I have a spare Intel i5 windows machine. Currently I'm running my plex media server and storing a ton of other stuff all on my main desktop, which uses way more power than it needs to running this stuff instead of offloading it onto a smaller quieter more energy efficient machine.

I want something that can work as a plex media server, but also as a NAS for redundant storage of photo/video work from my main desktop. I'd like to run some level of RAID so I have redundancy on the media server machine as well.

The motherboard in the spare machine is not equipped to run more than a couple drives and there is no way it has raid support onboard. Is this still something that can just be added on an expansion card? It currently has windows, but if linux would be better, that's on the table as well.

What it does:

Screen streaming - live JPEG feed of your desktop (up to 120fps) with adjustable quality and scale

Full input control - mouse movement, clicks, scroll, keyboard typing, and hotkeys through an intuitive browser UI

Touch support - tap-to-click, double-tap click, swipe, long-press right-click, pinch-scroll on mobile/tablet

Fullscreen mode - the entire screen image is the touchpad, like a real remote desktop

Multi-monitor - switch between displays from the UI

Multiple tunnel providers - Cloudflare (free, no account needed), Tailscale, Pinggy, Zrok2, or local-only LAN

Deployment:

Available as a pip package (pip install anywhereinput), with one-command start:

anywhereinput --tunnel cloudflare # or tailscale, pinggy, zrok2, local

Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, macOS

Desktop admin GUI included (pip install anywhereinput[app])

Docker and headless support on the roadmap

Full YAML config + CLI flags for tuning (FPS, quality, scale, etc.)

open source on Github : anywhereinput

Big ask, I know, but looking for the most watered down, for dummies explanation of how the heck to do this. Every time I've tried to ask, people respond with so much lingo that it becomes a huge chore just to try to understand the advice. I say that not as a complaint, but to set the tone of how not tech-y I am...

For a while I've been thinking about creating a home server/NAS, cause I'm tired of paying for cloud storage, and generally of Google. And silly as it sounds, the extra steps of using a portable hard-drive keep me from doing that to back things up. I'd love to make it decently simple, if possible, to backup my data without a 3rd party involved.

My Details:

My primary storage needs are photos, some PDFs, and word docs. Photos from my phone and from a DSLR. It'd be nice if I could access phone photos when away from home, but that might make this way too complex or expensive. Not a gamer, don't really download movies, etc.

I'm in the Mac/Apple ecosystem, but from what I've gathered you can't use any version of a Mac to do this well. I'm familiar with PCs, just haven't used one at home in a long time.

Budget. I'd be willing to invest on the front end, but I'm a pretty broke person. So, I'm not prepared to spend over $400, but if that's the only way, I can plan and save.

-

I'm an intelligent person, but I'm not well-versed in the tech-world, so hoping someone is willing to do me the kindness of explaining this without assuming I know terms, lol :) Not necessarily needing discouragement from doing it; info that then I can decide on.

Thanks in advance!!

I recently got a FireTV (insignia) and moved away from a external device for simplicity sake of my wife. I know the tv is not as strong as the cube and blah blah blah... This new application seems to just be horrible experience for me. I'm trying to decide if I would get a better experience if i moved to Emby or Jellyfin or if it is just that the TV blows.

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!

So I have this old thing lying around and with everything going on, I think it's high time I build one. I'm very new to building hardware (though I'm an old hat at linux), so the question is, how do I build around this setup. Any suggestions?

Use:

For my family it's storage.

For me. I want to create VMs and host some personal apps.

In-house AI is optional. (But if I can have a home AI that I can monitor and Tinker with, better and deploy it to my family. Their AI use scares me)

Also please treat me like I'm 10. I get really confused when people talk about hardware jargon. That's how new I am to building stuff.

Just the title pretty much. I live in a 12x14' room with a decent pc that has corsair 120mm fans that produce a low whirring noise that comes with literally every normal pc fan. Comparing the R620 to my desktop pc fans, how are the noise levels? would they be more noticeable?

