Making My Home Server A Bit Smaller

It has been a while since my first home server has been running and I already have several everyday services and projects I use running in it. Since I have a bit of an extra, I decided to dress the server up a bit.

I boot Mercari up again and looked for ITX cases and motherboards. I found an unused 3L Chinese branded case for something like JPY 3,000 yen so I immediately checked Amazon and saw that I could save JPY 2,500 with that purchase so I bought it.

I also need to buy a motherboard and a PSU that would fit the case but I can't find a Flex ATX PSU in Mercari so I just bought the cheapest one in Amazon. By cheapest, it is almost twice the price of the case I bought in Mercari sitting at JPY 5,500 lol. For the motherboard I found a really nice deal, JPY 5,000 Asus P8H77-I with an i3-2100 3.10 GHz and 8 GB ram included.

All-in-all I spent JPY 13,500 on this new setup, but I'll be able to sell a bunch of stuff I don't need here like the i3 chip (since I will put my current i7-3770K here) and old NEC PC and its parts I have no use for.

There's really no other updates besides the new hardware, since Ubuntu is portable, I just moved the parts and SSD to the new board, boot it and its back to work!

I was so happy with how small this server turned out. Here's a comparison to a 4 TB HDD drive:

And to my full tower PC:

It saves a lot of space and eliminates the obsolete look of the NEC Mate in my desk setup lol.