There comes a time when you have to say goodbye to an awesome piece of electronic equipment. After 7 years of loyal service as my home server, my EeeBox was starting to show more and more signs of old age. Besides running incredibly hot even when idling, it was also struggling to keep an active internet connection, which is somewhat important for a home server! Even so, it was very hard to say goodbye to this tiny pc that had become a somewhat iconic apparatus on my desk. After a year of considering all the options, I finally decided to build my own small form factor pc to replace the EeeBox. Last week the case arrived all the way from China.
And today all the other parts arrived as well.
I decided on the AsRock motherboard with the integrated J3160 Intel CPU because of its awesome power consumption vs performance ratio (it’s a server so it will be running 24/7/365, every watt matters). This will also be a fanless system, so a low-wattage CPU was an easy choice. I wanted to get a large SSD to make it a completely silent system, but unfortunately, I had to make a budget cut there. Still, after booting up the system, the HDD spinning is hardly audible.
It took a little bit of time and patience to fit the motherboard and the HDD in this tiny case, although there was some room left, the cable runs gave me a bit of a headache, especially the SATA cable to the HDD was difficult. The short ones just couldn't make the bends required to be stuck in from the left side, so I had to use a longer one which runs across the CPU heatsink.
Surely enough though, the system booted without any trouble and I could proceed with installing Citrix XenServer.
Running XenServer will allow me to create a separate VPS for my Resilio Sync server that keeps all my files synchronised between my PC and laptop. That way it will hopefully not interfere as much with the webserver, which was a big issue on the EeeBox (which was not capable of running XenServer). XenServer should also make it much easier to manage my home server.