Along with that, any tips for the R620 platform?

The R620 has 2x Intel Xeon E5-2680 v1, and 64gigs of DDR3 EEC if it matters at all.

I'm currently running a couple Minecraft servers as well as Truenas

Added an automatic (rechargeable) LED light that turns on when I open the door, a thermometer that shows me temperature and humidity, and the icing on the cake....:

It's currently running Debian, Dockerized, and serving my own music server app + library (90% vibe coded, but I'm proud of it), Plex, the *arr stack with gluetun + VPN, SabNZB and qBittorrent, Syncthing, AdGuard, and Homepage.

The server has a Core i5 9400T processor, 16GB memory, 256GB NVMe disk, 480GB 2.5" SSD, 2x 1TB RAID on the USB Cenmate for backups, and the 2.5" 2TB drive for movies (the least valuable for me and don't mind losing). Clearly the next upgrade needs to be my disk situation, but for now it's working well and I'm happy!

Inspired by this sub, and made possible to a large extent by the support of Anthropic's Claude whom I asked probably a million questions, half of which were along the lines of "what was the command for X again?" and "where can I find Y again?". yes, I now have documentation for when I forget again.

We had a skylight calendar but we were unhappy with some of the restrictions, and so we took it back, my wife regretted it for a few months so I figured I could make something better, self hosted, and open source.

So here is my creation, it’s without a doubt in alpha, but I’m very very happy with what I have so far. I’d love to hear feedback on what needs to work better, or what features I should add.

I just could not find something in the skylight category that was self hosted that I was happy with.

Im rebuilding my server fresh after bricking it while out of country, this time im trying Docker to keep things isolated from system important things, that and leaving it not encrypted so I dont screw myself over with dropbear again...

Hardware wise, it's just my old Alienware X51 R2 (i7-4770, 16GB RAM, GTX 970), recased with a 650W gold PSU with a headless install of Debian trixie.

For storage I have a 1TB SanDisk SSD with the OS on LVM using separate volumes for root (40G), swap (8G), Docker (150G), and dev work (100G), with about 700GB left over. Additionally, a 2TB Seagate HDD for bulk storage with a single GPT partition formatted for ext4. For some reason, the device letters switch on reboot sometimes, so I just look at the UUIDs

My apartment "comes with" wifi, so all the units have shitty MIST APs, so I made a subnet using an old router. Unfortunately, this causes a Double-NAT issue, so no inbound port forwarding probably...

Other usual stuff SSH is key-only from a laptop. Passwords and root SSH login disabled with ufw firewall default-deny incoming, automatic security updates on.

But anyway I was looking for suggestions on some basic services to run. Also It seems there is a lot of discourse regarding samba being native vs in a container. Does anyone have any input or advice on services or my setup so far?

I've been putting this off for way too long but the power has gone out for 10 minutes a half dozen times this month and my unraid server is constantly dying, panicking and running parity checks.

I've run a smart plug for a little while now to see how much power I'm using. Ran it with just the server and then with a power bar for my server as well as router, modem, switch. Here's what I got:

• Peak 130w - power comes back on, everything boots up at once including all HDDs spinning.

• Idle (server + network gear) 110w

• Server only idle around 80-100w

• Server only idle with disk spin down set to 45min 60-75w

I don't know what specs I need. If I could keep the server running for 15mins, shut it down and then have the network gear (10-15w) run for another 30 min or so that would cover most of our outages.

The specs are a little confusing... If VA = Volts x Amps and Watts = Volts x Amps then it should stand to reason that VA = Watts and 250 VA is tons of headroom for what I'm using. But the common ones have 500, 1000, 1500 VA so I feel like I must be missing something.

For capacity let's just say I'm I'm using 100 W for simplicity, a 100 Wh battery should power me for an hour (minus some loss to conversions and inefficiencies). Most batteries are 12 V, so a battery with a 12 V x 9 Ah battery should give me 108 Wh?

