Nov 2012 - $400 Server

Description: This mini-ITX server/NAS is a good fit for the individual or small family. The case's footprint is rather small, but supports 6 full sized hard drives (five 3.5" bay + one 5.25" bay). A fanless motherboard keeps the build very quiet, and the low-power integrated C-60 dual-core CPU provides plenty of power for file serving needs. The motherboard supports up to 6 SATA III devices, and has 12 (6 internal, 6 external) USB 2.0 ports, meaning you could potentially have 16TB of high speed storage and 32 TB of medium speed storage connected to this at once if you were using nothing but 3TB drives (assuming 3TB drives eventually have their problems worked out). Of course, for this low-budget build, we will only be adding 4 TB of hard drive space, which you can expand on later on. A gigE NIC means great networking speeds. An efficient power supply will keep your monthly electric bill down, and the lack of any other peripheral means that power consumption and heat generation is at a minimum.

Cost Breakdown
Subtotal	MIRs	Total
$386	---	$386

Individual Parts
Type	Part	Price	MIR	Link
RAM	G.Skill 4GB 1600MHz	$18	---	Newegg
Hard Drive	2 x WD Caviar Green 2 TB Refurb	$180	---	Newegg
Case	Bitfenix Prodigy	$80	---	Newegg
Power Supply	Antec EA-380D	$28	---	Amazon Warehouse

Combos
Type	Part	Part	Price	MIR	Link
Motherboard + CPU	ASUS C60M1-I	AMD C-60 APU	$80	---	Newegg

Variations:

Case: Replaces the case with a slightly smaller one. The case has less hard drive bays, so expansion is impacted, but if you feel that 4 hard drives would be enough, the CM Elite 120 would be a good fit for you. You'll also save quite a nice chunk of change with this cases, so that can either be saved up, or can go towards a small SSD or HDD boot drive.

Substitutions
Type	Part	Price	MIR	Link
Case	CM Elite 120	$50	$10	Newegg
SSD	Samsung 830 64GB	$63	---	Amazon
Hard Drive	WD Caviar Blue 500GB Refurb	$50	---	Newegg

Power Supply: Replace the power supply with a PicoPSU. The PicoPSU has no fan and is powered by a power-brick (AC-DC adapter). It's also 90% efficient at most power levels, meaning you get more power from each watt drawn from the wall. The PicoPSU will require a series of adapters and brackets to work, all of which are included below. It should be compatible with either of the cases above. The 120W PicoPSU below maxes out at 102W using the provided adapter, which should be enough for the motherboard, CPU, and 6 hard drives to all be running at full load, and still have power to spare. However, if you feel like you need more power, 150W and 160W versions are available as well.

Substitutions
Type	Part	Price	MIR	Link
Power Supply	PicoPSU 120W + 102W Adapter	$55	---	Mini-Box
Power Supply	PicoPSU 150W + 150W Adapter	$70	---	Mini-Box
Power Supply	PicoPSU 160W + 192W Adapter	$76	---	Mini-Box
Bracket	Rear Power Jack Bracket	$1	---	Mini-Box
Adapter	(2) MOLEX to 2x SATA	$6	---	Newegg
Adapter	MOLEX Splitter	$4	---	Newegg

Expansion: Expansion is simple with the Prodigy. Simply buy some more hard drives (matching ones, if you are implementing RAID) and add them to the case bays. If you need to add a 6th hard drive, use a 3.5" to 5.25" bay adapter, and add the hard drive to the 5.25" optical drive bay of the case. With 6 hard drives, you'll have used up all the internal SATA ports on the motherboard.

Nov 2012 - $400 HTPC

Description: This month's $400 HTPC is powered by an AMD A6-3650 quad-core in an ASRock A75 mini-ITX motherboard. The CPU upgrade is throw in for good measure, even though an A4-3400 dual-core would be sufficient. The price difference between the two is neglible. The motherboard comes with USB 3.0, gigE, and HDMI standard for maximum connectivity. The HDD has been doubled from 500GB in the $200 build to 1TB in this build, and an SSD is included standard in this build. It's a small powerhouse of a computer capable of light gaming on top of playing just about any media you would want it to. The mini-ITX case is slightly larger than the $200 build's case, but provides a substantially larger amount of room for expansion, including four 3.5" hard drive bays, as well as room for a full-sized dual-slot graphics card. If you wanted to build an HTPC/gaming PC/file server, this is where you want to start.

Cost Breakdown
Subtotal	MIRs	Total
$394	$10	$384

Individual Parts
Type	Part	Price	MIR	Link
RAM	Crucial 4GB 1600MHz	$19	---	Newegg
Power Supply	Antec EA-380D	$28	---	Amazon Warehouse
Hard Drive	WD Caviar Blue 1TB	$85	---	Newegg
SSD	Crucial M4 64GB	$66	---	Amazon
Case	CM Elite 120	$50	$10	Newegg
Optical Drive	LITE-ON DVD Burner	$16	---	Newegg

Combos
Type	Part	Part	Price	MIR	Link
Motherboard + CPU	ASRock A75M-ITX	AMD A6-3650	$130	---	Newegg

Variations:
The following modifications are for changing the HTPC into a multi-purpose machine.

Gaming: To turn this little PC into a gaming rig, simply add any of the following graphics cards and, if needed, replace the power supply. This will break the budget. These are upgrades, not substitutions. Also, although you may upgrade to practically any grphics card you want, remember that you only have a mid-range CPU in this machine. Thus, you can quickly reach a bottleneck. Any of the graphics cards below will provide a good gaming experience, and balance the machine out well.

Gaming Upgrades
Part	Price	MIR	Power Supply	Link
SAPPHIRE HD 6670	$65	$15	---	Newegg
MSI HD 7770 GHz ed	$100	$30	---	Newegg
EVGA GTX 650 Ti	$140	---	CX430 @ Newegg	Newegg
Gigabyte HD 7850	$170	$20	RD500 @ Newegg	Newegg

File server: To turn this HTPC into a file server, you would want to maximize the storage. To do this, you can do a multitude of things. The easiest would be to increase the capacity of the single hard drive that is already included in the build from a 1TB drive to a 2TB or 3TB drive. Additionally, you could add a second hard drive. You could also remove the SSD and/or DVD-drive and replace each with another hard drive. With 4 3TB hard drives, you would have 12TB of physical storage.

You can implement RAID 0 for a speed boost, but realistically, that wouldn't be necessary. In a home server, the bottleneck would most likely be your network and not the hard drive read speed. You also double the risk of losing your data because of the data striping with RAID 0.

If your files are extremely important (family photos and videos, work documents, etc...), I would recommend using the built-in RAID 1 or RAID 10 on the motherboard. RAID 1 mirrors a pair of hard drives, effectively cutting their capacity in half, but increasing data redundancy. If one of the drives fail, the other remains with the same data intact, giving you time to replace the other drive. RAID 10 is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0. The data is striped, and then mirrored. RAID 10 is preferable because it provides a speed boost, as well as redundancy.