What hardware/software to choose for Home Server

Lightning00blade · February 5, 2022

Hello people,

I have been planning for a long time time to build a personal server.

So what I have in my head is to have a backup for my photos and files (kept on a external hard disk atm, so not much redundancy), some movies/video maybe, run some personal web apps (Node.JS/PHP) and scripts.

What can you config I can build for this - I am OK with buying second hand and my budget max is $1000 (Can be increased to $1500 after some months).

What software would recommend using, I would say I have decent Linux experience.

If you have more question that will help you answer, I would be happy to provide

silentdragon95 · February 5, 2022

I assume that budget is for the entire system including HDDs?

Mainly you need to think about how much storage you want, because that's going to be where the majority of your budget is going to go. Afterwards you can think about what hardware to get, although none of the tasks you're describing really require a lot of power, so basically any PC with enough SATA ports and a decent amount of RAM should be fine.

In terms of NAS operating systems there are mostly two free choices these days, TrueNAS (Formerly FreeNAS) and OpenMediaVault. TrueNAS is generally considered to be the more powerful of the two and is basically the consumer-version of an enterprise NAS OS. However, it does require more powerful hardware (and mostly a large amount of RAM if using ZFS).

OpenMediaVault on the other hand is based on Debian and can basically run well on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a top of the line PC. The advantage here is that Debian is generally considered easier to get into if you want to fiddle with stuff yourself and not just install plugins via the GUI.