I can't believe people still pay for Netflix...
Today I am going to show you how to build your own Netflix. But it also doesn't stop there because I'm going to show you how you can replace just about every single cloud service that you interact with on a regular basis. We're going to take control of our data, our privacy, and importantly, our wallets too.
In order to do that, though, we are going to have to do some truly massive 3D prints, some bent wood lamination, and an extreme amount of tinkering. So my plan is to take all of those external services and bring them in-house, which raises the question of how do you even go about doing that? Well, the answer is that you build your own home server, which I know sounds intimidating at first, but these days it isn't actually that hard. So over here I have my NAS, and my frustrations with this thing were kind of the inspiration for this project. Inside this box I have four hard drives that are connected to the internet and I can access them from anywhere.
As you can imagine, that's super handy for storing all the footage that it takes to make these YouTube videos, but I am already running out of space on it and expanding it. Storage gets really expensive really quick. Plus it's super underpowered for how much it costs. It's loud. It runs on closed source software, and, ehhh, I don't know, looking at it, it's kind of boring.
So I want to build something that solves all of those issues and replaces the aforementioned cloud services. So with that in mind, let me introduce you to the brains of this project and a pretty unique piece of hardware. This is a minisforum BD770i and you might be thinking that it looks like any normal mini ATX motherboard, but you'd actually be wrong, because buried underneath this frankly, completely over specced heatsink is a Ryzen 7745HX, which is an eight core and 16 threaded processor that you'd normally find in a high end laptop. And that means that this server will not only be more than powerful enough to handle tasks like transcoding media on the fly, which we will talk more about later, but it will also be extremely power efficient and cool when operating, which is great for a computer that's going to be running 24/7. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that it has 2.5 gig networking,
which will also be really important later. So with that introduction out of the way, our first job is going to be modeling this bad boy in fusion 360. Using a pair of digital calipers, I painstakingly recreated a pretty accurate digital version of the BD 770i.
because one of the hardest parts of this project is going to be designing a new enclosure for all the parts that make up our server, making sure everything fits, and all of our ports are lined up properly is going to be a million times easier with a good, accurate digital standard. So that took a little while, but now that I'm done the design, I'm ready to print what will essentially be a prototype of a tray that will hold the motherboard and double check all of my measurements and make sure everything lines up correctly. So while that's printing, let me introduce you to the next piece of kit. This is an EVGA 750 GM, and while it might look like your average computer power supply is actually an SFX Psu, which means that it's considerably smaller, it's also 80 plus gold rated, so it should be very power efficient as well. Which again is important here because this thing is going to be running all the time. And just like that, our prototype tray was ready to be tested.
All the mounting points lined up nicely. And even though the ports aren't quite perfect, we can fix that in our next iteration. And speaking of the next iteration, I gave the PSU the same 3D modeling treatment and then found a way to integrate it into our motherboard tray. So now before we print that out, there's actually one other component that we have to add in order to make up for a shortcoming with our motherboard here, due to its compact size, Minisforum didn't include any SATA ports on it, and those are the most common interface used to connect hard drives, which we're definitely going to need on this project. So we are going to have to add this SATA controller card that allows you to connect up to eight drives. And yeah, we're going to use all eight ports.
So I added that to the model to make sure that everything fit. And then I hit print on what we will call the motherboard tray from now on. Once we're done, this will end up being a singular modular piece that we can easily slide into the server anytime I need to service the computer or make an upgrade. And speaking of upgrades, let's talk about the biggest upgrade of this entire project. My old NAS had four 10TB hard drives that gave me a total of 30TB of useful storage. Now it's 30 and not 40 because I ram my drives in Raid five, which is just a fancy way of saying that all the data was split up between all four drives, with some extra space reserved for redundancy.
In theory, any one of those four drives could have failed, and I still wouldn't have lost any data. Now, in my new setup, we are going to have eight 24 terabyte drives with an even higher level of redundancy. These are Seagate’s Ironwolf Pro drives, and not only do they have a massive capacity, but they're also specifically made for NAS applications. That means that they are made to run 24/7. They have a crazy high endurance rating coupled with a five year warranty, and they're also blazing fast with a big cache, which should hopefully allow me to edit 4K footage directly off of the server, but we'll test that later.
