл бұрын

That is great. My Samsung laptop is 10 years old and the plastic has become brittle and is breaking and falling off. So I have mounted (laid on, really) the motherboard of two short 1"x2"x14" beams. I do plan to make my own NAS but that would probably take another 6 months of accumulating some components each month.

@anton-eg1hh 4 жыл бұрын

had a broken laptop with an i5 540m running pfsense for 2 years like this i never had problems

@kartmen69 4 жыл бұрын

I got a dell 2120 netbook (got it for 2$) with 2 usb hdd docks, i just put the whole thing out off sight, and it works perfectli almost a year now. perfect for home use

@turbo5546 4 жыл бұрын

Sometimes you just have to make do with what you have laying around. Always a fun project making do and you can always pat yourself on the back when it works and the magic blue smoke doesn't come out.

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I’ve seen my fair share of magic smoke :)

@kainatticus 4 жыл бұрын

This is awesome, I love these kinds of projects

@kojack57 4 жыл бұрын

Nice. Thanks. Cool use of old H/W

@alertsemail7057 3 жыл бұрын

dude, you're freaking awesome.

@whyomgwhywtf 4 жыл бұрын

If u have learned anything from this video, its that you can run an LSI HBA from one of those stand alone riser cards... which i have been very curious about for a while.. so thanks for that at least lol

@glenns7866 4 жыл бұрын

Just as a recommendation, even though you aren't running GPUs through that riser its a better idea to use an actual 6 pin pcie connector rather than sata. Coming from a GPU mining perspective, its pretty risky running sata power on risers. I have seen many pictures of smoking and black sata power connectors after being used. I guess you aren't pulling much power, but still just trying to remove any more fire risk than you already have haha

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

Totally, I was not super concerned since the power consumption on the sata card is much lower then a GPU.

@glenns7866 4 жыл бұрын

@@TechwithShae 👍

@SakuraChan00 4 жыл бұрын

best NAS and more powerfull then a synology nas!

@Felix-ve9hs 4 жыл бұрын

and a lot cheaper

@ludwig4872 4 жыл бұрын

Yeah, it it’s really nice! But FreeNAS without ECC ram doesn’t make a lot of sense... maybe different software would be appropriate.

@180doman 4 жыл бұрын

You have plethora of better ways of doing that like itx with embedded CPUs, itx with powersaving separate cpu, sff/usff dell/lenovo/fujitsu/hp refubrished pcs and many more small solutions with power consumtion below 30w ... but... Your build is one of a kind and i love it :D

@totem168 4 жыл бұрын

That thing is a beauty and you also did great job for the environment, since you avoid it to go to the landfill. *thumb up*

@TheJunky228 4 жыл бұрын

and what about the original hardware that was in the server?

@totem168 4 жыл бұрын

Junky228 I don't know but, maybe someone already buys it from eBay and use it, or it can be saved as part.

@jasonfrench5369 3 жыл бұрын

I bet it is the quietest rack mounted server ever, I say nice.

@carpandrei7493 2 жыл бұрын

Hmmm... your video gave me an ideea: a more modern laptop motherboard that features one, maybe two M.2 nVME slots, in which you put PCIe to Sata addaptaters (I think up to 6 ports are possible, per m.2 slot) and find a way to tie everything together...

@DiyintheGhetto 3 жыл бұрын

I need to make one my self. I always wanted to make a laptop nas system. Thnk you for sharing this with us.

@David_Quinn_Photography 4 жыл бұрын

this was a good proof of concept video for sure.

@karoljenszura3584 2 жыл бұрын

i think its beautiful, i like they way you improvise things to get it worked. its like i see myself 👍 edit. amazing build, real art

@Rene-kg7pf Жыл бұрын

Lapnas 😂👍 wish u could make a version where the old laptop is working as it should despite just being old... I have one question though ... could this be made with sata controller? ... and ok another question.. the thing u show as a raid controller.... how is that connected to the laptop.. what cable there? Is it IDE and some kind of IDE board ? Very inspiring 👏

@MrV1NC3N7V3G4 4 жыл бұрын

Ingenuity 9/10. Jankiness 12/10.

@haatemee6966 3 жыл бұрын

Awesome project 😀, love the outcome.

@2ManyGoats 4 жыл бұрын

I just ran out of space for all my hard drives (4 3tb, a 1tb, 3 500gb, and am 80gb for the OS) so I'm about to turn it into a wall mounted system. If I had that case, I'd be doing that instead

@kbrnsr 4 жыл бұрын

2:45 Duct tape is the true hero of this video 8:16 What's a hero without a sidekick 8:36 Is this max jank? 11:36 It looks...okay?

@ShiroCh_ID 3 жыл бұрын

this is the true Recycling

@spamwich0 4 жыл бұрын

very interesting but you should zip tie a fan in front of the hard drives and it'd be a great little nas

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I was thinking about doing that, I have no spare fans at the moment, but I'll scavenge some very soon.

@TBL_stevennelson 4 жыл бұрын

Buys a $50 fan to cool $10 drives. That's got to be a meme. It would be interesting to see what it takes to cool everything.

