Saving money on Tech.

I have recently upgraded my home network with some very cheap (without hard drives the total spend on the whole network was £65) hardware that does all my needs very well, and all my data is secure. Also importantly I wanted it to be as power efficient as possible, as we all know, power prices in the UK are stupid these days.

Server

So what have I done? Well I cheated a bit. That £65 was for the parts that I needed,  as I already had some of the hardware I needed. You will need a cheap Intel 4th gen PC and a case to hold 6 hard drives. These can be picked up for less than £100 these days as well.

So what is my network and what services does it do. Well the centre of my network is my TrueNAS server.

The specs are as follows :-

• Intel Core I5 4400s CPU
• 16Gb Ram (2 x 8Gb)
• 2 x 500Gb Laptop Hard Drives
• 2 x 2Tb WD Red Hard Drives
• 2 x 3Tb WD Red Hard Drives
• Cheap motherbard with 4 SATA Ports
• 2 SATA PCI Express expansion card.

This runs TrueNas Scale.

This is the old Office PC, the case I already had, and the PC I got off a relative that bought my old PC off me. It has to be at least a 4th Gen Core CPU for trans-coding movies and TV Shows with Plex, which I will explain later on why this is important.

The Hard drives that are in this server I already had, but you can pick up hard drives quite cheap these days. I would recommend getting NAS (Network Attached Storage) specific hard drives for the system as they are designed to work 24/7 in close proximity to each other.

The 2 laptop hard drives are just the boot drives that are mirrored (Mirrored means of one of them stops working, which all hard drives will eventually do, the system will not die and you can replace the broken one with another one). Boot drives do not get used a lot, only when you turn on the system generally.

The WD Reds are NAS hard drives and that is where all my data is stored. They are divided into 2 data drives (Or pools in TrueNAS terms, a bit like your C: drive in windows) 1 2Tb and 1 3Tb, again they are mirrored for the same effect as the boot drives.

So what is this system running. Well all the software it runs is free. TrueNAS is the operating system it runs. Its a bit like Windows Server that your place of work probably uses. A lot of Fortune 100 companies uses this software, and its well maintained by the open source community.

This OS allows you to run services on top of it.

Services my server provides

1. Nextcloud

The first service I use is called Nextcloud. Imagine all the Google Services you use (So Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Photos, Passwords, Keep ETC) but instead of a multi national holding and charging you to use it, I am running it on my own hardware. The software is used by the German government so it is very secure and well maintained.

While I currently have 500Gb of space on this server, this can easily be expanded with a few commands. Currently Google charges £1.59 per month for 100Gb of space for Google Drive. This goes up rapidly if you need more.

This software is fully accessible from anywhere in the world and is also protected by 2FA which basically means even if you guess my username/password you also need my phone to access any of the data on it.

Nextcloud works with all the main PC operating systems as well as Android/iOS.

2. Plex

The 2nd thing this server does is host my Plex server. Imagine Plex as Netflix but for all your own movies/TV Shows you own. This needs a lot of hard drive space so all this data is on the 2 3TB hard drives. Do you remember I mentioned about hardware trans-coding before, well this is what that was for.

Hardware trans-coding is the process in which specialized hardware is used to convert video content from one format to another. Why is this important? Well basically it saves electric when you view movies on your TV. Now you do need a Plex license to use hardware transcoding, but I already had a lifetime license. There is a free alternative called Jellyfish that can do the same thing. I use plex as I am used to it.

You need a 4th gen or newer Intel CPU to do this. Although 3rd gen had it, it was not that good on that generation.

3. VPN Server

The 3rd thing the server does is act as a VPN server. Why is this important. Well if you do work in a coffee shop for instance using public WiFi you need to protect yourself from “snoopers” or “hackers” who can read the data that you are transmitting. A VPN encrypts this data so you are safe.

Currently Private Internet Access, a commercial VPN provider, charges £1.69 per month for new customers for this service. After the offer, it goes up to £10.99 per month, though VPN providers always have offers on.

4. Remote Access Server

As you can probably tell, I know quite a lot about computers. So I help family and friends with there PC’s when they are broken. I have something called Rust-Desk Server installed on my server. This, along with a client program, access their computers from my home. Although you don’t need this server, it is more secure as its using my server instead of a 3rd party and encrypts all the data from my family members to my PC when I am viewing it. So it is a secure way of remote accessing there PC’s to fix them.