If you want to pick up some of these drives for yourself, I'm going to include a link for them, as well as everything else I've used down in the video description. We'll come back to the redundancy conversation in a second, but first, I think we need to add these drives to or 3D model and come up with a way to package them for our server. Because even though these drives are supposed to be quite quiet, when you stick eight of them together in a relatively small space, they're probably still going to make a fair bit of noise. Thankfully, integrating the drives was a walk in the park compared to the motherboard, the only area I had to take my time on was the mounting points, because we are going to need those pretty soon. With one drive successfully modeled, I cloned it seven times and then started designing the drive caddy, which is going to bind all each drives together.
That way I can slide them in and out as a single unit for servicing, and with a little bit of clever design, it should also help with our sound issue as well. See this little air gap right here? Well, let's print out these parts and I'll show you why I did that. When it came to picking a material for the drive caddy, I went with carbon fiber reinforced PETG because it's extremely durable and should also be quite heat resistant as well.
Plus, come on, look at this stuff. It looks awesome. Then it was time to add our isolation material and fill that gap. This is called cell foam that's designed for soundproofing. A strip of it will sit between each drive in the caddy in order to absorb their vibrations, but that's only one piece of the puzzle. These drives actually have a built in sensor that detects any harmonic resonance, and then alters the rotational speed of the drives ever so slightly in order to compensate for it.
And then on top of that, I also included some cutouts on the top and the bottom of the caddy to add a layer of butyl rubber. You might know this stuff under the brand name dynamat, but basically it's used in cars to dampen road vibrations. And the cool thing about this stuff is that you only need a small patch of it to dampen a pretty large surface area.
Now, that's not all we're going to do on the sound dampening front, but you guys are probably looking at all eight of these drives and thinking, man, those things are going to get pretty toasty all packed together like that. So let's talk about cooling. I want this system to be cool and quiet. Right. So I went out and I got the big boy, the 200mm Noctua fan. Because it's blades are so big, it doesn't have to spin that fast in order to move a lot of air, which means that during normal operations, this thing is whisper quiet, and for reference, it should move enough air to replace all of the air inside the case. Once a second.
With all the hardware out of the way, it's time to talk about software. And as I'm sure many of you have already guessed, we aren't just going to install windows on this thing. There are a ton of different DIY NAS softwares out there, but after some careful consideration, I decided to go with TruNAS.
It’s known for its incredible performance thanks to the ZFS file system, good data integrity, and it's also got support for VMs and all the apps that I want to use. But it is also known for being very intimidating for first time users. So I was watching this Linus Tech Tips video recently, and they introduced HexOS, and they presented it as a more user friendly fork of TruNAS. So I ponied up $100 for a lifetime license, got accepted into their beta, and now we are going to see if it delivers on that promise. Installing it was a little bit tricky. I had to download a disk image, create a bootable USB key with it, and then plug that into my pile of parts.
Following the onscreen instructions, I hit a couple of roadblocks where I had to disable Secure Boot in order to proceed, but eventually a bunch of Linux techs started to scroll down my screen, and I was instructed to log in to the hex OS deck here. My first job was setting up my storage pool. Or in simpler terms, just deciding how I want all eight of my drives to share the workload.
Now, I was hoping to set up my server with two drives of redundancy, but unfortunately, at this time, HexOS only supports one. Not off to a great start, but on the plus side, it means that I'll get more storage and also more performance. With all my drives working together, I should get roughly 7x the performance of any one individual drive outside of that initial hiccup. Getting the pool up and running was a breeze, and the server instantly popped up on my home network. Ready to go.
And well, that might be great for bulk file storage. I promised you guys that this would be a replacement for Netflix, Spotify, and all those other services too. So let's talk about apps and also where HexOS has the most room for improvement. All my media is going to be handled by Plex, which I'm sure many of you are already familiar with TV shows, movies, and even music are all organized by the Plex server app. And then there's a separate client app that you use on your other devices to stream that content.
We'll talk more about the experience later, but for now, the setup was super easy and I was up and running in like 20 minutes. Next, I set up Immich as a Google Photos replacement. Again, you run an app on your server, and then there's a client app that you run on your phone.
