One of the most popular articles we ran last year was a fairly simple step-by-step guide for anyone looking to add some large-scale storage to their network. The easiest, or at least, the cheapest, way to do this in the kind of scale we were thinking of, is to build your own file server.
This needn’t be the kind of titanic affair we’re sure some will imagine when you hear the word “server,” but bear with us. What you’ll be building is very much a normal, desktop PC, absented a few bits and pieces that should save you money and essentially just present itself as a massive swathe of storage sitting on your network, making itself available for your various media, backups and anything else you might reasonably need a mile of storage for.
Hardware:
First things first, you’re going to want to make sure you don’t spend an absolute fortune on your hardware. It might seem a really obvious thing to say, but you can keep things fairly cheap and cheerful when it comes to this stuff.
Motherboard, CPU & RAM:
Since we’re keeping it all under control, from complexity as well as a budgetary point of view, Ryan from our RMA department helped me put together a build that aimed to curb my tendency to shoot for performance on projects that really don’t need the extra horsepower.
Click through to take a look at our Core i3 530 Upgrade Kit 
The motherboard, RAM and CPU we recommend all come as part of a single upgrade kit that we offer. We’ve gone with Core i3 for the sake of a little future proofing and as a just-in-case for those situation where you’ll want to eke out a little more performance from what amounts to an extra machine you’ve got sitting under the stairs not being used.
The upgrade kit boasts Intel’s Core i3 530 processor, 2GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM and an MSI H55M-E33 motherboard. It’s all fairly straightforward kit, but we thought it’d be best to list the various bits and pieces in case there was anyone who already has some hardware to use in a build like this that might be duplicated.
