I always keep bits of foam like that for exactly these kind of reasons. Neoprene and silicone pads are pretty useful too.

Ha, I had that issue too with my NAS. I now use packing foam as a base, which seems to work even better.

Update: These drives produce quite a lot of vibration, which isn't unexpected. They aren't overly noisy up close, but you can go pretty much anywhere in the house and the sound is exactly the same!

I've ordered a couple of 3.5" to 5.25" mounts which have better isolation than the usual little rubber grommets to hopefully get rid of the vibration.

I also ordered some better silicone feet for the server case which should help too.

It took a moment but I eventually got the new drives fitted. I had to find the bag of fittings and figure out which way around the bracket and drives has to go XD

The new raid array is now building and in a few hours I'll be able to start moving data across.

As you can from the screenshot one of the old drives is suffering a little! Thankfully the other 5Tb drive has no errors.

I still can't over the cost though. That shit pisses me off :/

Yeah, I heard it was 2029 before we can expect lower prices.

Or someone starts dropping virtual/physical bombs on datacenters?

The price change is obscene! Sadly it's not likely to get any cheaper for at least a few years :/

Fuuuuck! That's almost one kit of 16GB DDR5-6000 memory worth. :|

Seeing as I'm enjoying pissing money everywhere lately, and with prices getting only higher for the foreseeable future, I decided I better get around to upgrading the big drives in the server.

Sadly I am seeing 'issues' with the existing drives and while they are still alive and the data is good I should really get it sorted.

2x 8Tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro's £660! :(

I'd like to have gone for 10Tb or 12Tb, maybe even 16Tb, but the price made it unaffordable :S

Hopefully this will be the last of the upgrades for a few years :/

That is indeed the power supply I bought. Good to know it's decent.

Everything arrived today and I've put it all together. It seems to be working, so that's nice :)

Ubuntu 26.04 installed without issue. Seems ok, but I do find I miss some things from Mint. Maybe I'll just use Mint for the server.

The memory I bought second hand works well, although I could live without the RGB flashy shit! Thankfully it can all be switched off. I haven't pushed the memory to full speed yet, but I'll give a go tomorrow. I might just leave it on it's slower normal speed for server use though, it'll save about 5p of electricity a year! XD

I presume you got the MSI MAG A550BN?

The OEM responsible for the MAG A550BN is Channel Well Technologies (CWT), a respected manufacturer known for creating reliable platforms.

OMG, so cute! That kitty will purrr, 4ever

I felt MSI was a decent choice, but not having had one I wasn't entirely sure. No idea who actually manufactures the PSU's for MSI but they have a nice range available at decent prices.

That's a beautiful PC case, but I'm was wanting something more like this...

MSI is a solid choice, I've had many products including and still working M-ITX mobo ;)
I didn't knew they also sold PSU's..do you happen to know the manufacturer?

The rest all seem solid. Albeit the price for the ssd seem too damn high. But thank Bibi Trump for that. Also, I also want higher capacity hdd's for my NAS because I now have 2x 4TB plus an external 8TB drive..and I'm running out of space!

Good luck with linux! I'm sure you'll get it to work ..flawlessly the first couple of times. ;)

I've ordered the parts. I went with an MSI B550M PRO-VDH AMD motherboard as it seemed the best option for features and price. I've not had an MSI mobo before so hopefully it won't be shit. Got some Crucial Ballistix DDR4 3600MHz ram on ebay for £64, it's on the approved list for this mobo so should be good. MSI 550W power supply, nothing fancy required. Fractal Design Core 1000 case, no stupid fucking glass bullshit to deal with and lots of natural airflow. Acer Predator GM7 1TB SSD for the main OS drive, it seemed like a reasonable choice for value and good reviews.

I'll reuse the HDD's I currently use for the storage drives, but eventually I want to replace those drives with some bigger HDD's.

I plan to check out the latest Ubuntu 26.04 on this computer once built and see if I like it or not. You have to use SNAP on Ubuntu now and honestly I find it a bit shit. Thankfully Mint gets rid of SNAP which is a good thing, however because Ubuntu has made a big change and dropped X11 for Wayland the Mint devs will be delaying Mint 23 to December instead of July. I don't need a full on server version of linux so I'll either go with Ubuntu Desktop or Mint and add in whatever server software I want. Going forward it should be easier to maintain than the current server because it'll be running a standard build of linux rather than a special build like the current ARM based server.

That's all great info, thanks. I just saw last night you can easily limit the CPU in bios if desired, could be very useful to keep power consumption low.

On a personal note, my experience with AM5 hasn't been rock solid. The long boot times can still occur but on a server that is pretty normal, right? The Asus B650E-E was very unstable with both 7700X & 7800X3D cpu's. Only after the latest firmware update it became somewhat stable. However I never had any issues with the AM3 & AM4 platforms.

Oh, and you can underclock every AMD cpu so don't look to hard on the TDP.
So far the AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT seems good; 6 cores with SMT and an iGPU.

I use the 5600X, which lacks the iGPU, for my VR rig. And it works really good

And now I realise that one I linked is the 5655G and not the 5655GE, the G is TDP 64W and the GE is TDP 35W. So the one I linked maybe isn't such a good idea. Hmm.

Ok, so I now I see a Ryzen 5 5655GE which has a TDP of 35W rather than 65W which is good for a always on little server, and almost as quick as a 5600GT, but is PCI 3. Maybe this is the way. Hmm.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-a520m-k-ddr4-matx-motherboard-plus-amd-ryzen-5-pro-5655g-6-core-12-thread-oem-processor-bundle

Ok, so the 5600GT is actually PCI 4, not 3, but it is still on the AM4 socket, not AM5.

Hmm, more research required XD