config advice House storage server & Minecraft server

[Gallu]

Hello everyone! 

Recently I begun to think about building a home server for storage, media server and a Minecraft server instance for me and friends.

I thought about going for 5 terabytes (one for each member of the family + 1 shared), and using old server parts from ebay for the build itself.

What are your recommendations? Have you ever built a used server off of ebay?

 

Furthermore, for accomodating all the functions, I need to have some VMs, which is the best method right now, and can you link some tutorials (Maybe Linus has done it and i don't know)?

 

Thank you very much

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, Demoox said:

What are your recommendations? Have you ever built a used server off of ebay?

Not exactly off of ebay, but used parts? Yes, sure. A few months ago I bought an AMD A8-6600K, 8GB RAM and a mobo and used whatever leftover-parts I had lying around to round it out and it's now a nice server. I also have my previous desktop, a Xeon E3 1230v3 with 16GB RAM as my main-server. Slapped a GTX1050 on it so I can run Plex with hardware-accelerated transcoding as well.

 

As for recommendations...you don't need anything specific. Find a desktop-PC that can run a Minecraft-server, slap Linux on it and off you go. Buy a GTX1050 if you want HW-accelerated Plex. Or if you want a more guided, easier experience, install FreeNAS on it.

[SupaKomputa]

No need to find "SERVER" parts.

A regular pc will do, usually people use their old outdated pc for task like this.

For NAS, as you will run it 24/7, i recommend finding low powered system.

[ManyCoresGuy]

Dont do what i did and go out and get a real enterprise server. They are great but oh man do they get loud under load.

[Gallu]

6 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Not exactly off of ebay, but used parts? Yes, sure. A few months ago I bought an AMD A8-6600K, 8GB RAM and a mobo and used whatever leftover-parts I had lying around to round it out and it's now a nice server. I also have my previous desktop, a Xeon E3 1230v3 with 16GB RAM as my main-server. Slapped a GTX1050 on it so I can run Plex with hardware-accelerated transcoding as well.

 

As for recommendations...you don't need anything specific. Find a desktop-PC that can run a Minecraft-server, slap Linux on it and off you go. Buy a GTX1050 if you want HW-accelerated Plex. Or if you want a more guided, easier experience, install FreeNAS on it.

I was thinking about getting a cheap Xeon, yes, maybe a 1030 will do too for transcoding

5 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

No need to find "SERVER" parts.

A regular pc will do, usually people use their old outdated pc for task like this.

For NAS, as you will run it 24/7, i recommend finding low powered system.

With "server" parts i meant reliable and capable of maintaining a 24/7 load, since maybe I will do Android Custom Rom building for fun and lols

4 hours ago, ManyCoresGuy said:

Dont do what i did and go out and get a real enterprise server. They are great but oh man do they get loud under load.

oh shut. But I can still use a 4U racked server and slap in some "not-so-server-y" components, right? I wanted a rack server to put on a shelf in the laundry, where there is always fresh air and the modem/router

[WereCatf]

3 hours ago, Demoox said:

maybe a 1030 will do too for transcoding

It won't, only GTX/RTX-series cards have hardware-encoding. GT-series cards don't have such.

[ManyCoresGuy]

4 hours ago, Demoox said:

oh shut. But I can still use a 4U racked server and slap in some "not-so-server-y" components, right? I wanted a rack server to put on a shelf in the laundry, where there is always fresh air and the modem/router

You can do that. Mine is loud because its a 1u. Your better off buying a HTPC case and building out your server in that. You can pick up first gen ryzen parts for cheap so no need to go xeon.

[Velcade]

There's nothing wrong with buying used Xeon chips for a home server.  Most can be had very cheap.  10core CPUs for $70.  You don't need to mount them in 1u server cases.  I'm running two E5-2680 V2s in a Define R6 case and the thing is silent. 

[Gallu]

Thank you everyone for the replies, I very much appreciated them, will follow up with a build log when i'll actually have the parts in hand