I know literally nothing about home servers/NAS, but with all of the cheap non-Win-11 PCs that should be hitting the curb soon, I think now’s the perfect time to try to grab one on the cheap and give the whole thing a try.
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What should I be looking for in a used PC for this sort of use case? Specs, etc.? I think I’d like to do at least 3 hard drives in some sort of RAID config (whatever that is), but room for more would be welcome.
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Does anyone know where I would be finding these PCs? How would I know what a good price is? Are there centralized websites that sell this sort of used tech, or should I mostly be scouring Facebook Marketplace for local businesses getting rid of stuff on the cheap (in which case I’ll need to know what specs I’m looking for and how to price them reliably)?
(3.) My tech knowledge is at the level of running Linux Mint exclusively for the past year or so, but not even being able to get my Mint computers visible to each other over my local network after a few days of trying. With that said, can anyone point me to a super basic tutorial (like, idiot-level) for how to set up a NAS/home server, how to set up containers on it (whatever those are), how to set up a RAID array on it, how to get Jellyfin/Radarr/Sonarr, etc. working on it, and how to make sure that it’s visible on my network? I realize that this is a huge question that’s somewhat orthogonal to my main point for this post, and that there may not be exactly the resource I’m looking for, but I thought I’d ask anyway.
Thanks!
If you can boot an os from usb (basically the same for all distros) you can try proxmox.
There are these incredibly useful helper scripts that setup entire services in 1-2 copy pasted commands.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/
To explain what proxmox is its basicly virtualisation software, it can run vms but also lxc (light linux containers) and share resources very efficiently between all of them
Jellyfin, radarr, sonar. They are all included in the helper scripts, each will be a dedicated lxc.
Its also very easy to setup raid and there own storage format is very efficient.
Its well documented to the point that any decent llm can help you learn whatever you need. In fact its claude that helped me setup my own proper raid on proxmox, also tought me about datasets and how i can make those available to different lxc
Personally i am very hands off with my server, the hardest part is often choosing what ip i want to give a service, i rarely update or mess with it if not strictly necessary.
For hardware i recommend plenty of ram (can Be bought and installed seperatly), more cores is usually better and internal graphics can save you some hassle depending on what you are doing (also allows you to dedicate a Big gpu to some services).
A warning on second hand corporate machines, the performance is often good But quite fans are often an afterthought. I onxe got a beast of machine for free but you could hear it spin from anywhere in my house.
A good practical case is always a blessing when you need to check the insides.
This is amazing info - thanks so much! I’ll probably end up putting the server in the basement, so sound hopefully won’t be much of an issue.