It’s taken a few weeks, but my new home file server is finally up and running. I actually finished assembly last night, but, considering it will be run headless, I wanted to give it 24 hours of initial testing to make sure everything was ok.

For the time being there are only 5 drives installed, two fewer than my old file server. I’ve deliberately left plenty of room for expansion though. One PCI slot has been used (for the video card), leaving two PCI-e 16x slots, two PCI-e 1x slots and two PCI slots empty. There’s plenty of free drive bays, and I’m trying to source another 6×3.5″ drive cage which will fit into the space above the PSU.

With the extra cage, there should be enough room to fit up to fifteen hard drives fairly comfortably, although I doubt I’ll ever use that many at once. Ten is more realistic. I’ll be installing two more 1TB drives in a few weeks, and from there I’ll just add more drives when I need more space/redundancy.

From the (albeit limited) testing I’ve done so far, performance seems to be a bit better than the old server, so I’m fairly happy with the result.