I am noticing a pattern where I will watch a Level1 video then spend the following 2 or 3 hours researching a build list.

Let's all imagine how filthy rich Wendel would need to be to have more money than sense.

Every video somehow gets better. This channel is an absolute GOLDMINE of top-quality content.

I'm a huge fan of 5.25" bays because they're so versatile and so easy to access and bloody annoyed that the industry has gone in a generally form over function RGB bling direction in recent years.

I'd love to see two different videos on home storage servers. One covering 2 - 4u power-efficient, rack-mounted servers that hold as much storage as possible and are suitable for media, virtualization and even hosting VM's via TrueNAS scale. The second video covering power-efficient storage servers for people who don't have a rack and need a good looking quiet server that has a lot of capacity.

I think we need to see a Sliger and Level 1 Techs team up for the ultimate home nas/server case!

As far as I can tell, ATX in a tower with room for a lot of HDDs is the best value still. It takes up a bit more space but everything costs less than MATX or ITX. The ICYDOCK stuff is really cool, but also really expensive for what it is.

I love that Wendell just casually suggests writing a system linux module for getting your memory errors into ipmi, that's not level1 that's graybeard level lol

The follow on builds / videos to this one can't come fast enough for me. I am so very ready to do this same thing.

Love my U-NAS NSC-810A. MicroATX, dual full size PCIe slots, 8x3.5 hotswap bays. Little tough to build it but now that I'm done it's been awesome.

The ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T looks real interesting for that Jonesbo case - The 2 OCuLink connectors will connect 4 SATA drives each, or you can use them for PCIe4 x4 for some kind of U.2 functionality. And as it has dual 10GBe networking, it certainly has the throughput. Finally, you can bifurcate it's x16 slot into x8x8, x8x4x4 or x4x4x4x4 for NVMe caching. Or even a half-height GPU for HW transcoding as part of a FreeNAS SCALE box.

Very happy to see Sliger getting a mention, there cases are underrated and under reviewed, love my SM550 case.

FANTASTIC VIDEO! - I just built in a Node304 case with a AXZEZ ITX carrier board (with 5 SATA ports - yes!!) & a RasPi CM4 module (available as a combo!) and I wish I saw this sooner! The only thing missing is ECC memory. I'd also look at the Silverstone DS case which comes with a SATA/SAS backplane (if money is more important than time for you) . Thanks for thinking of us mere mortals Wendel! :D

I would like to see the "budget home NAS that can be upgraded in the same case to the Best cost/efficient Home NAS" because I believe a lot of people who don't know they need a NAS if they are presented with a compelling option they will join the datahoarder club and with it they will join this channel, the best one for this type of content! Magnificent work! I have known your channel for a while, but I joined recently and I am glad that I did because enjoying the content even thought neither do I have more money than sense.

Left the Mac world and loving my first awesome PC build.. I was thinking adventures when I stumbled on this channel.. now I’m excited but just more confused with so many options.. I fell into a wormhole looking up raid setups and networking.. 😅

I just found this channel and I'm loving the hardware content!

I've been at you forums looking for this and the fact that your testing with error injection 🤤, I thank you greatly on this adventure and certainly will copy Lol ❤️

Also please don't stop reading my mind about these insane machination such as using many of those ICY dock 5.2" bays. I was going to put it in the basement of my Dual PC (Desktop / Server) P600S. Filling the other 3.5" bays with 20TB EXOS drives.

Glad to see you getting healthier! Looking good.

My first homelab server for plex and Nas functionality was a node 304 with old core i3 and quadro p2000. I'm out growing that 6 drive bay limit so I decided to go ryzen with a fractal define 7. It holds so many 3.5 drives. This enables me to use lsi hba adapters with SAS expanders to scale out. It's not same use case as your living room server scenario but I'd love to see some content on expanding bay enclosures that don't take up a lot of space and cost effective to another 16 drives etc. Especially considering we have to prepare for the apocalypse 😂

That RAM tester is absolute genius

I'd actually love to see this case created. This was one of my struggles in find a small case that had expansive storage solutions.