What are the downsides

If something goes wrong with the server, I have to fix it. I also have to back up the server as well. This is covered by 1 x 1Tb External HDD attached to the server and the plex data stored on a separate computer, my old Windows Machine.

Nextcloud basically backs itself up as it syncs data between the server and my PC’s

The only thing I had to buy for this server is 1 x 8Gb stick of Ram and the SATA Expansion card.

Costs

The cost of running this server (I have ran it for a month) is £3 per month. So as you can see, even with the cheapest Google Drive (which wont cover the Plex data, just the Nextcloud Data) and VPN cost, I am saving a bit of money per month, but have a lot more control and space.

Changing my main PC

The other thing I have done is change my main PC. My old gaming PC I sold to my family member, but I had another PC as well. This one is based around a 7th Gen Intel Core i5. While this is efficient, for what I use a PC for these days it is overkill. Also Windows 11 is not officially supported on this hardware (Officially it needs an 8th Gen Intel CPU, so means I need a new PC) I wanted to get a PC that I can use on the internet, do my Radio Show and general usage. I do not do any gaming on PC anymore as I have consoles to do that. It is possible to run Windows 11 on the PC with some work around but that are not supported by Microsoft, so support can run out anytime on it.

My Main PC Running Linux Mint

The only thing I need Windows for these days is my magazine, Standing Tall. I don’t need the internet to do that, just access to my server, that is possible by blocking internet access on that PC via my router.

So what have I done to get around the problem. Well as I still need windows for a few things, I have got a new PC. This cost me a total of £35 for the PC and £15 for an SSD.

The PC is obviously not new and not that powerful for that. The PC in question is a Lenovo Thinkcentre M93. It is no longer supported by Lenovo. So what have I done to it to make sure its secure and fast.

Well the best thing you can do to an old PC is put a solid state drive into it to replace the hard drive. This system came with a 500Gb Laptop Hard Drive, which as you can probably guess is now in my Server as one of the boot drives. I got a 240Gb SSD from CEX for £15. The specs are as follows :-

• Intel Pentium G3320T Duel Core CPU
• 4Gb (1 x 4 DDR3 1600Mhz)Ram
• 240Gb SSD.

This is a very low powered PC. The reason why this is still fast and secure enough for office work, server admin and web browsing is the operating system. Instead of running windows, which is very bloated these days, its running Linux.

Windows, just on the desktop and you not doing anything can use north of 2Gb of Ram alone. You need at least 8Gb of ram to get an acceptable performance out of a modern Windows System, even for basic work.

Linux can run on as little as 1Gb of Ram, although 2Gb is recommended. I am currently running the full fat version of Ubuntu Linux, and the latest version that was released this month, version 23.10. 23 is for the year 2023, 10 is for the month it was released, so October.

For everything I use the PC for this is just as fast as my other PC, which has 4 times the amount of RAM (16GB), a faster drive (M.2 instead of SATA, M.2 is about 4 times as fast depending on the version) and a lot more powerful CPU. It also uses a lot more electric than this PC.

The best way I can explain how much more electric it uses, my “new” pc uses on average 15w of electric while browsing the web, doing office documents or recording my radio show. My old PC uses 120+w. So its like ¼ light bulb vs 4 light bulbs on. Over a year that can be significant savings in electric at today’s prices.

Linux is free to use, as is the office suite I use, Libre Office. Libre Office is also fully supported by Nextcloud.

** Update ** Since writing this article I have upgraded this PC with another 4Gb of Ram (To make it a total of 8Gb) and a Core i5-4590T for a total of £13 and changed the linux distro to Linux Mint. The power usage is still the same. The speed of the system is now faster than my Windows machine for everything I do on it and the total cost for the system is £63. I have also installed a Windows 10 VM on this machine so I dont need to use my main PC to create Standing Tall.

Conclusion

While I had a lot of the hardware already (If I had to buy it all, the hard drives would be the most expensive part of it) and need a lot of knowledge to put it all together in a secure way, I am happy with the network I have now.

I am saving some money using this system, all my data is now under my control, not some multi-national and is using software that is well supported. Most importantly my data is secure as well.