Now, anytime I take a photo or a video, it's automatically synced and organized on the server. And again, set up was super easy. So big thumbs up there. Now both of those are what's considered a HexOS curated app. So their installation process has been breathed on by the HexOS team to make it as streamlined and as easy as possible. Unfortunately, that's it for curated apps at this time. There should be more in the future, but as of this recording, that's all you get.
Now, you can still install any TruNAS apps that you want, but their installation is a lot more tricky. So one important thing that I'm still missing is cross-device files linking like Google Drive or Dropbox. And after a bit of research, I found Nextcloud, which seems to be a great open source alternative. Installing it though, was an effing nightmare and now I understand why so many people are so afraid of using TruNAS. I'll spare you the gory details, but it took a lot of sifting through forums and a lot of learning on my part in order to get it up and running.
But now that it is, I have effectively replaced all of those services that I outlined at the beginning of the video, and we're just barely scratching the surface of what you can do with your own custom server. Another thing I thought about running on my server is my website, because there is actually a dedicated WordPress app available for true. Net, but in the end I decided against it and I'll tell you why. And at the same time, I'll also tell you about the sponsor of today's video: Hostinger.
I don't mind tinkering around with the back end of my business, but when it comes to the front end that the public is going to see, well, I think that's a job best left for professionals. With Hostinger, you have everything you need to grow your business online all in one place. I could tell you about their super intuitive website creation platform. They're built in support for WordPress or their AI powered content creation tools. But within the context of this project, I'd rather just talk about how with hosting or handling my website, I don't have to worry about it going dark just because the power's out at my house.
I also don't have to worry about missing out on any sales for my online store just because I clicked yes on the wrong software update. Plus, I know that if I ever get stuck, they have 24/7 support ready to jump in and help me with any problems that I might have. Something that I wish I had when I was setting up true ness. And did I mention that they have insanely good prices as well? I can pay for my website hosting with the money that I'm saving from canceling Netflix and still have change left over. And it actually gets even better because you can use codes ZACBUILDS to save an additional 10%.
So head over to hostinger.com/zacbuilds and take your big idea online today with Hostinger. Now there's obviously a ton more you can do with the server, including virtual machines, home assistant, and hundreds of other apps. But if I talked about all the things that I want to do, this would end up being a two hour long video. So let's get back to building, because we still have to design a case to house all of this hardware. And here I had three main concerns space, sound and looks.
Obviously, I want this project to take up as little space as possible, so I started by arranging all of my digital parts into the smallest reasonable footprint. Then I just drew a box around them and that was the basis for my enclosure. I rounded off the corners, started creating rails that are hard drive caddy a motherboard tray can slide into, and then I added a second wall, which brings us nicely to our second point; sound.
Later, we're going to fill this cavity to create an acoustical barrier between the inside of the enclosure and the outside world. So we'll talk about that in looks in a second. But first, at this point I was ready to print out a prototype of the case, but I hit a pretty major roadblock. Oh.... crap. guys, the server enclosure is just a little bit too big to be printed as a solid piece on either of my 3D printers.
Now, I could split it up into smaller pieces and then assemble it afterwards, but that's really going to slow things down, and that's a big pain in the ass. So I did what any normal sane person would do, and I got a bigger 3D printer. This is the Creality K2 plus, and it is an absolute unit of a printer with a build volume of 350 by 350 by 350mm. It's actually got more than twice as much total volume as my other printers. It's also got creality as new CFM system, which allows you to rapidly switch between up to four different materials while printing. It's even got a built in moisture and temperature display, which I think is pretty neat.
I am very excited to add this thing to my fleet of 3D printers, and I think it's going to allow me to print some very fun and very large things in the future. But for now, I want to test it out by printing this server enclosure. And what a test case this was. Not only is this my largest 3D print ever, but it will also be the longest. I spent some time dialing in the settings to make things as quick as possible, and I was still looking at basically a full 24 hour print and this is by no means a slow printer, it's just that huge of a print.
So with the K2 plus whirring away in the background, I filled my time by designing both the front and the rear of the enclosure. The front is a relatively simple piece. It's just a large flat section that will screw in place and give us somewhere to melt that big boy fan.
Then the back has all the ventilation for the case, all the IO ports, and it will also serve to lock the drive caddy and the motherboard tray into position. And while the K2 plus did a great job of printing out the main body, here we go. That actually looks really good for 0.28mm layer height.
