SSHaugen

Thanks for the reply. I built my house with this in mind. Not that I have a large server rack, but I have every room wired with 2 pulls of ethernet cable and use a patch panel in a custom built 19" rack so everything has a home. The intention was always to have my own private "cloud" for security and safety. To me, it is the desktops and towers that are cumbersome and don't have a place. We use laptops and our phones for everything and yes, we successfully stream HD video through a laptop. We are ripping our movie collection to gain space and need someplace to keep several TB of movie and other video. I was hoping to get some suggestions about a solid motherboard and processors. I read some articles a while back about using multiple, older, slower, processors in lieu of the latest, fastest ones. Is that a good idea?

Hey! I have been trying to go it alone, learning about servers. When I got to the point when I was ready to start making hardware choices, I was just overwhelmed by the number of choices available just on the Supermicro web site. I've built my share of computers, but the range of processors and other resources told me that I need help. I found Linus just today and hopefully someone can give me some guidance to narrow the selection with information on what to look for. This is going to be a home server, mostly for media to stream the videos I have to devices in the house and hopefully to my mobile devices through a remote login. In addition, I want to host a mail server and maybe web page for my dad's domain. I'm sure these will be virtual machines, so this is going to need some horsepower as well as lots of storage. I'm not made of money, but I'm willing to buy good components to make a quality server that will last quite a while. My thoughts on hardware are as follows: I have a 4U chassis that I can build it in. Storage - 8 to 10TB in a RAID 1+0 for speed and redundancy. Multiple NICs - each VM will need its own. MB - PLEASE HELP Processor - PLEASE HELP RAM - lots of DDR3. Advice welcome