I'm tired of the jank, help me do it right?

[KyonaLuya]

I'm pretty clueless on how to do what I'm trying to do even though I know it should be simple compared to a lot of the things you guys do. I'm willing to learn. We've been storing files on flash drives and other such jankiness because I haven't had time to tackle a new project and it needs to end. However, I have no idea where to start.

 

I want to build or buy a server machine. It needs to have NAS with redundancy and the ability to host game servers (Minecraft, Foundry). No need to host/stream video as we have an old Raspberry Pi for that. What's going to be the cheapest way to do this without sacrificing too much reliability? $100-$150 USD, ideally. I don't have a preference between building or buying a prebuilt box. We don't have a good used parts scene locally. What pitfalls am I going to run into? Is that even possible to do for that price point, and if not, what am I looking at? Thanks.

[Levent]

You are sacrificing all of the reliability when you set your budget to $150.

 

Whatever you decide to take on, will be equally as shitty as a setup made from SBCs. 
 

Save more to increase your budget then maybe you can consider reliability.

[Needfuldoer]

An older prebuilt office desktop will give you more processing power and a much higher RAM ceiling than a Pi.

 

If you're willing to sacrifice a little power efficiency and some of the "real server" bells and whistles (most notably, IPMI), old LGA2011-3 workstations are very affordable and can take cheap, old, registered ECC server memory. You should be able to find something like a reasonably equipped HP Z440 well within your budget. (Assuming you're in the US, here's one for $125 shipped to the lower 48 that comes with 32 gigs of RAM. Just add storage.) You won't be able to afford much storage on top of what it comes with, but once you have some more scratch you can add a couple large capacity hard drives and run them in a mirror. (That's safe enough, especially since you have backups because RAID is not a backup.)

[KyonaLuya]

2 hours ago, Levent said:

You are sacrificing all of the reliability when you set your budget to $150.

 

Whatever you decide to take on, will be equally as shitty as a setup made from SBCs. 
 

Save more to increase your budget then maybe you can consider reliability.

What do you think I should increase my budget to?

[m9x3mos]

3 hours ago, KyonaLuya said:

What do you think I should increase my budget to?

How many hard drives do you want and are you okay with not having hot swap? 

Using used Dell none sff office computers would be a good place to look on a low budget. Some of them you can cram 4 hard drives in.