It struggled when it came to both the front and rear panels. Now, to be fair, these are really challenging prints due to their shape. But I had multiple filament jams and a lot of bed adhesion issues. Turning down the print speed and tweaking the settings did eventually get things worked nicely, but it took multiple attempts to print both parts. Hopefully, Creality can find a way to smooth out this experience in future Firmware updates and printing out these parts was only half the battle, because I still didn't even know if everything was actually going to fit together in real life. Now, you might have noticed that some of these parts have changed a little bit.
I reprinted the motherboard tray in the drive caddy with different settings in order to make them significantly stronger, and I also added this cute little bracket to stabilize Sata card, because just having it loose in the slot seemed like a bad idea. Now I know it might seem a little silly to be nervous about this assembly, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that just because everything works in a rough CAD model, that's no guarantee that it will actually go together smoothly. Components like wires and connectors take up way more space than you might think, and can end up causing a lot of issues. Lucky for me though, it actually all came together really well and felt remarkably solid for a 3D printed enclosure, but it was still missing a little something.... Remember earlier, How I said I wanted to focus on size, sounds and looks.
Well, this thing as it stands right now, I still think it's failing the looks part of that test. So let's head to the shop and do something about that. Using my CNC, I cut a large hole in the panel to dress up the front of the case. I don't love having big empty spaces on my projects, so I found a good way to fill them is with a nice natural material that has a lot of its own variation.
After the carve was done, I beveled all the outside edges to give it a slight 3D effect. Thinned it out using my planer and then sealed the wood with an oil rub finish. Then I added something that will hopefully prevent a lot of future headaches. This fine metal mesh is going to sit between the wood and the front panel to help filter out any dust. That way the inside of my server will stay nice and clean, which should in turn keep up running nice and cool. And because it's front mounted cleaning, it will be super easy.
So that takes care of the front of the case. But what about the main body because you guys saw that render earlier. Well, here, instead of remaking this entire body out of solid wood, what I want to do is take our 3D print and wrap it in a walnut veneer.
Now, I've never attempted to do anything like this before, but, I did text Keith Johnson a couple questions about the process, so I think we should be fine... Right? Now, you're probably wondering what we're doing in my bathroom. Well, yeah, about that wood is much more pliable when it's both wet at warm. So in order to bend the veneer around the tight radiuses of our 3D print, this was my solution. I did consider building a steam box, but this was a lot cheaper.
Okay, now we just wait till that dries. 24 hours later... start removing the clamps and see how it looks.
Oh, I think this might have worked pretty well. I think we'll be able to pull that nicely into shape. When it came to permanently attaching the veneer, I considered using epoxy... *Keith Johnson Noieses* contact adhesive and quite a few other solutions, but those all sounded messy annoying. so Keith actually suggested that I use speed tape, which is basically just a double sided tape that's made specifically for attaching wood veneers. And you know what? I'm starting to think that this Keith guy might actually know what he's talking about.
It took a bit to work my way around the enclosure, but eventually I got a full 360 degree wrap. I cut the seam on the underside where no one will ever see it, trimmed off the excess, and then eased all the sharp edges with a quick sanding. now, obviously I couldn't leave the veneer bare because at the end of the day it is still real wood. So just like with the front panel, I used that same oil run finish.
And while I waited for it to dry, I put together my new vibration absorbing feet. This was a last minute addition on my part, but I designed a set of feet that will incorporate the same closed cell foam that we used to help isolate the drives. One strip will sit against the case and another strip sits against whatever surface it's resting on. It's a small addition, but every little bit will help to keep the system as quiet as possible, and could potentially help to extend the life of these drives as well. And speaking of extending the life of these drives, another thing that I added to the setup is this big battery backup.
If the power ever goes out while your hard drives are writing data, it can be really bad for them. So this thing should give me ten minutes or so to properly shut down the server in case of power failure. This just adds another layer of security to the whole setup, and I think is well worth considering if you want to set up your own home server. Man, I really need to do some better cable management down here. This is ugly. And on that note, let's put this thing together so that we can test out just how fast and quiet it truly is.
