 I don't know why you have a ton of data. I mean maybe your wife or GF or hubby or kid is a huge photography nerd. Maybe you're the world's worst let's player who needs to record hours of footage to salvage three minutes of entertaining content Or maybe you have a hundred monkeys tied up in your basement typing away 24x7 at keyboards hoping to reproduce the entire works of William Shakespeare I don't care Whatever the reason is you're looking for a better way to expand your storage Safely and that is what this video is about Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their core i7 6700k and core i5 6600k processors check out the link in the video description to learn more So the way most people expand their storage is by buying a hard drive and putting it into their computer tower Wrong if you need a fast way to expand your steam library Sure, but for bulk storage of things like photos or videos this is pretty much guaranteed to be a crummy way to do it in the longer term Consolidating your storage in a NAS or network attached storage device makes it easier to share and if you have multiple devices like a desktop and a laptop it helps avoid that nightmare of Where did I put that file or where did I put that one without relying on cloud storage services? Which can get very expensive with higher capacity plans Not to mention the trust issues that some people have with giving somebody else their sensitive data for safekeeping On top of that even basic networking equipment these days can handle over a hundred megabyte per second transfer speeds Meaning that even 4k video editing across a network is easy as pie with the right workflow The main problem with network attached storage is that the consumer grade stuff? sucks the single drive or two base stuff sucks because it's slow and offers little to no redundancy that is protection from drive failures and The 4 bay and up stuff sucks because the affordable ones are slow with limited functionality while the good ones are so expensive you might as well just buy a computer to do it and That's ignoring the with some exceptions generally crappy unintuitive management software so enough about the problem then let's talk about the solution We've been diving into more and more server grade stuff on the channel lately for a number of reasons number one I find it interesting deal with it number two whether it's higher capacity ram or SSDs or many core CPUs It's a reflection of the technology that will trickle down into consumer grade gear in the future Which I find interesting deal with it and number three which ties in closely with number two old Server stuff can be incredibly cheap while offering the same functionality or better than what a general Consumer would be able to buy on the shelf today, so it's time to hit up good old eBay I found that buying a cheap already built computer is a good way to both ensure the Compatibility of all the parts you're getting and save a few bucks versus buying individual components But your mileage may vary so any core I 3 based machine will be powerful enough for all but the heaviest NAS use and will sip power relative to a more featureful processor and sure that the included motherboard and power supply are standard ATX and Check the motherboard product page to ensure that it has gigabit LAN From there if you just want a couple of disks And you don't mind fussing with internal cables whenever you want to expand you can add either a free Nazos like Rock store or a paid one like the one that we use at Linus Media Group On raid for like 60 bucks, and you're actually sort of good to go. I mean it'll be a bit of an eye sore But hopefully the money you saved will help heal that wound because a dual core class Nazbox off a retail shelf would cost two times as much or more But if you want something then that more closely resembles the pre-built NAS experience. I've got some tips there, too First you'll want to change out that case eBay to the rescue again here search for hot swap case And you'll come up with all kinds of options that should suit your needs This Chen bro refurb that I found while writing this looks perfect for us standard ATX motherboard Compatibility and up to eight drive sleds power supplies can be a little tricky with these rack mount style cases This one's a to you and not all this stuff is super standard But with some double-sided tape or hot glue this one could be made to fit quite easily and is affordable If you find something like this six drive ready bundle you actually won't even need to worry about the power supply or this next step But most of the cases you'll encounter will need power supplies And we'll use SFF 8087 SAS connectors for their hot swap back planes Which leads us finally to the original inspiration for this video My search for a cheap storage card for my personal home server upgrade Now I had thought that I could repurpose an old raid card But what I discovered is that for proper monitoring and smart reporting that is the health of your drives HBAs or host bus adapters with no raid functionality Just ports to plug into work much better than raid cards because most and there are some exceptions Raid cards even in JBOD or HBA mode will not behave completely Transparently which can be an even bigger problem for OS's that require bare-drive access like Freenas The issue is that affordable HBAs either use a normal SATA connectors making them unsuitable for use with a backplane or They're made by brands that I frankly wouldn't put my important data anywhere near So I ended up following Alpenwasser's guide on the Linus Tech Tips forum to pick up some cheap cables and a Super affordable LSI raid card model the 92118i on eBay again that supports eight drives and can be flashed To something called IT mode to make it behave exactly like an HBA After the flash all the smart monitoring data showed up perfectly and for $500 or much less if you have some parts lying around to reuse or you don't mind Sacrificing some power efficiency by using even older hardware from a thrift shop like FreeGeek We've got ourselves a wicked box to put in the closet that depending on the operating system you choose But we actually accounted for some budget for unraid can do so Much more than an off-the-shelf NAS not to mention the nearly unlimited Upgrade ability down the line. 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