Looking much healthier lately Wendell. Nice work. 🤙🏻

"Don't speak to me or my son again" perfect.

My normal go-to platform for home server stuff would be an old gaming system that myself or a friend is trying to get rid of for cheap.

Ooh my that seeedstudio server looks really cool! And for that price too! If you get that and two 20tb hard drives, that would be an easy choice to get a backup server for my homelab!

I love the idea, I didn't even realize the 5.25" bay thing until you brought it up, and I think its genius.

A+ hilarious intro to this vid 👍 <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1008">16:48</a> -- Thank you for the heads up about i225-V being "on the struggle bus." I have one, no issues so far. Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

I LOVE these home servers videos ! (the intro of this one cracked me up)

Putting aside hot swap ability, what you describe as the ideal mATX server case is pretty close to the Fractal Design Node 804. Room for nine 3.5” drives plus two more 2.5” drives. With a 3D printed adapter, you could add a tenth 3.5” drive. An extra bonus is that it looks good enough that you can put it anywhere. For filling all those drive bays, I’ve got a Supermicro X10sl7 which has 6 SATA ports, plus an onboard 8 port LSI SAS controller.

I want two different form factors. One is a hypervisor node that only needs to support a handful of M.2 drives (22110 size would be ideal), and then a larger chassis that would be the storage server with both flash and spinning rust.

Wendel I haven't been able to watch a video in awhile but I just wanted to say, you're so damn skinny! Way to go! I know that's insanely hard work that barely gets noticed over time but seeing it all in one go, like damn you're almost another person! Congrats, and I hope you keep it up.

Very interesting video Wendell and Level1! You definitely got my idea cog wheels turning. I'd love to build a home server to work as a NAS and use as a remote server to learn Linux!

I think the Ideal Home Server would be something like: -The best performance/watt CPU to be energy efficient, I think the 7950x or 7900? -The most ECC ram you can get -2 SSD/NVME in raid for the host hypervisor. Proxmox, xcp-ng, unraid or whatever is your choice -5 HDD's with RAIDZ2 passthough to a Truenas VM as a target for the storage, with NFS or SCSi for easier ZFS management. -About GPU.. I'm not sure the iGPU in the AM5 is supported for HW encoding yet, I don't do much encoding as I mainly use direct playback, and for the little encoding I need the CPU is fine. So I don't think a dGPU is needed for the ideal Home Server...unless -Unless you want to do a Jack-of-all-trades Home Server and use it as a Gaming PC, locally or via Parsec/Moonlight. My current "main" Home Server is also my gaming PC as I can't have multiple computers (space+money). And passthough the dGPU to a VM that I turn on for gaming. It is in it's own nvme disk so if I need to play a anticheat game I can dual boot to it, I do loose all my "server" stuff while dual booted though, like media, password manager(though it's cached in each bitwarden device), etc... So this setup would be ideal for a Home Server-only machine.

I'm SO excited for you to do a Jonsbo N1 Media server build because I picked up the case to do exactly that! I did some research and apparently you can also grab a m.2 to SATA converter card to do the last 2 SATA ports in the Jonsbo and if its a ITX with 2+ NVME slots you should be golden to run 6 SATA + 1 NVME Boot. I definitely plan to go AM5 in only for having the onboard graphics so that I can free up the PCIE slot for extra networking. No idea what Motherboard I would go for. Hell it might not even exist till Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 6 comes out with the AM5 platform

For my server, I'm still rocking a Fractal Design R5 I bought a couple of years ago. It's using a couple of IcyDock adapter bays as well (two 5.25" bay to 2x 2.5" SATA + 1x 3.5" SATA adapter). I currently have 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs on it.

Can't wait to see what motherboard you use for the N1, I built a TrueNAS Scale server with it using an older gigabyte b-chipset motherboard and a ryzen 3400g I got with a system I bought for a 3090 back in the dark days. I put an asm1166 chipset sata expansion card in it and it's been pretty solid.

Totally agree with the idea of 6-5.25” drive bays.

I have this case and the Node 304, but now my go to home server case is the SilverStone Technology CS351. It supports mATX motherboards while still being compact, so you can have a GPU and a 10gbe nic. Plus the 5 bays are hot swappable.

