Building a quiet small server out of spare parts

An old office desktop, a second-hand SSD and a bigger, slower fan turned out to be a perfectly good home server. The hard part was not the hardware but the noise.

What made the difference

Undervolting the CPU dropped idle temperatures by about ten degrees, which let the fan curve stay flat for most of the day. Replacing the stock 80 mm fan with a 120 mm one on an adapter did the rest.

What I would skip next time

Spinning drives. They are cheap per terabyte, but in a small room you hear every seek. For the few hundred gigabytes I actually need, an SSD was the better deal.