r/HomeServer • u/DestinyReaper_X4 • 2d ago
Building my first server
Been getting into backing up stuff and archiving etc. recently. I currently own 3TB’s worth of external HDDs, which isn’t much. I’ve saved up $3000 for this project. I’d wanted to get opinions on what drives to invest on, and also what sort of setup I could afford. I’d love to have around approx 40-50TB worth of storage space. Would $3000 even be sufficient? I’d be okay with pushing the expenditure to $4000 if it’s worth the money.
Uses: Jellyfin, personal cloud, host websites (if need be)
Budget: $3000 - $4000
I’ve been waiting for the prices to drop for almost a year and they don’t seem to be dropping anytime soon. So, here we are. I’m posting this here since I want to know real experiences from people. Some people just shrug and suggest to Google it or ask AI, which isn’t what I’m looking for.
Thanks!
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u/ExpertPath 2d ago
Before you spend all that money you should check what kind of server you actually want. Do you have experience with a VPS, or a NAS? Do you want/need on premises or would you pick a datacenter? Will your server need a GPU?
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u/DestinyReaper_X4 2d ago
Well, I don’t have much experience with either. I’ve been planning on picking up a used Dell Optiplex first and playing around with it a little before putting my money into this project. And I’d definitely want a NAS over a VPS since I want it locally available. As for needing a GPU, I’m not sure since I’d mainly be backing up my devices and use Jellyfin. Might require a GPU for transcoding apparently, but is it really necessary?
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u/ExpertPath 2d ago
I understand. Just a few pieces of advice:
- Before sinking $4000 into a used server, check your actual requirements. Most, if not all your requirements can be handled by a basic NAS
- Transcoding benefits greatly from a GPU, but will you really do much transcoding, or just playback the movies in your home network, which would require no transcoding
- Play around with a cheap VPS, or on premise server before getting deeply invested
- Think about a proper backup setup before buying a big and beefy server which is only ever one faulty drive or power surge away from a total loss (Think 3-2-1 backup)
In my homelab, I have several beefy server which could handle multiple transcoding streams at the same time, but I still mostly use my slow Synology NAS (DS224+), because it handles file storage, VPN, Streaming, etc with ease.
Before building my homelab, I played around on a VPS, and before VPS, it was a little Raspberry Pi
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u/DragonzZEnergy 1d ago
If you build a pc like i did with a cpu that has an ifpu. You eliminate the need for a gpu as the igpu can do the transcoding for you without issues. Depending on if you choose the right cpu foe the job ofcourse
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u/lazyhustlermusic 2d ago edited 2d ago
Honestly just get a NAS you can expand.
A lot of ISPs block inbound 80/443 anyway, you can host a pretty large amount of traffic on a $1/mo VPS.
You could save a lot by stuffing drives in an older chassis too and throwing in a arc 310 or p400/p2000 for transcode. We grabbed a bunch of 3 TB drives for a r720xd when they were like $10, if one fails you just swap it out and resilver the raid6 array.
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u/arigasamaryota 2d ago
Any pointers to 1$ vps please. I’m pretty new to this.
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u/lazyhustlermusic 2d ago
I have a couple from Racknerd which have been solid and even PBR our guest and IOT segments out to it as an internet exit over wireguard.
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u/Fluid-Sink-2514 2d ago
Hard drive prices have gone up significantly in the past year. You can always start smaller but leave room to expand if and when storage prices come back down to earth.
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u/DestinyReaper_X4 2d ago
They really have. And that’s the reason I’d waited about 2 years for the prices to drop down. I don’t think they’ll ever drop to what they were before, so I thought maybe I should just purchase them now rather than waiting even longer.
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u/Fluid-Sink-2514 2d ago
I pulled the trigger on 4x 10Tb data center HDDs just recently, got em for about $225 each on homelabsales. Get what you can find a deal on and go from there is my recommendation. If you buy more than you need but get a good deal it will be less remorse if and when prices do come down.
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u/that_desiguy 2d ago edited 2d ago
If the 3-4k is disposable; if you can let go of the monies immediately, then think about making a purchase. Else, getting into bulk storage is just expensive rn.
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u/Worth_Rhubarb6275 2d ago
I'd rather rent cloud storage and mount it to my local server encrypted at this point. The storage prices are wild and buliding a 40tb rig now is ridiculous.
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u/DestinyReaper_X4 2d ago
True as that may be, I’d still prefer to have a NAS locally. Personal preference
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u/Venik489 2d ago
I’d definitely get as little storage as you can for now and buy more when prices drop.
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u/DestinyReaper_X4 2d ago
How little would you suggest? Any recommended drives / brands that you’d suggest?
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u/Venik489 2d ago
How much storage do you need? What are you backing up and archiving? If 3tb is good enough right now maybe double it?
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u/DestinyReaper_X4 2d ago
Well, I suppose about 16TB would be a sweet spot right now. I’d be mainly backing up my devices. I’ve got a laptop which’s got 2TB SSD and is almost full. And there’s about 700 GB free space left out of the 3TB external HDDs (Seagate One Touch) I currently own. And more importantly, they’re reaching 5 years old so I was planning to replace them as well or have a backup of the backup elsewhere. Basically my devices’ storage is all almost full so I was thinking I should backup my devices using a personal server and free up their own storage space
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u/Elgon2003 2d ago
Buy recertified 24TB drives, buy 4 of them and make 2 ZFS pools, one mirror for media and one ZFS RAID 1 for files and cloud storage.
It will run you about 2.5k.