I've watched at least 100 to 150 videos kinda like this but this was exactly what I was looking for.

I've been waiting for an updated storage server video!

glad to see I m not the only one searching for a case design that does not exist

I got an OG Antec Nine Hundred in 2007 or 2008 for gaming and used it as a fileserver enclosure until a few years ago. Still have it standing around here somewhere too. The Antec Nine Hundred was a "Premium" gaming case back then, going for the spectacularly high 100€ mark. (for the time 100€ was expensive for a case ...) Man, our hobby has gotten silly expensive.

You are hitting all the right pain points. I ended up getting a used case off of facebook marketplace. The kid I bought it from seemed like he never did anything but pull it out of the box to look at it. I can't remember the brand or model for the case but it has room for 10 HDD's and more expansion for the 5 inch bays. I'm ready to get it up and running but the old i5 4000 motherboard I have for it only has 4 sata ports. The only motherboard that really interested me were the ASRock ones used here. I haven't convinced myself to put the money up for a new motherboard, cpu and ram just yet.

You make me glad I still have my old Antec Nine Hundred around. It was my first PC Case and I used it for 11 years. Hoping to repurpose it for a home server.

10/10 Intro. I have my Windows XP ISOs ready for the post fall compute needs

is dude melting away? Looking good my man

I want to see the Toptron (or AliExpress equivalent) mini-ITX NAS mobo with 6x SATA, 4x 2.5 GbE NICs, and the Intel 5105 CPU! Crazy cheap and functional! Gracemont stuff is right around the corner, too... Mini home server hardware market is heating up!!!

Oooooooh, you know exactly the words that excite us. You had me at 'Hi' but all the stuff after was icing on the cake. "hoarding" "reconstruct society after the fall 💦" "addiction"

I've got 2 of those Antec 900's with a load of 5.25in trayless caddys. Great thing and it was super cheap a few years ago.

Dayum!!! I remember when you were the eyes between the monitors, you've lest so much weight, congrats, and the channel is doing great, I'm starting to feel old now great vid, might start a new build now ahahaha

I am looking to lessen my dependence on Adobe and Google cloud services for storing achieved projects. Great information and gave me some ideas for configurations.

I definitely agree I wish the Seeed reServer was a 3 bay 3.5" drive system. That would be an excellent NAS product!

It's just a little less space efficient than this extruded aluminum idea, but my old Bitfenix Prodigy continues to be my favorite case for small home server. 5 hard drives, cheap full size power supply, room for a big tower cooler so you can have a chonky cpu doing hard work, and then you just use that one pcie slot for an hba.

Not seen the channel before. Love it.

Nice Wendell. I also managed a steal on a MATX server board for 50 bucks, it goes for 3X that used and $4-500 new. I lucked out !

I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with icydocks for sometime. I already have the Rosewill server case with the hotswap bays but I've been considering buying a couple more with 5.25" bays for this reason. The front panel on those cases is all modular.

Haven't watched a L1 vid in a while but Wendell's looking good, hell yeah!

Firstly Wendell, this video was my tech wet dream of doing my home server setup 🤤🤤🥰😇👍💪with the said itx Jonsbo case 😱🤩🤯! Secondly, good to see you looking healthier, better and taking better care of yourself 😇👍.

I really dig the music in your videos!

I still have two Chenbro SR30169 cases and, honestly, with the 4 front-load hot-swap SATA bays, they make fabulous SFF servers.

I love your idea of the 5.25 inch focussed case. Maybe someone can 3D print it as a proof of concept? On the motherboard to test I'd love to see a focus given to power efficiency.

Very late to the Party but this is right what im looking for . Love these compact mini pc/media server combos and cases with drive bays aree always good.

My home server is in a 15+ year old Lian Li PCv1000. Back when Lian Li made nice cases. Picked up a bunch of their old HDD cages that match the design of the case from some random PC parts stores that carried ancient stuff.

I have a cheap Rosewill case with my old main PC guts as a home sever. Recently moved to a pair of sata SSDs instead of my failing spinning rust for storage. Its great, but loud, and gets so dusty. I like those little NAS box options.