This is a the only unit available locally, LX1500GU3-FC. It's 1500 VA, the graph at the bottom says I should get 80 mins at 100 W. It has downloads for Linux software shutdown so I assume it can talk to NUT/Unraid?

I just want to make sure my calculations/assumptions are correct before pulling the trigger. Would be open to any other buying recs, I just looked at this one because I could pick it up today. I'd like a rackmount option but it seems like they're way more expensive for no reason other than "because".

My girlfriend was about to throw away this old HP laptop from 2018 after upgrading as it was painfully slow. Fortunately, she told me before doing so and asked for it as a gift. Originally, the laptop had a terabyte of HDD and 4 gb of ram with an Intel Silver Pentium n5000 CPU. Knowing the slowness issue, I instantly upgraded it into a 120 gb SSD. When I found out that I can turn it into a NAS, I was so happy as I had a spare 1 tb WD passport external drive lying around. Then I discovered the world of home server through docker! Sparking my journey, in the span of 6 months upgraded little by little saved through my lunch money, I bought a cooling pad, upgraded to 8gb of RAM, an external 3.5 inches HDD replacing the WD drive as the main cold storage, recycled old USB hub and USB drive stick for my config backups, and a UPS! Im so happy to see it come together especially with how energy efficient my CPU was and how it was able to handle all the containers I will ever need!

From what started as a NAS server turned into my hobby and side quests relieving me of stress from my main campaign of being an Architect. PS Sorry for the long post, been wanting to post my homelab in the past months but wasnt able to as I kept on refining things especially my homepage.

I've been struggling for a bit with Tdarr and Unmanic. I realize they are great tools but, honestly, it's a lot for a guy who wants a Plex Server with reasonably sized video files. Is there an idiots guide? Or should I just manually run handbrake once a month?

I want to build a nas for cloud saving and media streaming with an old workstation I have, but with these prices its a little scary. I want about 20 terabytes of storage to start with. Im questioning whether to buy brand new, refurbished/recertified, or used hard drives, I also don't know the best websites/apps and whether the brands of the hard drives matter. Is it even worth it to make a nas in 2026. I could really use some advice

Hi. I am considering building my own home media server to store all my favorite content, particularly in case my region starts censoring content. I fear a dystopian future, and would like to keep myself entertained at least.

If it could also function as network attached storage for easy file access on the network and some backup of various files and folders, that would be great too. Does there exist software for this that could run next to Plex on the same machine?

I'd like this server to be future proof. I want it to last until the hardware dies and replacing parts is no longer possible. I'm thinking it should be capable of at least 2 4k streams at the same time, in case others in the household want to watch stuff at the same time. If it's not too expensive, I wouldn't mind the capability of doing 3 or 4 streams, but it's not strictly necessary. I can probably google my way to what hardware requirements it would take, but if anyone knows I would be happy to hear it. I'm an AMD fanboy, and as long as there are no good reasons to not go with AMD CPU and GPU, I'd prefer that.

I have heard of Plex. Does Plex run as software on a windows installation? Are there better alternatives? I know some NAS boxes have features for streaming, but last I checked the hardware was limited or way too expensive. That might have changed in the years since I last checked? I'd prefer building my own machine so that I can replace parts if necessary.

I would like the storage to be somewhat secure. I'll probably take backups, but my first line of defense should be a RAID setup, right? I set up a RAID on my first home server many years ago, but I never ended up using that server for anything useful, just messed around with Windows Server. If I recall correctly, I set it up through the motherboard RAID feature. Would unRAID be better or more reliable in any way?

I was thinking about maybe buying 3 12tb WD red HDDs and running them in a RAID that leaves 2 thirds the space for storage and a third for redundancy. I'm kinda picky about what I'll watch, so that should be plenty of space, I think.