@MarkRose1337 4 жыл бұрын

Good place to get fans is from busted power supplies

@Ender_Wiggin 3 жыл бұрын

What a mad lad

@glonch 4 жыл бұрын

Awesome job!

@BirAdSecin 3 жыл бұрын

I have a super question; How to set up bios mod for different motherboards :D

@thegreenguy8837 3 жыл бұрын

This is awesome. Gotta try this.

@Mikey-Likes-I.T 4 жыл бұрын

You get a like AND a Sub just for the Janky-ness of this and the fact that it works!

@PusterPL 4 жыл бұрын

I really enjoy your videos :D Fun and slightly educational :)

@benjaminby4642 3 ай бұрын

Can you come back to this project ? Maby an update if it’s worth it or you can improve it . Thanks

@TheJunky228 4 жыл бұрын

this is beautiful jank, I live for this stuff --edit I take it all back, it was waaay worse than I thought lmao

@kal9001 4 жыл бұрын

Intriguing... I have a few old laptops around and wondering if this is a good idea to replicate. The issue of course being the WLAN mod...

@mattd390 3 жыл бұрын

I dig it

@jackcalloway3619 4 жыл бұрын

The only problem with the P410 is it only supports 6GB/s with SAS drives, not SATA. They’re also known for their rubbish performance. I would recommend a P822 as they’re amazing for performance and cost the same as the P410.

@hypercoffeedude 4 жыл бұрын

Someone buy this man a 3d printer! Good video though, LOL!

@davidoconnell4100 3 жыл бұрын

That's delightful.

@ThePoorInvestor 4 жыл бұрын

you're my type of guy! Keep up the great job.

@saiff541 4 жыл бұрын

So i guess i'm going to rip the motherboard off my old laptop and try this.

@hongtanke 3 жыл бұрын

I appreciate that your wife recognizes that this is jank af.

@JarofNothig 3 жыл бұрын

Hi, that's awesome server you have, how is she going? I'm planing to do the same one but I'll use T420s

@hiveofactivitysussex6924 2 жыл бұрын

My kinda server build!

@user-cy9zz1tj7e Жыл бұрын

Nice, hardware~~

@josel.flores4617 3 жыл бұрын

My like to the jankiest nas server on KZfaq

@Sam-dn3wg 4 жыл бұрын

It's 2020 and i put 4x4tb drives in my NAS. So, a slight improvement over 2tb :)

@petrosposiedon3210 Жыл бұрын

Question. Can something somewhat similar to this be done using an old 2011 MacBook Pro with no broken or damaged hardware (except for a cracked display screen and cracked trackpad but I don’t even imagine needing either of those) ?

@jonatanlambert Жыл бұрын

my god this looks like a fire hasard

@illstateofmind 4 жыл бұрын

Awesome ghetto build

@pepeshopping 4 жыл бұрын

Cool but what matters is transfer speed when you have several drives in raid and the little pcie does not have enough bandwidth.

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

It’s definitely not an ideal build. Not enough ram, and the pcie 2.0 1x slot is a massive bottleneck. But for a total cost of about $10 and spare parts, it could be usable.

@ppipowerclass 3 жыл бұрын

I have a 1U nas that someone gave me and I have absolutely no idea how to set it up / use it :(

@Airbag888 3 жыл бұрын

Hmm I wouldn't call it 'low power' Looking at just the idle 18.1W idle specially. I'm going to blame the ATX power supply for starters. Also I wonder about the performance numbers out of that pcie 2.0 x1 (at best?) mpci m2 slot. Personally I'm looking for a solution to plug in a 10gbe card (sfp+) and 2-3 drives and 1-2 nvme as cache on a system using dc power.. very hard :p A+ for effort though

@zxcvb_bvcxz 4 жыл бұрын

That laptop is probably supported by CoreBoot, if you wanted to go all the way.

@christostsekas8795 3 жыл бұрын

Hello! Great project! Im trying to set up a similar NAS using an old hp 4510s laptop motherboard and omv. But i have a small issue. Depite the fact that i have the system installed and configured, once i turn it on without a monitor attached, it refuses to boot and turns off after a minute or two. I have searched the bios for settings that correspond to some kind of headless operation and i couldnt find any, I run an bios update but the problem persists. What do you thing? Thanks in advance.

@Damarious25 4 жыл бұрын

Epic Rap Battles of History - Shae VS. Linus

@augurseer 4 жыл бұрын

Shae, This is perfect and still worked better then what Linus does. ;) Here is to Canadian handwork

@richardross3815 3 жыл бұрын

Let me know when you need another roll of gaff tape?.... lol

@BarfusWOW 4 жыл бұрын

what did you do to that poor laptop drive over it?

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

It took a tumble, it was a very sad day.

@TBL_stevennelson 4 жыл бұрын

I will buy it from you. Jk. But it's cool thanks 4 the Entertainment. Next you should compare it with other cheap solutions. Compare it to Raspberry pi One of them all in one storage. Anything else you think of.

@AndrewDanne 4 жыл бұрын

Hey it works, it fulfills a needed task, it was how much??? Not a lot. that's way cool!!

