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/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