My Journey in building a $400 Storage Server Part 1 (Hardware)

I have started thinking about making a $400 NAS server a very long back before the floods in Thaiwan and I planned to acquire the following items to build the server.

1. An ATX Cabinet
2. Some AMD processor with 2 cores
3. 3x 2TB drives
4. A Motherboard
5. 4GB of RAM
6. DVD Drive
7. Power Supply for the Cabinet.

I wanted to build every thing under $400 but with floods the cost of Hard Drives sky-rocketed and my project delayed. After thinking very hard I have decided that instead of sticking to just a storage server if I upgrade my desire to build a home all in one server which I can use as a Storage Server, Web Server, Email Server and File Share server then I can justify spending more for this project.

This is a list of hardware I purchased to build the server. In this part 1 I am going to document the building of the physical server and next parts I will write about what software / services I have installed on this server.

1. 3x 3TB Hard Drives from Amazon for $330

2. ATX Shinobi Cabinet from microcenter for $40

3. MSI Motherboard clearance from microcenter for $16

4. AMD FX 8320 CPU from microenter for $150

5. 500W Power supply from microcenter for $28

6.8GB Crucial memory from microcenter for $72

7. Some SATA III cables from microcenter for $10
8. Video card NVidia 8400 from microcenter for $25

Total Server cost $687 which is $287 above my planned budget. I hope this will turn into a good investment.

Here are some pictures of the build process.