I use an older HP thin client PC with a 4TB solid state drive as an SFTP file server using vsftpd, but if you are local only then an SMB server using samba would probably be fine. I use SFTP because I wanted something a bit more secure which I can port-forward with my router on a random higher-numbered port for remote access.

I mostly taught myself how to do this by looking at guides originally meant for the raspberry pi, but there is nothing different about running these same programs on Debian or the like. Personally, I would not recommend a raspbery pi for a large file server, as they do not natively support SSDs without additional hardware which will make the price significantly higher and less self-contained than a used, older-gen thin-client PC which can be had for relatively low cost on places like ebay (though they do make some fairly high capacity micro SD cards these days).

Hardware-wise, generally these types of servers are not CPU intensive, nor do they require any particularly high amount of RAM, so an older-gen or lower power CPU can often work fine, but you should probably make sure to get something with at least gigabit ethernet speeds, as a 100Mbit connection on, say, a raspberry pi 3 or older will be very slow for transferring large files.

For a long time, I used a Raspberry Pi running stock standard Raspbian with an external USB drive connected. I just Googled around how to set up a Samba file share, and that’s all I used. Didn’t really see the value in any media-specific software, myself. For me that was secondary to the LAMP stack web server, anyway.

Biggest thing I would recommend is making sure you have, from day one, a full backup of your data and any configuration necessary to read the data.

If you’re thinking about wanting access away from your home network, my recommendation would be to do it by also setting up a VPN and connecting to your local network, rather than something that is directly exposed to the Internet. That is, unless you want to be able to share files with other people at ease.

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).

Ok, a lot of open questions still:

• Are you looking for hardware recommendations, or software, or both?
• What is your budget range? Tens, hundreds, thousands of dollars?
• Do you want a straightforward solution that will just do what you want right now, or do you want a long-term platform that can grow and adapt with you?
• How much space do you have - does the server need to be compact?
• Will it be in your bedroom - does it need to be quiet?
• Are you just looking to store the files, or also stream them from the server to endpoints?

If all you need is a place off of your computer to act as a file server, you can get there very easily by plugging a USB drive into a capable consumer-grade router and configuring it to provide NAS service. This cheapass WAVLINK can do that.

For those who have home servers set up with similar purposes, how did you arrive at your current set-up?

It started with networking. When you start trying to expand your home computing capabilities, at some point you will find that a basic consumer wifi router is too limiting. When that happens, I recommend looking at Ubiquiti Edge networking devices.

What considerations should i take before, during, and after set-up?

If you’re ready to build a proper server, then first start with a change of perspective. Stop thinking of your personal computer as your main computer, and start thinking of it as a peripheral end-user device on your home network. Treat its local data storage as unreliable, temporary, disposable. Its computing power is important for usability, but its storage drives are expected to fail.

The server is your data’s true home now. It’s not just a place that you save files, it’s a data tank. Anything important on your end-user systems should be automatically synced to it. The server should be up all the time, reliable, stable, and built for redundancy. The drives in the server are consumables. Every drive must have at least one backup. The power supply should have a backup too.

To accomplish this you get used enterprise hardware, something like this Dell PowerEdge T410. This has 6 3.5" HDD bays on a backplane with a hardware RAID controller. It has two CPU sockets, so you can add a second processor when your workload increases or if you get into running VMs. It has lots of space to expand the RAM as needed (up to 128GB). It has redundant PSUs. It has a dual NIC (trust me this will be useful later).

Install either TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox VE - either is a good base for home server applications, either can be used for NAS and VM host purposes. Some people like Proxmox as the primary OS with TrueNAS as a hosted VM to manage the data storage.

This platform will be long-term stable, and expandable. There are a lot more considerations, but you won’t really know what you want or need until you start building something. It’s best to buy something that can grow with you.

Also consider getting a basic UPS - this particular one can be connected to TrueNAS so that if the UPS detects a power outage, it will tell the server to gracefully shutdown.

Backups, and backups for the backups. Redundancy is reliability. Build for reliability before you think you need it.

Resources for learning & support:

• Professor Messer’s Network+ training (start with the OSI model)
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

First you do what you, reading, learning. Then you start building stuff, repurposing old hardware.

Then you find that something breaks, the old fan in that old system quits, that linux version does something horrible to its ext filesystem because you made a configuration error. And then you look at the 100+wh it uses, 24/7.

That’s the moment I just bought a qnap which fitted my budget. (or synology or asustor)

And these run, in your use case, for decades.

The end.

Ps: dont forget a backup solution.

Edit edit edit: decades? Yes, decades. I’ve a TS-210 to prove it. Still churning along as a backup target. I’ve never had a qnap die on me, except one time, an external ac/dc power supply died.

Edit edit edit edit: muh security! Qnap, synology, asustor bad! Yeah yeah. Don’t use the (qnap) cloud services. They are neat though and quite safe. As long as you keep thinking for yourself.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3b (I think) that handles Nextcloud just fine. It currently has an old 500 GB hard drive, but I’m about to upgrade to a 3TB. It isn’t configured for external access, but as I recall setting up the ports and domain seemed relatively trivial.

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.

The safe way would be to buy an existing NAS solution, such as a Synology DS423+, don’t forget that you want to buy at least one USB Drive that the NAS can put backups on if the data is valuable and/or unique to you (can’t redownload the photos from Vacation Summer 2024) and you want to run your NAS disks redundantly (mirrored in some way, f.e. RAID10).

If you want to expand your home lab services and the NAS can’t handle the cpu/ram requirements you can still often use the NAS as a bind mount and keep it as your storage location even when you add a second computer that runs the actual services. This is the way many traditional data centres work, with Compute and Storage separated into different hardware.

Personally I run everything virtualized in a Debian kvm/qemu server, including my gaming fedora vm with vfio gpu passthrough. For me it was a lot of fun learning to setup vfio passthrough and the like but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you do it because you’re curious and doing it that way has a value in itself.
There’s a lot of packaged hypervisor solutions, such as Proxmox, that makes it easier to get started with virtualization right away and already have builtin backup solutions and so on.