That mini server looks pretty nice for people with limited space, I'm still happy with my generic late 90s ATX tower filled with drives and cheap used Supermicro board for that ECC goodness.

By the way, SATA Ports wise, you can always get a couple 1 to 5 sata port expanders, I actually used one with a BananaPI M1 so I could connect 5 disks to a single SATA Port with SATA PMP enabled being the one trick needing to be done. Not the fastest solution though will work in most cases where the disks do not saturate the single sata port.

I have an Antec 900 sitting collecting dust. Funny to see it mentioned here. Have a Fractal Define 7 XL arriving today that will be an all in one media and file server, etc.

Would love to see a video about building in the Jonsbo and/or a slick mATX build!

Yes the Intel 4x3.5" or even 8x3.5" and 8x2.5" hot swap drive cages are available for cheap, but they can be a pain to use. Drive access is controlled (via signals on the SATA / SAS connectors) by the micro (typically a Cypress CY8C22545) on the PCB which is usually controlled by the Intel motherboards BMC via the I2C interface (white 5 pin connectors). So to use these cages you need to either hack the I2C, micro or PCB. None of which are great options for the uninitiated. Another options is to just remove the PCB and use regular cables to the drives which is easily done but also removes the hot swap option.

So I built a "server" in the jonsbo n1, 5x 12tb drives, 2x 2tb name, 1x 1TB sata ssd. Gigabyte b650 its board, 64gb ddr5-6000 memory kit, Ryzen 7900. I ended up using an HBA in the pci slot. This thing flies. Running trueness scale on it so far and it flies. I am interested to see Wendells take on it when he builds.

I really like FD Node 804 with micro ATC MB support and 8x 3.5" drives (+ enough space to mod some extra 3.5" bays into it).

I'd like to see a run-down of the USB DAS boxes (mediasonic, sabrent, terramaster) , as there's a lot of real-world usability issues regarding disconnections and drive ID naming. It'd be nice to know what's good/bad to use. I have no horse in this race other than being a r/HTPC mod recommending storage solutions to our users across the breath of the pre-built/diy/hybrid space.

I'm upgrading to am5 and using my old hardware for a home server build. I would love more home server content

Excellent. I have a lot of linux isos that I need to store and keep safe.

I have an Antec 1200 (moar 5. 25) running my home server. Simply the best case

I would love to find a series that dealt with a solid state setup. I am looking at something that would be good in an RV or on a boat as I am looking to put movies and music on it. It needs to handle vibration and preferably have a passive cooling setup. This would mainly be a NAS setup and then duplicated for a pfSense node. Passive cooling because moist saltwater air eats electronics and passive would slow that down a bit. Also would like to do SFP+ connections.

dood, you are looking good man.

Best cold open ever! Insta-thumbs up!

I have an Antec 900 case. Now I need to fill it up with something! 🤩

Hey bro, you look great. Congrats for taking care of yourself and your health.

I've ended up with a Synology NAS and a separate mini PC setup. I went through all this home server stuff before realizing I wanted two different things from my home server setup. Firstly I wanted absolute stability and availability for my storage. I didn't like the opportunity for backups to fail, lost data, or even slow data access. Separately, though, I wanted a server I could absolutely hammer with transcoding and compiling something I could do experiments with and not think in the back of my mind. Eventually I would like like to upgrade my mini PC into something more SFF sized so I can gain some extra performance but mini PCs consume so little power that there will always be some use for one.

Been looking at the Sliger Cerberus mATX case for a nice compact home server. If you could fit 6 3.5" drives in it that would be amazing, I dunno why everyone always stops at 5 hdd's but it's been driving me insane! Y'all should do a build in one at some point and figure out just how many disks you can cram into it!

