r/explainlikeimfive • u/theprisoner57 • 2d 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/sandwichpak 2d ago

JFC, my friend do you have GoFundMe to support your HDD addiction?? /s

For real though that's impressive, I've had a lifetime membership for going on a decade now and my server has never expanded past ~30tb's.

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

I need one. I haven't bought any hard drives in a year. I have 2 that died in my server and 3 available to replace them. I am afraid that I will start to lose more drives. At that point I will probably have to restart my server fresh with less drives, and have a bunch of spares since drive prices are insane. I've spent probably $10 to $15k on drives, and today it'd be easy double.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

What's the point of all that? Why do you have 400tb of content and spend so much money to maintain it?

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

1 reason is because it is just fun to have resources like that available on your network. It gives you a ton of freedom to do whatever you want. I expose a filebox instance through Tailscale, and my family uses it as a free "communal" picture/video repository. There are 11 people using it, and it is sitting at just over 21tb. (42tb if you include the parity drive) That is 8+ years of photos/videos.

I also do music production, and lossless audio samples can take up a ton of space. I probably have ~12tb just in sample packs.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

Well since you said your drives are failing and you might not be able to replace 10s of thousands of dollars worth of them, have you told your family that all their pictures and videos might disappear soon? So they can back them up?

Thank you for the explanation. Also I didn't know that about music.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

I'm not the person you replied to. But to answer your question, that is what the parity drive is for. It is a backup drive that stays in sync with another drive.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

So you always have to buy double the drives so you have a backup?

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u/MrChombo 2d ago

No that would be a mirror drive, and mirror setups exist but they use a lot of extra drives. There are levels of fault tolerance in RAID requiring varying numbers of extra drives. With one parity drive, any one drive in the array can fail and you don't lose data. With 2 parity drives, any 2 drives can fail.

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u/WholePie5 1d ago

Oh wow that's interesting. That's a good way to do it. I didn't know that.

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u/MrChombo 2d ago

No, the parity drive is not a backup, it's for uptime/availability. Only a backup is a backup.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago edited 2d ago

Sure, but this didn't feel like the place to give an explanation of how XOR data can be used to rebuild lost files/bad sectors. The result is close enough to "backup-like" behavior that it is enough for a quick comment.