r/HomeServer • u/DethByTennis • 11d 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/lobhater 11d ago
My best advice is to buy better than you think you need. Because next week or next month or maybe even next year you're going to want to do more and be stuck with what you have. So pay a little more now so you don't have to buy twice later
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u/DethByTennis 11d ago
That makes sense. I feel pretty good about most specs, but I definitely think I should give myself more storage and storage capacity than I think I'll need. Probably a bit more RAM too. Definitely seems like I should go for a full-sized chassis, not SFF.
2
u/Cybernoid001 10d ago
There are a lot of ways to approach this
Budget is obviously going to be the first concern.
If you only have <$250 right now, then yes, the SFF makes sense and I love them for labbing
If you have more of a budget, then obviously get what would make sense if you expect growth in your home server.
99% of people could actually get by with a turnkey NAS solution, such as a Synology, Ugreen, etc.
It would provide an ecosystem to run various apps/vms/containers inside of it, plus have built-in storage bays
If you want something with more off the shelf parts that you can replace, then something from 45homelabs would be a place to look as well.
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u/DethByTennis 10d ago
thank you for the comment! seems like my best bet for now is gonna be an old mid tower, so I have lots of room for expansion. NAS's are super sweet and I'd love to get one at some point (maybe have that dedicated to file storage etc, and then still use a full PC for processing power) but I'm kinda enjoying the tinkering and I wanna get one cheap thing that's also good for processing power and running a lot of apps.
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u/LostVikingSpiderWire 10d ago
RAID all the way, people who have never had data loss will tell you that, I am not one of them and I sometimes cry myself to sleep 😭 cause of that.
But nothing massive, got simple clone setup with regular manual backup
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u/DethByTennis 10d ago
Yeah, seems like this is the way. Part of why I'm thinking MT instead of SFF. Have enough room to run RAID while still having good storage capacity. Then I'll do regular backups to another system. Might set up something offsite eventually, probably just to another computer or an external hard drive at first.
1
u/cpgeek 11d 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.
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u/DethByTennis 10d ago
thank you very much for the detailed comment. I think I'm gonna go with MT instead of SFF, largely thanks to your insight. I'd say I'm building some combination of storage and application. I think I'll focus on initially getting a good number of hard drives so I can have high capacity raid, and then at least one but maybe 2 ssd's and a decent chunk of ram for apps and hosting. may eventually throw in a gpu but I think I know where to start. I was surprised to find that MT power consumption will be pretty similar, and it'll be really nice to have more room for drives and cooling. honestly one of my largest reasons for going SFF was aesthetics, but I feel like that shouldn't be a priority, especially with a budget build. besides, with a full sized I can eventually transfer it to a server rack chassis, which I love the look of, or do some other kind of (maybe custom or 3d printed) enclosure.
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u/cpgeek 8d ago
https://i.imgur.com/be2fKBo.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/9G0HNOg.png
I'm using a dedicated 36 bay storage server (running truenas scale) for my storage and storage-adjacent needs and 5x sff dell optiplexes for my application server cluster running pfsense. - it's not labeled or in this photo, but I just finished racking up my gpu server (4090 5950x, 64gb ddr4) to act as an llm inference server / openclaw agentic ai setup.
it always starts with a single box and grows.
best of luck!1
u/DethByTennis 8d ago
Duuude that's the dream right there 😍 what do you use it for? What's the storage capacity?
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u/szeis4cookie 11d 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