Hi everyone, I’m new to this forum that I’ve been reading for a while, I apologize in advance for my bad English.
I wanted to build my own NAS to transmit video to the TV and use home assistant, I think the right way for the software is unraid.
I recovered the motherboard, RAM and power supply from an HP 66423 Elite 8300 and I wanted to know if it could be valid for building a NAS. as cpu it has an i7 3770 and 4gb of ddr3 ram. Thank you
i mean… yeah? but you may have some difficulties you wouldn’t have with either ‘regular’ consumer motherboards or server motherboards.
something like a service manual may be useful. I can’t guarantee this is the right model you have but you get the idea:
I don’t know if the board will fit in regular ATX case or you’ll have to cobble something together with wood/plastic/cardboard.
There may not be much power cabling available for hard drives. And the cabling may do something unusual like come directly out of the motherboard. SATA power splitter/extension cables can help but you may not be able to get more than like… 6 drives (just a wild guess, even that may stretch it).
There may not be many SATA ports. the motherboard I see only has 3. This can be helped with pcie expansion cards of SATA adapters or SAS cards (like in JDM’s build writeups)
pcie slots might be limited especially if it’s a micro size.
but if you are only needing a couple of drives to start I think it can work.
it looks like 4GB of ram is the minimum spec for unraid. For basic file serving this seems fine. If you start running other services or want to get into running virtual machines you will need lots more ram. The good news is DDR3 is cheap. The bad news is the board might limit you to only 16GB of ram. (or maybe it can run more unofficially).
Thank you for your reply.
the motherboard and this one in the image is a foxconn
, my problem will be understanding which pins are used for switching on, because it is not marked on the motherboard, I see 4 sata ports, 4 usb 3.0 and 2 usb 2.0.
I managed to get 4 Nasware 3.0 WD 750 GB HDDs as a gift. for what I want to do at the moment I think they are very good.
the thing that worries me a little about dockers for home assistants, many say they use a VM but I don’t know if my configuration is inadequate.
Wouldn’t bother trying to use this board. It doesn’t use standard power connections and isn’t a standard form factor and doesn’t use standard headers. It’s going to probably be much more of a problem to make work for you than it’s worth.
I don’t know how difficult it could be, I found a little quida which is also present in the pdf above for the connections, for the power supply I have the original powersupply.
What case will you be using
I should buy it, this motherboard measures 26.5 cm x 21 cm.
hoping that there is some case that fits 
otherwise I should opt for a different motherboard?
There is very little chance of finding a case that supports that motherboard. Except maybe the original case.
I have to look in my garage, maybe I should have a GA-H77-DS3H which has a standard atx shape
I have to look in my garage, maybe I should have a GA-H77-DS3H which has a standard atx shape
I checked and I think I threw it away
so to get a rando OEM board to work in a regular case there are two hurdles.
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is the screw points. You can try just overlying it over the ATX screw locations to see if they match. If they do, great. If you have an extra hole on the motherboard, they make plastic spacers. If you have an extra post jutting up from the case that would make contact with a non-screw part of the motherboard, that’s bad and would cause a short.
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is the power supply. sometimes you can find on ebay adapters from an ATX power supply to the HP plugs.
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is the various front panel connectors. These are the worst. Occasionally there are like adapter boards avaialble, i’ve seen them for some dells, like here:
HarbinRepairs/Dell-Optiplex-MB-Header-Adapters: These are adapters designed to retrofit some Dell Optiplex motherboards to fit in a conventional gaming PC case. (github.com)
But the cost of buying adapters for power suppply, power switch, front USB, front lights… it can get expensive.
One thing I did for a while, was I actually removed the front panel connectors, and power switch from a dell, and just snaked them through an empty 5.25 spot on my fractal case. Then I had a jiggling dangling power button to use, but I could cover it with a door. It was super janky but it worked for months.
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Hi, thanks for the reply, in the last few days I have recovered the original power supply of the motherboard, now I have purchased on Aliexpress six simple buttons to turn on the board, and some status LEDs. As soon as it’s all finished I’ll try to do some tests with Proxmox to see the consumption.