Server / NAS / Media PC help

TimboSlice · March 27, 2019

I'm looking for help getting started building a NAS / Media PC / Server for myself. You can find old workstation / server towers pretty reasonably on eBay Server Xeon E5620 and inspired by the latest eBay PC build you can pick up a few Hard Drives as well.

I really know very little about Xeon SKU's and the actual amount of compute power a NAS / Media PC would need. I'm beginning to collect Blu-rays of TV shows and movies because I want the deleted scenes, special features, the de-specialized versions of Star Wars, etc. and I want to be able to play those on my TV either through HDMI or Nvidia Shield TV. I also don't know if I will need to have virtual machines to handle the file server / NAS side separately from a media center instance. I've heard of Plex and Kodi but I have not looked into actually setting them up. I also don't know if I would want a cheap 100-200GB SSD as a cache for dumping files to the NAS.

If any Linus-es are reading this seems like a really cool build guide that would be right up your alley and some quick googling did not immediately yield any good tutorials. The closest I got was this one from Tested but I would certainly be interested in a second Canadian opinion before I get too far invested.

EDIT: After reading the full article this is actually a pretty good starting point but I would welcome any other opinions especially on the Xeon E5620.