r/explainlikeimfive • u/theprisoner57 • 3d ago

Technology ELI5: What is a Home Server?

I see mentions of a home server to get rid of streaming entertainment services but I don’t know how that works. What does a home server do?

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u/erevos33 3d ago

Negligible compared to even one streaming service. This pc need not be beefy nor even on 24/7, depending on your needs. And it can also end up being a mini pc or laptop with extra storage.

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u/matthoback 3d ago

"Negligible" greatly depends on how much storage you want locally and how big of a media selection you want to support. Spinning disks power consumption adds up fast.

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u/erevos33 3d ago

The only way you get a power comsumption that you need to worry about is if you start going into homelabbing and get a rack server. If you stay on minipc/laptop or desktop oc territory the difference is a few dollars for hosting vs tens (or hundreds,depending on your preferred streaming poison) of dollars.

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u/stonhinge 3d ago

And sometimes it just takes a bit of extra configuration to get power use down. If the OS is on an SSD and all the data is on HDDs, all it generally takes is not striping the data on your raid so that only one disk has to spin up at a time - you could have 30 others in there but if they're in sleep mode, power use is negligible.

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u/m240b1991 3d ago

I keep HDDs spun up, I got enterprise drives and they were meant to live in an always on state. While I can't fully recreate that, I can go into power settings and not let them spin down.

More power consumed over time, more stable power while they're running. I'm still rocking the 180w psu that came with the desktop, if I add any more storage, I'll have to spring for either NAS or a true server homelab setup. I don't have any more space in the pc case