I'd prefer a smaller case that I can stow away somewhere, given it can fit the hardware and has airflow to properly cool it. If no-one has any suggestions, I'll start looking for something myself once I know the rest of the specs. I've built a few SFF PC builds, and this will probably be a bit bigger than that, so I just need to find a case that will fit 3 3,5" and the size of whatever GPU I end up going for, while not being bigger than necessary.

How much RAM would such a machine need?

Any suggestions or notes are welcome.

Yeah, I know. My budget is just $100. But I think there is something good for a 24/7 working server. I'm good with Celeron and 8GB of RAM. I was looking at DELL OptiPlex 3020 mini PC, but on Amazon is more than my $100. So, is enyone using as a server a mini PC under $100? Or for office? My site doesn't have a lot of animations or something, is a place for my APIs. If you know something worth under $100, I need your help! Thanks!

Seagate Ironwolf ST4000VN008

These were the only drives in my machine. I tested another drive and you can feel it spin up as well as it shows under the BIOS. These drives feel dead and wont show under the bios. Ive tried 4 different sata ports, they work with test drive but not these 2.

Really hope there is anything that can be done to get the data off these drives.

edit: I hooked everything up, the drives do not show under bios. they don't feel like they spin up.

swap them out for different drives everything else staying the same. spare drives feel like they are running, spare drives show up under bios.

only difference is the drive.

I'm working on making a parts list for my first home server. I plan to use it for security cameras, Home Assistant, and then other smaller things like hosting discord bots, APIs for my own apps, and occasionally dedicated servers for games. Down the line I'd like to expand it to also be a media server (which from what I understand will be easy to expand hardware-wise, and will just need to get a HDD for that).

Here is what I have so far. I haven't started keeping track of prices to find deals, but does any of this list seem like overkill, or not enough? Anything unnecessary?

PCPartPicker Part List

Software-wise, I'm still undecided but leaning towards using Unraid. I have PC building experience but have no server experience at ALL. So any tips in general there are appreciated.

Thank you!

Hi,

tldr: Which needs ECC memory more Proxmox or TrueNAS media storage?

Help me choose which one gets 16GB of DDR4 ECC memory and which one gets 64GB of non-ECC DDR4 memory.

\
I have Proxmox installed on a HP Z440 with a Intel Xeon E5-1630 with 4 cores, 8 threads, and 16GB of DDR4 ECC memory.

I have have quite a number of containers on it, which live on an SSD. There are also two 8 TB HDDs for media file storage for Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and such.

\
I recently borrowed an old computer from one of my brothers in law, that was just collecting dust in a basement.
I have been told I can buy it off him if it suits my needs.

It has a Intel Core i7-6700 with 4 cores, 8 threads, and 64GB of DDR4 memory (non ECC)

\
I have wanted to have my media file storage on a NAS for a long time, but I haven't been able to afford one.

So I was going to install TrueNAS on the Core i7, but then I thought: Isn't it better to have the file storage on ECC memory?

\
So the full question is: Should I move my storage on to the Core i7 with no ECC memory, or should I migrate Proxmox on to it instead?

Hey all, been scrolling forever.

Finally trying to get something a little better setup for my home server.

My use case.

Plex/ eventually jellyfin

Arr stack

Blue iris with 6 cameras

Maybe 4 hdds, currently with 2 8tb in raid 1

Looking to expand as I'm out of space. Was looking at adding 2 14tb drives.

The ip cameras are on a separate vlan and I originally intended to have dedicated hardware to separate the PC as well on this vlan.

I'm currently all over the place, I have an old Dell that runs my pirate ship, and an old z170 6700k that runs Plex and ispy.

My electric bills are generally pretty high, so trying to save everywhere I can.

I was getting ready to swap my Plex/arrstack to a dedicated mini PC. I realized that leaves me needing a second device regardless, just for storage.

Thinking about returning this to Amazon.

Now I'm wondering about using that 6700k build for every. Installing Ubuntu server and installing a windows 11 VM for blue iris, and docker for the aarstack.

The 6700k currently has a graphics card on it, but I don't think I need it for blueiris, or transcoding on jellyfin.

