Where We Are Right Now: The Media Vault
The foundation of this build is the Fractal Design Node 304. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a brilliant little Mini-ITX case with a clean front panel.
To keep things compact, we paired it with a spare Mini-ITX motherboard we had stored on the shelf. Now, this is a non-Z chipset board but it actually works out just fine for us.
The Brains: Repurposing with Purpose
Sitting in the motherboard socket is an Intel Core i5-9600K.
Now, hardware purists might look at that K-series chip on a non-Z motherboard and ask, "Why use an overclockable CPU if your motherboard chipset won't let you tweak it?"
The answer goes right back to our philosophy of smart recycling. This chip already has performance headroom for server tasks, and it doesn't benefit from being overclocked in this scenario anyway. Its integrated graphics engine is fully capable of handling on-the-fly Plex hardware transcoding when friends stream from outside the house.
To make sure this machine can run 24/7 without sounding like a jet engine in the living room, we installed a fanless be quiet! CPU heatsink. Because there are no moving parts on the cooler, the CPU operates in complete, blissful silence.
Powering the system is a fantastic but admittedly old 650W EVGA power supply—a brand that will pop us regularly as a favourite of ours.
The Storage Matrix: 130 Terabytes and Counting
This is where things get genuinely ridiculous. To host nearly 50,000 music tracks, 1,500+ films, and close to 18,000 TV episodes, we needed a storage array with some serious room.
Inside the case sits a 2TB SSD handling primary music operations for everyday reading, alongside a dedicated 500GB internal SSD acting as a high-speed scratchpad for miscellaneous read/write tasks (keeping this off the main storage drives).
Connected directly to the Mini-ITX rig are two 6-bay TerraMaster Direct Attached Storage (DAS) units. Inside these units sits our pride and joy: eight Toshiba MG08 series 16TB enterprise hard drives.
Multimedia & Game Nights
To round out the HTPC side of things, we threw in a dedicated Creative 5.1 sound card to feed audio out to the sound system. Along with two Xbox controllers ready for local cooperative game nights—but we’ll save the details of our HTPC couch gaming for a dedicated blog post!
Up Next...
That is where the 24/7 media vault stands today: compact, silent, and holding a literal mountain of data.
But a media server is only half of it. In our next log, we’re going to look at the primary desktop rig.