@AtharvaaM Жыл бұрын

I am trying to do this with lenovo x230

@williamhustonrn6160 4 жыл бұрын

man this reminds me of the days i ran all my HHD's in their USB enclosures before shucking them into my new unraid build. I use to run 6 x 10tb USB enclosures HHDs in unraid via USB 3.0 and i got 180-200 transfer speeds.. curious why yours are running so slow? is a quick removal policy enabled?

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I’m almost positive the bottleneck is the old 3gbps sata card, and the fact that it’s a pcie 1x slot. It was definitely a made from junk build, if I get my hands on a newer card I’d like to give it another go and see if that improves the performance at all.

@imawsome6 4 жыл бұрын

Only thing I would change is the tape. HDDs vibrate. Buuut, I may have to do this with my old laptop... :)

@davidtuomi8361 4 жыл бұрын

So, my question is how did you trick the bios into loading without having a battery? I'm having an issue with an old Dell laptop where I need a replacement battery. But to use a non-Dell battery (now unobtanium) you have to flash the bios. But to flash the bios you need a working battery.

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I downloaded the Phoenix bios flash utility, and started it with the "force" flag. Then all I had to do was select the file I wanted to flash and hit go. Surprisingly it was pretty easy even though I couldn't find any guides online.

@booboo699254 4 жыл бұрын

Post-apocalyptic NAS

@TheJunky228 4 жыл бұрын

Have you flashed the RAID card so that it only acts as a passthrough for the HDDs (so they can be RAIDed in software) rather than actually a hardware RAID? [IT Mode] I always hear that using RAID cards as-is is a big no-no when it comes to servers

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

The original card I tried does not have an "IT Mode" unfortunately, the second card I tried is a simple HBA card though, so no raid at play. You are correct though, using a hardware raid card is definitely a no-no unless it can be put into IT/HBA mode.

@arminmohammadi1 4 жыл бұрын

So cool :)

@awonglk 4 жыл бұрын

Just curious, just what's the average/max power at the wall socket does this build uses given this is an "ultra power efficient" build?

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I added the power measurement results to the video description. I was basing that statement on the specs of the Synology DS1618+. Although my access power is higher, my standby/hibernation power is lower. If I were to put a lower power CPU in this laptop I think I could get the numbers lower without sacrificing performance.

@TheMchip 4 жыл бұрын

not a bad idea .. but there is sooooo much workt to put it together :D

@danielkovacs6040 3 жыл бұрын

"No one is going to put 2tb hdds in a nas server in 2020". Me here building a 3 x 2tb raid 5 from a dell optiplex 760 ....

@hongtanke 4 жыл бұрын

please change your channel name from Tech with Shae with Jank Tech Eh (eh for Canada)

@BrandonHall916 4 жыл бұрын

I felt dirty watching this....

@cliffordjamesbloomfield4161 4 жыл бұрын

Haven't time to watch right now but I'm commenting and upvoting because I love this nerd crap.

@PaulineMiddelink 4 жыл бұрын

How can you call it ultra efficient etc if you did not even do power measurements?

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I added the power measurement results to the video description, at the end of the video I did put up a picture of the idle power usage but I know I didn't really cover it.

@artlessknave 4 жыл бұрын

funny, that doesn't look like server grade hardware. does it have ECC? this hurts to watch.

@Felix-ve9hs 4 жыл бұрын

ECC in a Laptop? With a Laptop / non Xeon CPU? With a Mobile Chipset? Don't think so

@PaCmEn12 4 жыл бұрын

How did you connect the motherboard in to the power supply?

@TechwithShae 4 жыл бұрын

I’m using the original power brick plugged into the docking station for the motherboard. I was looking at a DC to DC power adapter so that I could use the power supply in the case to power the motherboard though, I would need something that converts 12v to 20v. Right now it has 2 plugs.

3 жыл бұрын

@@TechwithShae i know it a old video. But did you know that you could get 20v out of that PSU? You only need to bridge different outputs and check with a multimeter. Just try on a old PSU first though.

@rodrigofilho1996 3 жыл бұрын

The bottleneck was clearly the gigabit network, 6 drives are too much for gigabit network, if u had only 2 HDDs the performance would be the same...

@lelandclayton5462 4 жыл бұрын

I see you built a reproduction of the Florida Unemployment Server.

@jamesbaxter904 3 жыл бұрын

My Dell T110 uses like only 40w of power, but it's a legit server 😂

@VioletDragonsProjects 4 жыл бұрын

8GB is not enough! even 16GB is not enough. im using 32GB in my FreeNAS server with proper server hardware and its still not even enough. i have 6 3TB NAS disks and 4 1TB disks for iSCSI. and i can reach 350 to 400mb/s on a 10gig link! you can end up with data corruption without ECC RAM.

@Felix-ve9hs 4 жыл бұрын

8 GiB of non-ECC RAM is totally fine for a NAS that you use at home, if you have a big Database or VMs hostet in a Company setting, 32+ GiB and ECC RAM (and a UPS) do make sense