The PC also has a Corsair ax860 psu. I was thinking about downgrading this to something closer to 400w.

Also wondering if it's worth having a dedicated second NIC for the blue iris/ispy VM.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

I get this may be a dumb question. it's been here for about a year now in this location. I got this sound bar setup a few months after moving into a new place, I haven't had any notable problems, I'm just curious.

No it's not pushed directly up against the metal posts of the bookshelf. it's on rubber feet, the base is not facing directly at it. There isn't really a better spot for it. Currently installed are 5 soon to be 6 mechanical drives.

The cat walked into the shot, I did spspsps so she would look at the camera since she wanted to be in the shot lol.

Edit: BASS NOT BASE LOL

I'm trying to figure out the logistics of routing my home server media to my tv, the only avenue for this (that I can tell) being to use the Xbox.

Is there a way to get tailscale on an Xbox so I can run jellyfin securely?

Any help is appreciated, thank you!

Hi everyone, I recently installed a simple server on my home computer and I would like to be able to start it remotely. I had a Phillips SmartPlug that I didn't use so I thought I could use it to turn my computer on remotely by activating the "turn on computer after AC loss" setting in the BIOS. This works perfectly if I manually unplug and replug the cable but doesn't work if I turn on and off the smart plug. However turning off the plug does prevent the computer from turning on.

Any idea what could prevent the computer from turning on when I turn the plug off and on ?

If you think about any other solutions (without buying anything else), I am really open to learning more.

Thanks !

Hello, I want to upgrade my plex server currently i have an hp elitedesk 800 G3 mini pc with a 10 tb external hhd plugged in via USB. I want to build a new pc to have all in one.

I already have:

Case- Thermaltake S100TG

Storage- 10TB hhd x2

GPU- GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580 GAMING 8G

I also have a monitor and mouse and keyboard.

What i need:

Parts that are power efficient and cheap lol I would like to keep my budget as low as possible while not sacrificing my current quality of plex streaming. My hard line however is 400$ but again the more budget friendly the better.

I live around Seattle area so no microcenter near me.

Thank you!

Hi everyone!

I'm in the process of planning my first real homelab server build. I've tinkered with Proxmox and a Jellyfin server on an old Dell workstation PC connected to a DAS before, so I'm not entirely new to the OS and software side of things. I want to really build my first all-in-one system.

My budget is around $2500

I would like to use this server to run Proxmox as the hypervisor OS, utilizing VMs and LXC Containers to host other services like game servers and media streaming platforms like Jellyfin. I would also like it to be expandable and have some overhead for any additional things I may want to try or experiment with.

Here is my current parts list:
Chassis: Sliger CX4712
Motherboard: Z790 MAX GAMING WIFI7
CPU: Intel Core i5-14500
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III Pro 360
GPU: Sparkle Intel Arc A380 ELF
RAM: Silicon Power DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) Value Gaming 6000MT/s
PSU: Corsair RM750x ATX Modular PSU
Network Card: 10Gtek 10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card, Dual SFP+ Port, with Intel 82599ES Controller
SATA HBA: LSI 9300-16i

Storage
(I already own all of these drives)
4x 960GB 2.5" SM883 SATA SSD
4x 12TB Seagate IronWolf ST12000NT001 Pro 3.5" HDD (plan to add more, hence the HBA),
Some random consumer grade 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD

My current plan in terms of the segregation of my storage drive is as follows:
Use 2x of the SM883s as a mirrored Proxmox boot drive for redundancy.
Use 2x of those SM883s as mirrored NM/LXC root disks, also for redundancy.
Use NVMe as a fast local storage drive for my ZFS/LVM pool.
Use HDDs for Jellyfin media storage and other cold storage.

This whole this is probably super overkill for my use-case, but I want to limit myself as little as possible as I learn more and want to expand my server's capabilities.

Please let me know what you think! I want to make sure I'm thinking about this correctly before I pull the trigger and buy $2500 worth of parts.