Need help building my first home server

[jkxinja]

Hey everyone, 

 

I was thinking about building a budget home server and had a few questions. I was hoping you all could guide me in the correct direction. I want to use the server to run Plex, home assistant, NAS (with iscsi and network sharing), and a maybe as a torrent box as well. I was looking into whether I wanted to buy used parts off ebay, an old desktop pc off ebay, or a raspberry pi. Doing some research I found that raspberry pi's aren't meant for running hard drives 24/7 (correct me if I'm wrong) so I am leaning towards buying an old desktop off ebay. 

 

Some questions I had were: 

1. What OS should I use? (I have Linux experience but TrueNas also seems to be easy to set up for what I need). 
2. What specs should I look for? 
3. What are the best hard drives to buy for the price? (I am looking for about 10TB of non-raw storage). 
4. Our house has ethernet ports in every room and I have them all hooked up to our router atm. Would just plugging the server into the router lead to ok file sharing speeds? (we have gigabyte ethernet) I don't see a way to get both ethernet from my router and a 2.5/10gb connection from the server to each room. 

Thank you for the help and sorry if something I said was wrong. I am but a noob.  

PS: No strict budget just trying to be reasonable as this is my first server and might be upgraded to something better in the future. 

[manikyath]

1. you could give truenas a go, and if you dont like it, go for something else.

2. anything haswell or better should be fine.

3. last i checked, 3-4TB was still the best range. just make sure you buy CMR drives and IMO avoid the seagate barracuda 3TB, i've seen far too many red flags to trust those with data. they appear to have an exceptionally high failure rate, and seem to fail in a very "you dont notice before it's too late" sort of way.

4. just plug it in somewhere, those are worries for later.

[jkxinja]

12 minutes ago, manikyath said:

3. last i checked, 3-4TB was still the best range. just make sure you buy CMR drives and IMO avoid the seagate barracuda 3TB, i've seen far too many red flags to trust those with data. they appear to have an exceptionally high failure rate, and seem to fail in a very "you dont notice before it's too late" sort of way.

Would this IronWolf or this Western Digital be good then?

[sloniupl]

Don't know what is your budget bu i'm running this at the moment and it is great with Trunas Scale:

 

Motherboard: Asrock X570M Pro4

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600

RAM: 2x Kingston Server Premier, DDR4, 16 GB, 2666 MHz, CL19 (KSM26ED8/16HD)

PSU: Seasonic Focus GX-750

Storage:
– System: 2x Crucial MX500 250GB [mirror]
– HDD: 5x WD Red Plus 6 TB (WD60EFZX) [RAIDZ-2]

GPU (can be anything this was the cheapest when i was building server): Nvidia Quadro P400

 

RAM is bit expensive but you get ECC that ZFS likes.

 

As for hartdrives WD RED Plus are good choice.

 

If you have Gigabit ports on the router switch than speeds of file transfer will be ok. You will be more limited on the hard drives configuration / read speed.

[jkxinja]

On 1/18/2023 at 4:08 AM, sloniupl said:

Don't know what is your budget bu i'm running this at the moment and it is great with Trunas Scale:

 

Motherboard: Asrock X570M Pro4

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600

RAM: 2x Kingston Server Premier, DDR4, 16 GB, 2666 MHz, CL19 (KSM26ED8/16HD)

PSU: Seasonic Focus GX-750

Storage:
– System: 2x Crucial MX500 250GB [mirror]
– HDD: 5x WD Red Plus 6 TB (WD60EFZX) [RAIDZ-2]

GPU (can be anything this was the cheapest when i was building server): Nvidia Quadro P400

 

RAM is bit expensive but you get ECC that ZFS likes.

 

As for hartdrives WD RED Plus are good choice.

 

If you have Gigabit ports on the router switch than speeds of file transfer will be ok. You will be more limited on the hard drives configuration / read speed.

Thank you! I will definitely look into it!