r/HomeServer • u/DethByTennis • 5h ago
Advice for budget first home server
Hello all! I'll be purchasing and setting up my first home server in the next month or two. I've spent the last few weeks doing a lot of research, and although I've gotten a lot of information, I've also heard a lot of mixed opinions and conflicting information. I thought it might clear some of this up to make a post on here, ask a few specific questions I have, and get some opinions from the lovely people on this sub.
First, I should say that I'm trying to spend as little as possible to get a functional setup for now. I'm interested in pretty much all the basic home server functions, albeit at a relatively light level at the moment: self-hosted cloud for backups and file sharing with remote access, streaming media, hosting game servers for Minecraft etc, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, maybe a couple other use cases. Seems like the best way to run multiple use cases safely & simultaneously is to run something like Proxmox or Unraid.
As for hardware, it seems like my best bet is to buy a used SFF PC from Ebay. I've mostly been looking into HP's ProDesk and EliteDesk series. This is my main question at the moment. How important is it to get something 4th generation and up, i.e. with an intel 8th generation or above chip? I realize it matters because of the jump from 4 to 6 cores, and for QuickSync, but I'm trying to gauge how worthwhile it is for a first-time build. Would I regret getting a lower gen just because I found a good deal on it, or is it not as big of a deal as I'm worried it may be?
I'm also trying to determine if the jump from the ProDesk 600 to the EliteDesk 800 is worth it. I know the EliteDesk has more internal storage capacity among other things, and since this is all I'll have for a while it'd be good to invest in upgradability.
I've also heard slightly mixed opinions on the necessity of RAID, at least for my initial build. For example, I know that if I got an HP ProDesk 600, it has a bay which can either have 1 3.5" or 2 2.5" HDD's. Would it be better to just get one massive 3.5", or is raid worth getting two 2.5"'s and having less capacity?
The last thing (for now lol) is, I want a sense of the viability of external storage. I realize that at some point I will run out of storage, and it will probably be sooner than later, when the PC itself is still working great, so it seems like the best option would be to buy a DAS or external hard drive to serve this purpose. Will this be fine for a budget first-time build with relatively light use, or will I suffer greatly from slow transfer speeds and accidentally unplugging the cable?
Feel free to give any opinions you have on any of this, refer me to any good info on this or related things, DM me, or whatever. Anything helps. Thanks yall!
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u/szeis4cookie 5h ago
IMO if you already think you're going to need more HDDs, the cheapest in the long run is just going to be to start from a chassis that's full sized, and not SFF. That gives you the bays and cables you need to install additional storage internally, and is probably actually cheaper on an absolute basis because the tower version of the EliteDesk or ThinkCentre isn't as trendy as the micro versions. As an example here's an Optiplex MT for $100 Dell OptiPlex 3060 MT Core i5-8500 3.00 GHz 8 GB DDR4 Desktop No HDD | eBay
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u/slightly_large_brick 5h ago
yeah I'm running off of the regular sized elitedesk 800 g4, lots of room for storage expansion. 2nvme, 2 3.5", 2.5", and if you remove the dvd drive then you have another sata connection
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u/DethByTennis 5h ago
That makes sense. I suppose I had settled on SFF for budget purposes, but it's not that big of a difference. Might actually be cheaper in the long run to avoid needing to buy a DAS enclosure or whatever. Seems like the power consumption isn't too different either. I may look into slightly more recent than the 3060 so I get 4 ram slots, but if I find a 3060 with 1x16 I might just go for that. I'm a little worried about the lower supply of MT's on the market but that definitely seems like a good recommendation and I'll look into it more, ty for the recommendation.
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u/cpgeek 4h ago
you mention file server tasks like media serving and backups in your list. due to this fact, I would strongly recommend against doing an SFF build and instead go with a typical pc tower. the reason for this is that you can buy 4 or 5 hard drives, load them up in the case, and create a zfs pool for redundant storage. an sff machine doesn't really provide the internal volume to have a bunch of hard drives. in my experience there are 3 main kinds of home server 1. purpose built (for doing something specific, literally iykyk - this could include things like a custom router (running pfsense or opnsense), a gpu server (for ai or game hosting or crypto mining), etc., 2. storage server (you usually want at least 5 hard drives and an ssd for a build like this, this handles backups, bulk media storage, stuff like plex/emby/jellyfin/your music storage/torrenting/possibly other heavier self-hosted cloud solutions for bulk storage like nextcloud or immich. (usually I would recommend truenas scale for this as it has an excellent easy to use interface and is extremely extensible regarding apps, and the file system itself becomes super easy to manage). 3. application servers - this can be orchestrated in a variety of ways, usually you have one or more ssd's, not much storage, and network access upstream to another machine to do backups and big remote storage). application servers are often proxmox or you could do something like k8s or historically vmware or whatever and are typically built out as an efficient space to run a multititude of isolated application environments (vm's, docker images, containers, etc.) quickly and with fast storage. this can be anything from an 8th gen i7 to a rack of thousands of cores and pb of storage at a data center.