An old office PC turned into a home storage server
A 5040 was rebuilt as a home storage server. It started as an older office desktop with 4 GB of DDR3L memory and an i3 processor, then used four spare 2 TB SSDs and a 256 GB M.2 drive. About $50 was spent to upgrade the processor to an i7-6700 and raise the memory to 32 GB.
Drive bay adapters were added, including a Dell adapter that fits two 2.5-inch SSDs into the 5-inch bay. A PCI card with two 2.5 gigabit wired was also installed, while the home internet connection is 1 . runs from the M.2 drive, and the four SSDs are grouped with ZFS1.
The main use is storing game recordings and editing files, with Jellyfin planned later for media playback. There is no plan for 4K streaming, so the upgraded processor is considered enough for now. AdGuard already runs through the router, and Pi-hole was previously hosted on this machine.
Key points
- An old 5040 was reused as a storage server.
- The upgrade used an i7-6700 processor, 32 GB of memory, four 2 TB SSDs, and a 256 GB M.2 drive.
- was installed on the M.2 drive, with the SSDs grouped as ZFS1.
- A dual-port 2.5 gigabit wired network card was added for faster ing.
- Planned uses include game recording storage, editing files, s, RAID learning, and Jellyfin.