Goofed Home

I’d definitely skip this in favor of something consumer-grade. You can find used Dell Optiplexes all over the place cheap and stick a large drive inside/outside of it and use it for a couple of years.

A big old server is just going to drain your wallet on both power and parts with equal or worse performance and a lot more complexity for what 99% of home users will use it for.

It sounds like your main goal is probably a media server and an Optiplex will give you an i5 or i7 with QuickSync which works excellent for processing video. RAID isnt really necessary here because you can just download more Linux ISOs if these one are lost, though it can be great later if you buy a bunch more drives and expand into other areas where data is less replaceable.

Can’t say on access behind CG-NAT, as I haven’t ever dealt with it, but Tailscale might work as a free third-party option though that’s just a guess.

The rule of thumb with servers is * Performance * Reliability * Power usage * Noise * Size

The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities ²⁴⁄₇. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

Are 22TB Exos derives around 400+ monies (double the price from a year ago). 6TB are only half that? Idk even where to look for prices bcs stock is weird.

Yeah, these are dark times, evey gen things get worse instead of advancements ppl can use.

Still, keep in mind that those “nice” SAS drives are still slow & might have been in operation for 12 years.

Speaking of Nextcloud, if you use for backing up photos, have you tried Immich?

yup, desktop components are what i was originally looking for, but this is 200 euros for a lot of storage, which would be way more expensive if i were to buy it separately

True. Getting a TB of storage is not affordable nowadays. And we know why. F*©k AI.

But here in Poland you can still find some used Q920 with the same specifications.

If you are located in Europe they would most likely send it even to your country.

This one would be like the one I have.

https://allegro.pl/oferta/solidny-i-kompaktowy-komputer-micro-fujitsu-q920-i5-16gb-2000-ssd-w11-praca-17993236542

You’re the only one giving me a positive answer!

I do not mind RAID, so i won’t lose data when a drive fails (the most valuable thing will be backups, which i mean, are backups, so not that critical if i can make a new one, but even losing other data would be a bit boring). I think I’d do software RAID tho, so if the controller breaks i wouldn’t have to find the same model, which could be hard for old hardware i guess.

the other comments scared me about power consumption, so i’ll have to investigate more of it.

If you’re going for software RAID, I recommend taking it a step further and go for ZFS: If set up correctly you get all the advantages of raid6, while remaining very flexible.

Do you have an estimate on the energy consumption?

Oh, so the spec is fairly correct at 97W idle.
And being an old, slow CPU means it’s not efficient at load either (higher peak consumption & longer precising time needed).

cool

yup. I was using my old desktop as a server. Thankfully though, it has 32GB RAM and a 8 core CPU.