With the front panel screw down, I could finally permanently attach both the dust screen and that walnut front panel. And when it comes to attaching wood to 3D printed plastic, I've found that CA glue works really well. Plus, the fact that it sets in seconds with an activator spray is a nice little bonus. To complete our double walled soundproofing, I slid some precut sheets of closed cell foam into place, and then before installing the hardware, I actually had some extra material to use up. I covered pretty much every surface with even more of that sound dampening material from before. This is probably complete overkill, but in theory it should help to dampen vibrations from not just the drives, but also the CPU fan and the PSU as well.
The last step was the rear panel, which slid perfectly into place, and with that, our server was assembled and looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. It has been a long road to get here, but the server is finally up and running and we are ready to put it through its paces. Performance was a big part of this project with that new CPU file system and drives, this thing should be blazing fast, right? Well, yeah, it kind of is. In bulk file transfers. It's currently running about 2 to 3 times faster than my old NAS, and that enables all sorts of fun functionality, like being able to edit 4K footage directly off of the server, plus streaming media as well as transcoding. It is a complete walk in the park for this thing.
However, there is one major bottleneck and I know that I could be transferring even faster. I am fully saturating my 2.5 gig home network, so I think a ten gig upgrade might be in the near future, because I know that these Ironwolf Pro drives have even more untapped potential, and I could be transferring even faster. Next, let's talk about sound. And I've actually known for a while that this was going to be a huge upgrade. Even when I had the system laid out on my bench, it was already extremely quiet.
And now that it's in the case with all the soundproofing, it's on a whole other level. Here's a side by side comparison with my old NAS Now I'll have no problems running this thing in my office while I'm recording videos and also recording voiceovers. Streaming media with the server has been amazing as well. I already talked about transcoding, but Plex has been an absolute game changer for me. There's no lag, no buffering. I just press play on any device I want and it goes now.
I do have to pay for all the media that I load onto the server, so that's one downside. But on the upside, I also don't have to worry about my favorite show getting sold to a different platform, or my favorite musician beefing with my streaming service and then pulling all their songs. Once I own the content, I actually own it, and it's always going to be there. Backup and syncing is also something that I don't even think about now. And I don't mean that in the sense that I'm not doing them, I just mean that they happen automatically in the background.
So I don't have to think about it, which is exactly how it should be. My phone, my laptop, my desktop, they all harmonize together really nicely. Any device can save to the server, and then once it does, that file is available for any other device to pick up and run with Now obviously I am still vulnerable to something like, say, a house fire. Heaven forbid. So I think what I'm actually going to do is take my old NAS and put it somewhere offsite, like my dad's house, and then that way I can have good remote backup as well for proper 3 2 1 security.
So now let me put my money where my mouth is and talk dollars and cents. Excluding the cost of hard drives, this project cost me just shy of $1,000, which sounds like a lot until you start comparing it to other eight bay NASs that are currently on the market... Then it starts to look like a little bit of a bargain and also keep in mind this thing is way more powerful than any store bought solution.
Now, obviously the drives have a cost and a big one at that. Each one is somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. But again, we have to put that in context. How much does it cost to get a comparable amount of storage with Google Drive or Dropbox? Well, you can't.
Their services top out at 30 and 15TB, respectively. For home users, they do have enterprise grade solutions, but those get really expensive, really quick. Backblaze actually has a cool pricing tool built into their website, and for 168TB of storage like I have here, you'd be paying $12,000 a year on the low end. So that means that my server will have paid for itself in under six months, just based on storage costs alone. And let's be real, there are so many other advantages here. Obviously, speed, as we talked about before, there's also media streaming.
I've dropped my Netflix and Spotify subscriptions. There's data privacy. All of my files aren’t on somebody else's computer. There's data security for much the same reason, though I should caveat that and say, now I'm in charge of my own security, and there are responsibilities and obligations that come along with that. And then also just plain old flexibility.
I can add drives. I can upgrade the hardware, I can change the software. The options are kind of endless. And for a tech enthusiast like me, that actually does have some value to it. So overall, I'm very happy with how this project turned out, but I still think I could have done it even better.
And I actually made a whole separate bonus video talking about just that. I've included a section about how I plan to add ten gig networking to this thing. That video is currently live for channel members, so if it sounds interesting to you, check it out. And if not, I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.
2025-02-08 18:08
