Your Old PC is Your New Server

- Do you remember that old PC you kept in the closet? Yes, that. Today he has been given a second chance. This old machine isn't useless, even with its nine-year-old CPU and complete lack of a graphics card. Because? Like, you know a little secret. Not all PCs need to be for gaming. Are you tired of paying for Google Drive? Host

your

own cloud storage. Hate running USB drives through

your

TV, host your own media

server

. The possibilities are endless. With the help of Pulseway, the sponsor of today's video, we'll show you how to repurpose that old computer into your own personal

server

for cheap or even free. (techno music) The first thing we need to learn is that servers are just computers.

The word describes a function, not a specific type of hardware. Sure, servers in big data centers look different than your home PC. They are designed for reliability with redundant power supplies and ECC memory. They prefer many slower cores rather than a few fast ones and lack consumer I/O, such as tons of USB audio or display outputs. But that's because they serve hundreds, if not thousands, of customers. We are not. That's why even our old closet PC, an old laptop, or even a $30 Raspberry Pi can act as our first home server. This OptiPlex 7010 we picked up from our local recycler, Free Geek, is the perfect candidate, not only because it's cheap at US$176, but because the build is solid.

It has a Quad Core Intel i7 3770 with hyperthreading, a 128 Gig SATA SSD for a boot drive, and a reasonable 1 Terabyte of mass storage. However, at this price, there are some compromises we must make. Its 12 GB of RAM is a mismatch and, as expected, it has no GPU. And even if we added one, we'd probably have power supply issues because value-designed power supplies like this 250-watt one, while generally pretty solid, don't leave much room to play. , nor does it offer additional PCI Express power cables. But do not worry. What really matters here is that we have a blank canvas to work on.

And by the way, now is a good time to open your rig. Give it a good clean and maybe refresh your thermal paste while you're at it. He needs some love. Now, let's configure our operating system. Now before you say it, we won't be installing Linux today. We know that moving to a Linux or FreeBSD-based option has both performance and feature benefits over Windows. However, if you're just starting out and already have an old Windows-based machine, this is the easiest way to get your foot in the door. And that's what we want this video to be.

A beginning, not the end. If you want to see a follow-up where we use TrueNAS or similar, rattle your sabers in the comments and subscribe. The first thing you'll want to do is reset your PC to factory settings. Now, if you're running Windows 7 or 8, now is a good time to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. Keep in mind that many of those old Windows keys will still work to activate newer versions of Windows. If it's already there, press the Windows key and type Reset. Haha, it's slow. Then click Get Started. All you need to do from here is follow the prompts until you have a fresh installation of Windows.

We ran WinAero Tweaker to disable automatic updates and kill Cortana and also disabled many additional features like telemetry that can suck up valuable resources from an older system like this. Now we are ready to configure our server to do things. To start, we will download Plex Media Server for our media and Pulseway to manage our system remotely. If you're thinking, why would I need remote access to this dinosaur? Well, it's not because we plan to access it from around the world, but because we may not have a spare keyboard and mouse to leave them connected, let alone the space.

Instead, we can operate it headless, that is, completely controlled through any web browser or the Pulseway app. Clean. Setting up Plex is simple. Install the app, follow the prompts, and definitely read that EULA. I'm right? They are very legally binding. The beauty of using a Windows PC to start your server hosting journey is that the user experience is not, and I say this with the utmost respect to all you command line warriors, complete rubbish, usually . Simply download what you need. The links are in the description and install it and configure it with a sticky and you're done.

It really is that easy. Of course, we can't cover all options here. You could run a remote torrent box or ad blocking server, for example. But if you're following along and run into some roadblocks, check out our forum, where there are tons of friendly fellow nerds willing to help you. Love you guys. Setting up Pulseway is equally simple. Simply click on the wizard and log in. At this point, you will have full access to your files and settings from whatever web browser you use to access Pulseway. And we're done. The service is working, Pulseway is active.

In fact, you can get away with not even setting up a network share or anything and just use Pulseway to manage your files remotely. But having a direct shared folder on your local network is pretty cool. So, let's do that too. It just takes a few more steps and you won't be able to access them from Starbucks, unfortunately or fortunately. We have a drive set up here called LTT Simple Server that we're going to log into and we have a folder that we want to share. What we'll do is right click and go to Give Access and then click on specific people.