This is where ASRock Rack mITX Epyc board comes to the rescue... with PCIe4x16 slot standard and 6xPCIe4x8 over miniSAS if I recall correctly... with 2x of those PCIe4x8 being splittable to a total of like 16xSATA drives... before you factor in any AiCs with storage controllers or networking or eg. media transcoding acceleration (maybe Intel ARCs or similar, once some lower power option becomes available, elsewise T400 or T600, or - wishful thinking - Alveo u30), this looks great, only the cost of the mITX ASRock Rack board with Rome (or newer) even lower-core-count lower-TDP Epycs may scare most... And that's before you factor DIMMs and storage itself.

I have the N1, really like it.

Happy with my Fractal Core 1000 case (super basic) and 16 2.5mm SSDs via IcyDock 5.25" bays. Case supports mATX motherboards which is my next upgrade to get 10Gb networking. Thanks for info on Asrock motherboard. Will consider.

i have a nuc for small things and a recently upgraded (xeon+16 gb ram) hp microserver g8, i love them

I would pay for a "Wendell Home Server" solution, maybe something similar to Synology or other nas but with Wendells own curated software packs and with scripts that sets the server up. On the hardware side have a list of suggested motherboards / backplanes with different features. Maybe there is room for another insanity project like the L1Tech KVM but for the nas solution to have a L1Tech Backplane (that perhaps gets attached to the motherboard PCIe slots?). Regardless, a simple and easy solution to set up initially AND foremost being easily manageable for software updates, hardware upgrades and in case of drive failures, that I would pay for, pay as donation for software solution and special things from L1Tech store.

I have two of those Intel cages and a rosewill cage in a old atx case. Now lays flat for eventual use in a rack. Adaptec 3016 / omv / mergerfs / snapraid I cut out most of the case front/bays and just bolted the cages in. Sealed the gaps with painters tape so the rear fans pull air across all drives. Ugly, but works. You should list the models of everything mentioned so people can search easier. I snagged my cages for about 35 but that was pre chia

love the videos. also looking healthy. Keep it up!

For me the ideal server is one that takes up as little space as possible while still being powerful. A cluster of n100 mini pcs actually has fit that bill quite nicely

Currently migrating to a Node804 for my server, and pairing it with the MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI. With 8 onboard SATA ports and 2 M.2 slots, it's got plenty of storage. Plus the case can fit a slimline optical drive which is perfect for ripping media directly on the server. To top it off, the mobo has 4 16x slots. I'll be adding a 10G card, GPU for transcoding, and maybe down the line some more storage cards.

I know it was designed for HTPC duties, but the Silverstone GD08 doubles extremely well as a home server. From memory holds up to 12 x 3.5"drives, and plenty of room for add in cards. And it can live beneath your TV and look good while doing it.

m-ATX is the way to go, totally agree. I have an Asrock b450m pro4 with 32GB of DDR4 ECC unbuffered and a R5 2600. Works great with Truenas.

For mass storage needs, I'm quite happy with my HP N40Ls, which have up to 4 3.5 SATA each. Then there is a Lenovo T420 with 2TB in the optical bay and some USB hard drives as a streaming server.

Main things I’m looking for at the moment is a power efficient platform (high energy prices and all that) simple and bullet proof. ZFS on a TrueNAS OS with ECC is a must. A fair few cores so I can virtualise home assistant and a docker host VM for the remainder of the containers. Cheap enough ideally to run two for ZFS backups as not yet found ZFS hosted online for decent money to run the backups too.

I'd like something like the Antec 900 but I want it in a rack mount. Something I could use standard (120mm) fans, populate the whole front with those icy dock bays. Then I could mix and match the front hotswap as I need and it'd be a case that could grow. Make it a shallow depth and allow it to accommodate add-in cards for more customization. I love rack mount and even a small rack is pretty cheap for your home. A 12u on rollers or something is amazing but what isn't amazing is your typical rack mount fans. I want something that you could have in a room and still be able to use that room for something.

God damn Wendel! You've lost weight! amazing work!

You're overthinking it... My home/nas server is just a Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple external drives plugged into it running OpenMediaVault, lol. I also run Jellyfin as my media server on a PC I built out of spare parts laying around that's plugged into the TV. I agree that's the best place for the media server to live, just makes sense. Although I must admit, watching this got me excited to upgrade when it's time.

Yo you’re looking fit dawg!