So I have like 16 drives lying around so I thought I should probably make a server out of them.

I found a case already but I want to know what else I should get hardware wise.

What I plan to use it for is just mainly mass storage but also being able to do production on my computers, watching some shows, back up files. The usual stuff. So what parts should I get for it? I need a motherboard cpu ram (damn it) and a new psu cuz i only have an extra 450 watt.
Budget is like 250 dollars if thats even possible.

I should mention I have 11 1TB Drives (that i have to test first tbh lmao) 2 3tb drives and shucked 6tb from a segate. Probably shouldnt use that last one.

The software side is a whole can of worms I dont know about so thats a later question lmao.

- Side note question whats the advantage of stuff like plex? I just kinda click on the video file and watch.

Hi everyone. Just starting my journey into the land of building a custom home server.

I have a server machine with an SSD, but I wanted to give it a lot more storage and have that storage be decoupled from the main machine, so a hard drive DAS was the natural choice. The setup right now is a single, brand new WD Red Plus 10TB HDD (WD100EFGX) inside a Terramaster D4-320 hooked up to the server machine via USB. Both purchased from Amazon.

The attached video is a couple clips stitched together. When these clips were recorded, Immich was indexing a bunch of photos I had loaded onto the drive yesterday. The video shows a couple of pretty long, continuous, loud seeking noises. Now, it’s not fully representative of what was happening. These sounds came and went during the indexing job. However, they were always long streaks (5-15 sec) of this noise.

I’m well aware that hard drives make some mechanical noise as they read and write, but the loudness of the sounds this one is making seems excessive. I'm not sure how well it will come across in the video, but the sound is pretty loud here in the room. I don’t remember my last PC with a hard drive ever being this loud, although that was probably 5+ years ago now, so my memory might just be failing me.

Is this a normal amount of noise for a brand new HDD to make, or is it damaged and I should exchange it?