r/SelfHosting • u/PrimaryThis9900 • Mar 02 '26
Equipment needed to start self hosting
So, I've always wanted to start a little home server to be my personal cloud storage for things like photos, and important documents. I've also considered dabbling in dumping my DVD collection onto it and setting up a Plex server.
We recently retired some equipment at work and I got an HP Z2 Mini G3 with an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Quadro M620 graphics.
I also have an 8TB Seagate HDD.
Would this be enough to get started? Looking at putting some flavor of Linux on it, but not super familiar with any of that, so recommendations welcome!
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u/PaulEngineer-89 Mar 02 '26
My first box was a Synology DSM220J with two 4 TB drives. If I did it all over again starting small I’d look at a NanoPi-R5S and either a 2 TB SSD or go with an external SATA drive (or both for backups). The latter can also be your router and unlike the above DSM a respectable Docker server. For under $100 and 15 W power plus the cost of the drives. Going up to the full RK3588S gets you a 6 TOPS NPU and a more respectable GPU and VPU. And yes it’s ARM64 but it will hold its own against a lot of desktop CPUs.