Everybody has to start somewhere, and everybody makes mistakes. I never intended to purchase a server, but while shopping online for hard drives for my ever growing collection of Linux ISOs, I stumbled across a 4TB drive on Amazon for only $30 USD. I purchased the drive without a second thought, but when it arrived, I noticed it didn't fit in my PC... After hours of struggling, I finally looked it up and realized I had purchased a SAS drive, rather than SATA.

At the time I didn't know what SAS drives were, I thought it was no different than SATA. I was wrong. After doing research, albeit poor research, I decided I needed to purchase a device capable of using SAS drives, I scrolled through Newegg, Amazon, and Ebay, looking for servers. I stumbled across a refurbished HP ProLiant DL380 Server for $149 on Newegg.

However, when it arrived I realized something.. it only had space for 2.5 inch drives, so instead of returning the server, I took it apart and plugged the drive into the backplane and set the drive on top. It was very sketchy, but it worked. Then I had another issue, the server had no SATA power for my other drives. I ended up taking a power supply from my dad's old Dell PC and used a paperclip, shorting two pins and using that for SATA power. What's worse is that I used this method for my boot drive, which was an old 2.5 inch SSD I had lying around. I don't recommend doing this for a boot drive like I did.

I ended up using Ubuntu as the operating system. I knew nothing about Linux, I think some reddit user recommended it. I still use Ubuntu to this day for all my servers, but I soon plan to switch to visualizing my servers to save space and money. Learning Linux from scratch took me longer than I'd like to admit, even after 4 years I still end up having to google a simple command I've done hundreds of times. This server ran Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyfin, and the occasional 2 week Minecraft server.

This server ran for over 3 years without issue, I can actually recommend buying an old refurbished server for starting your own HomeLab, if you can deal with the excess power consumption, the noise, and the headaches of having older hardware. But for $150? I recommend it!