From here you can allow only one person to access the file as usual or in our case we will give access to everyone on our local network. Be sure to change the permissions from Read Only to Read and Write, creating a melting pot. And boom, the folder can now be added as a network share by copying the link in the Add a network folder message to any network machine on your local network. Don't forget to go to the Network and Sharing Center to make sure that both network discovery and file and printer sharing are turned on in private settings.

Or if your network is set to public, you need to set it to private because it won't work on public networks, not by default. Double check that. Actually, that's it for creating a basic file server. And with it, we can do a litany of interesting things. We can point our Plex server to the storage folders and access the entire drive over the network. We can set up a Windows remote desktop connection or go to easy mode and use Pulseway's built-in remote desktop tool to control our server from anywhere in the world without exposing our IP to the network.

We can also update Windows without having to log in to the system itself, even from the phone. And the best part is that we are still running Windows. We are not running Linux. You don't have to learn anything new. If your main computer runs alone, you have an easy-to-setup backup PC waiting in the wings. But what if you want more control or don't have a Windows license to throw into your spare parts pile? Of course, you could run a standalone Linux server, but as we've seen in the Linux challenge, that's not always for the faint of heart.

Unraid and Proxmox are also feature-rich options, but they are not very user-friendly either. For an intermediate user, we suggest TrueNAS CORE, formerly known as FreeNAS. It's free, easy to install, and has a decent user interface. That's it, video finished. It is not a joke. We are going to improve it by adding more storage and data redundancy. These two 12-terabyte IronWolf Pro drives can handle that beautifully. At $400 each, they're not cheap, but considering 10 terabytes of Google storage costs $70 a month. If we did the math, this upgrade will pay for itself in less than a year, including the PC, not to mention you will own and control all your data.

Alright, we have the 1 terabyte drive and the first 12 terabyte IronWolf, but now we have a problem. Where is this going? We can't exactly like it, just throw it here and get it over with. We can't put it here, there's just not enough clearance. As if there were no provisions. There's not even another SATA cable, unless (Anthony laughs). This optical drive is no longer useful. Oh, there are some screws in there that I need to get rid of. Oh, okay, great. But there is another problem. Yes, this freed up some space and yes, this is SATA. Well, they're not the same size.

So, that's where this comes into play. It will accept a three and a half inch drive, like this, and one slot, something like that. Oh yeah, okay. Obviously I need to set that up first, but that's the plan. Let's do it. Let's see if it still works. Now that we're out of the DVD drive, because who needs one these days, we have a free SATA power and data cable right where we need it. So our second unit, now definitely bolted in, is absolutely plugged into the system and no screen appears. This is very worrying. One moment, please.

Two things we just learned. First, always check your cables. Second, many of these older machines sometimes have trouble sending anything through the display port. Yes, this is the kind of thing that these old systems will sometimes give you trouble with. But once you've got everything set up and running, here we go, we've got 12 terabytes of storage right here. Did I say 12? I meant 12 terabytes of redundant storage. Yes. Now is the time to attack these things. We will configure RAID 1, which means the drives will be mirrored. Anyway, there is no performance benefit on writes, but there is on reads.

But if one dies, you will be able to keep 100% of your data. Press the Windows key and type "Storage Spaces." Then create a new group by following the steps we have linked below. (clicking keys) First you will need to format your drives. Make sure you do that. Here we go. On formatted drives. (Anthony sneezes) Ooh, ah, I'm allergic to Dell (beep). Storage space, resilience, two-way mirror, yes. File system, NTFS. Size, so 10.9 terabytes, that's 12 terabytes. And create storage space. Format storage space. We are ready to go. And there we have it, a redundant 12 terabyte NASBox for less than a thousand dollars.

And each of these hard drives costs about $400. So that's telling you something. This particular form factor is really easy to hide somewhere visible, especially if you use Pulseway to do all your remote monitoring and maintenance. Many thanks to Pulseway for sponsoring this video. We hope you enjoyed it. And if you want to see more of this, kind of DIY server content, don't forget to subscribe and check out all our other server videos. We'll have them linked on the final screen for you. For now, see you later.