can anyone help build a chaeap £400 server for home use

[Amazingjoseph11]

i was looking for a £400 server in a desktop case with 20Tb of storage maybe hot swapable drive bays like this below

http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-5-25in-Trayless-Mobile-3-5in/dp/B000KS8S9W/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454349970&sr=8-2&keywords=hotswap+drive+bay

[rmac52]

20 Tb of storage costs more than your entire budget.

[LionWaffles]

In addition to your budget problem, what is your intended use for the server? Also, are you experienced in building computers? Have you build a computer before? If not I don't suggest attempting this.

[Guest]

Oh boy, here we go again...

You won't buy a 20TB storage server for 400 quid, you're gonna need far more than that. Let's just say that according to the requirements and best practices, a 20TB FreeNAS ZFS array will need 24GB of ECC RAM (1GB per 1TB plus some overhead), then you're going to need a CPU that supports ECC memory, a good motherboard and so on... 

You're gonna need a bigger budget, because you won't even get 20TB in disk storage for 400 quid. 

[Necrodead]

For my 'home server' I installed windows on the cheapest AMD processor and mobo I could find with sata 3, stuck an old stick of DDR3 in it and am using an old SSD for a boot drive. I stick all my HDD's on it (non-raid) and have it connected to my network without a monitor. I already have file access set to read/write for the network, so I can save files to it as well as pulling them off. I use a 3tb drive for a separate backup.

Thats probably about all you could do for 400 quid. maybe get a better processor, but I was more interested in the 8x sata 3 ports I could get on a cheap AM2 platform.

[Jarsky]

For about 450 GBP you can get 3 x Seagate Archive 8TB drives and make a 14TB RAID5.....but of course you'll still need a complete machine to put these into, with at least 3 spare SATA ports. There are some cheap little old Core2Duo machines that you can get for like 50 quid, so you could maybe do it for 500 GBP. I used to run mine off an old AMD Athlon X2 which got upgraded to a Phenom II X2 550BE, until I could migrate it to what I have now. This is the benefit of a software RAID, it has flexibility to move the drives between platforms.

Your other option for drives is to keep an eye old for old 2TB drives to build one with. I'm going to be decomissioning my old array later this year which has 10 x 2TB drives in it, so you may find other good deals on second hand drives in your country. Bare in mind, that using old drives will be slower, and also is not a safe practice but you will save a lot of $$$ this way. My drives have 48,000hrs on them all (approx 6 years uptime) so will probably go fairly cheap, but still even 10 of these smaller drives, is probably a large chunk of your budget - especially if you went with the recommended NAS drives (mine are the old WD20EARS Green drives with headparking disabled)

[RickL]

I use my PC as my Home use server since I now don't have an office, it lives in the loft.

As stated above, get a cheap motherboard, AMD CPU, a couple of WD Red 3TB Drives, a little bit of RAM, a clean install of Windows then set up a free DDNS from No-ip.com, install the software. Get File Zilla server program, set up your user list WITH A GOOD STRONG PASSWORD, open up your ports on your router then you have your very own FTP you can access anything on those drives anywhere in the world from most devices. (I used this ALL the time at work for music etc).

Next, for in the home just enable home sharing, share your network drives, set up the user name and password and then map the network drives to other computers.

Next, Install yourself TS3, Plex Media server and the such likes. Done Add data as and when required.