Cyberia Collective

<-Back

Blog Post 13: Home Server Expedition

Date: September 17th, 2026 @ 20:30 UTC-4:00

Author: lule34567

As apart of self-hosting the Sven Coop server (yes, I'm still working on the map; see modem for server updates), the Wikipedia backup, and the Bluesky bot, you need hardware. Many self-hosters often buy their hardware off of Ebay used...and old. I am no exception.

My server hardware is a 2013 Lenovo ThinkCentre M73, with a 2.9 GHz, 4 core, Intel i3-4130T processor with a integrated 1.15 GHz GPU; 4 GiBs of memory; and 500 GiBs of HDD storage. You can find the hardware probe here. Because of the age of this machine, it needed to be dusted off, have a new hard drive installed due to SMART errors appearing, and thermal paste reapplied. This blog will document the first expedition I had into this machine.

I had ordered a toolkit and thermal paste as necessary, but my blunder fell when I did not check the maintenance manual and ordered a 3.5 inch HDD rather than the 2.5 inch "Laptop Thin HDD" variant of Seagate hard drives (see specifications here.) alongside a 3.5 inch HDD adapter for that HDD.

a picture of a machine slighly taken apart, with an air can and cable next to it. there is also a bed with a toolkit, a hard drive with a cable next to it, and a partially covered, turned on laptop.

Once I opened the machine itself, I had realized that the hard drive within the machine is much smaller than the one that I had bought; and from then, I contemplated for a few minutes. I did not give up, however, and I took this chance to investigate the machine even more, whilst also dusting it off with a brush and air can; specifically the fan, thermal system, and other dusty areas. I deconstructed to the thermal unit as I wanted to take a look at the thermal paste itself, to which seems to have been showing its age. Carefully, I reconstructed the machine back to its normal state, and reinstalled the bits and wires and parts needed.

From this, I decided to use the hard drive as a new accesory upgrade to my system, rather than to return it for a miniscule amount. I plugged back in the adapter into my laptop, formatted it to ext4, and plugged the M73 ThinkCentre as well as its new hard drive accessory into my router.

While I cannot upgrade my machine now, let it be known that I will eventually replace the decaying hard drive within it to a errorless replacement; and I consider this expedition a great study into hardware repair and the machine layout itself.