Project - Cheap Home Server Build

I've been looking into ideas and specs to build a cheap, home NAS server/gaming server as a cheap fun project.

My main build is fine, although a couple years old, it's holding it's own. But with so many drives and me being somewhat of a data hoarder, I'm about out of storage.

I was going to just replace drives with larger capacity and keep on chuggin', but I thought piecing together a little mini home server with some drives as a NAS server for my home would be pretty cool.

After some searching and trying to stick to a nice cheap budget, I found an HP ProDesk 600 G2 SFF (Small Form Factor), which had an i5-6500 and 8GB of RAM, I grabbed it from an eBay auction. Nice, small but not tiny case with a little space for upgrades.

I grabbed an i7-6700K on eBay to replace the one it comes with, just to max out the potential as that's pretty much the best chip I can put into this board.

I grabbed another 8GB of RAM and ended with a total of 16GB.

Lastly, I grabbed a cheap m.2 drive for a boot drive, as I don't need much storage on the main drive. I bought a PCI-e to m.2 adapter card and installed it into one of the slots.

It's currently running a slimmed down, tweaked version of Windows 11 with as much of the nonsense and unneeded stuff removed, and customized to feel and look somewhat like Windows 7, as I think the UI and windows just feel better.

The next upgrades will be to add some SATA drives for the NAS storage to start being setup, and then figuring out if I want to stick with Windows sharing on my network, or use something like a dedicated OS for the NAS, like OpenNAS. I haven't decided yet.

The last upgrades I'll be doing is probably installed a Radeon RX 550, as it's pretty much the best GPU I can get into the case and one that is capable with the stock PSU.

I don't think there would be much gaming ever done on a spare system, as I've already got plenty others, but why not toss in a GPU for fun?

Thanks for reading my little write-up of one of my latest small projects.

If this is something you've wanted to do but haven't done it yet, I suggest doing what I did and just grabbing a cheap built machine and work with it.