Good day people!
(This paragraph is fluff, feel free to skip) First I’d like to thanks everyone who has answered my questions thus far. A of now I’m daily driving CachyOS on my “laptop” and Bazzite on my gaming PC. I’ve settled on Hyprland after running with sway for a few days and have been forcing myself to solve problems and do file management using the CLI exclusively (excluding firefox for duckduckgoosing help). I’ve gotten semi-comfortable manipulating files, but haven’t had to do anything too skill intensive yet.
On to the question! I am currently looking to set up a home server. My use case is for storing media, specifically videos (for watching) and game Roms (for playing older games on emulator). With this use case in mind, what’s a good resource to learn how to get started? For those who have home servers set up with similar purposes, how did you arrive at your current set-up? What considerations should i take before, during, and after set-up?
Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Thank in advance! Hope to hear from you all soon!
Retro ROMs are usually small. Videos can get quite large though, on the order of ~100GB per movie if you are storing 4K Blurays.
I personally bought a couple > 20TB HDDs off of serverpartdeals.com and installed them in my gaming PC so now it also functions as a small NAS. Because it’s only on when I’m using the PC, the electric bill is not too bad. But it’s worth doing the math to see what your average kW/hour usage is. Wattage monitors are pretty cheap.
If you specifically want a lower-power NAS in a separate machine, this will require a bit more research, and they can get pricey. I highly recommend using ZFS though.
If you’re OK using a cheap, low-power mini PC as a home server and/or gateway, I can recommend the BeeLink EQ12. Mine is currently running 24/7 attached to a Hasivo 2.5Gb switch with PoE powering my WiFi AP.
There are also options for connecting large external HDDs to a mini PC, but you would be compromising throughout via some SATA adapter.