Advice on home server hardware

[aquova]

Hello everyone.

 

For the last few years I have run my own personal server off of a 2011-ish Mac Mini that I store in a spare bedroom closet. This machine has served me fairly well, but I've begun wishing for something with a little more oomph. This became particularly apparent when some friends of mine wanted me to host a Terraria server for a time which, while it was able to do, was stretching it to its limits. My current setup is a headless Ubuntu installation running most of the services I need in their own Docker containers. I've built mine and my girlfriends desktop PCs, but I don't really know much about more server oriented hardware.

 

What I currently/will use the server for

- Running my personal static website

- Network storage (currently using ~1.5TB of various things, mostly movies and TV shows)

- Jellyfin server (Plex alternative), for streaming those TV shows and movies to my household. Only two people accessing it max at a time

- Hosting Discord bots

- Managing IoT devices via Home Assistant (plus Node-Red and MQTT to supplement that)

- Something I can't do well but would like to - hosting game servers for friends (5-10 people), such as Terraria or Minecraft

 

What I'm looking for:

- I really like the NAS-style cases. Small-ish form factor with several drive bays for potential expansion, although I don't plan on filling them all immediately

- I would like something not super power hungry or puts out a lot of heat. Like I said, it lives next to the router in my closet so there isn't a lot of ventilation, especially in the summers

- I'm planning on running my own Linux installation again, so I don't need any NAS OS included or anything like that

- Something that I would love, but isn't a necessity is an optical drive bay. Yes I know, however I have a SATA Blu-Ray drive that just sits on my desk with a SATA to USB adapter, and I would love a proper place for it to live.

- Do I need a dedicated GPU? I imagine it will help for the video streaming but I don't know if it's required.

- Budget: I built my PC for about $700 a few years ago, so I'm looking for something in that price range

- Location: Central US. There is a local Microcenter which I will probably use for some things to save on shipping

 

The Mac Mini's current specs, for anyone who is curious:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8800 - 2.66GHz

GPU: Nvidia GeForce 320M

RAM: 10 GB (original was 4, I upgraded a few years back)

Storage: 500 GB HDD internal, additional 4 TB in external SSDs that I had lying around

OS: Ubuntu Server 20.04