First home server

[BeastFRX]

Hello guys,

I recently acquired a used computer which I am planing to make it my home server.

This computer has

-an Acer Veriton M4620G Mother Board

-an Intel i7 2600 CPU

-16 GB RAM

-an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Graphics Card

-a 250 GB SSD

-1 TB HDD.

I am planning to buy 2 new HDD of at least 4 TB each for redundant storage,and get rid of the graphics card (because I think the graphics card will be useless).I want to use this server as a NAS but also as a cloud/backup for my phone and my wife's phone.Do you think that this parts will be enough of is the CPU to slow?And what OS do you recommend for me (btw I am a windows user  ) for my first server ? I want also to be able to use this server not only from home and for free (except electricity and internet fee),is it even possible to make a home server without paying a monthly fee for a OS or program??

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, BeastFRX said:

Hello guys,

I recently acquired a used computer which I am planing to make it my home server.

This computer has

-an Acer Veriton M4620G Mother Board

-an Intel i7 2600 CPU

-16 GB RAM

-an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Graphics Card

-a 250 GB SSD

-1 TB HDD.

I am planning to buy 2 new HDD of at least 4 TB each for redundant storage,and get rid of the graphics card (because I think the graphics card will be useless).I want to use this server as a NAS but also as a cloud/backup for my phone and my wife's phone.Do you think that this parts will be enough of is the CPU to slow?And what OS do you recommend for me (btw I am a windows user  ) for my first server ? I want also to be able to use this server not only from home and for free (except electricity and internet fee),is it even possible to make a home server without paying a monthly fee for a OS or program??

I’d probably consider unraid. There is an upfront cost to buy unraid, but it will grow with you as you do. It’s typically well worth the price. 

[Jarsky]

That hardware is plenty for network storage; and for some apps / automation you might want to run. Agree you don't need an old GPU like that; just use the i7-2600's iGPU. 

 

You could quite happily keep running Windows; free if you just run it unlicensed. 

You could also run something like Rockstor or Xpenology (Open Source version of Synology DSM). 

You could also run UnRAID; it has a licensing cost but you can get a basic license and always upgrade it later if you decide to grow into more devices. 

[Needfuldoer]

Am i7-2600 is plenty of CPU power for what you want to do.

 

 

I'd recommend trying TrueNAS Scale, OpenMediaVault, and Unraid out before committing any irreplaceable data to the server. You'll want to set up a mirror across both drives, so either one can die and you won't lose data. A software mirror in Windows will work too, but ZFS gives you some powerful tools like snapshots that let you "roll back" changes to files.

 

No matter what, always remember that a NAS is not a backup, and RAID is not a backup! RAID is insurance against having to restore from your backups. You'll still want to save your most important data to an offline storage device or cloud storage.

[johnt]

5 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d probably consider unraid. There is an upfront cost to buy unraid, but it will grow with you as you do. It’s typically well worth the price. 

Unraid seems like a bit much for a simple file server, no?

 

 

5 hours ago, BeastFRX said:

.I want to use this server as a NAS but also as a cloud/backup for my phone and my wife's phone.

I don't recommend this unless you plan to sync data only when you are at home. If you want to use the storage server outside of your network (or house), you will need to open ports on your router and that could be problematic if it leads directly to your files.

 

I once opened a port for RDC on my Windows server that I didn't manage for about 3 months. I finally logged in and there was someone who was using my device as a server for grandma porn  I can laugh about it now, but it was disgusting. Funny enough, they left my files alone from what I could tell, but I couldn't tell so I ended up keeping only the very important items and deleting everything else. It was a total waste of time. He was stupid enough to save his google account passwords to my browser. I logged into his accounts and deleted everything including his google account.

[manikyath]

11 minutes ago, johnt said:

Unraid seems like a bit much for a simple file server, no?

one of my servers runs unraid; yes it's way overkill if you've got no plans for docker and sr-iov.

[LIGISTX]

34 minutes ago, johnt said:

Unraid seems like a bit much for a simple file server, no?

 

It really depends what you want. If you want a NAS, and you want to continue to have a NAS for a long time to come... its probabaly a decent idea. Easy to add drives of any size at any time, easy to add redundency, and easy to start tinkering with docker and VM's.

 

Personally, I don't run it... I run proxmox and virtualize everything under that. But for a nocive looking to start doing these sorts of things, unraid is pretty great. Its simple and has A LOT of documentation and videos/forums to help get you going.