I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that’s off the table. I’ll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
The minimum spec is whatever e-waste you can find that still powers on.
My home server has an i3-4160, 10 gigabytes of mis-matched RAM, a ten-year-old 240 GB SSD with 36000 hours on it, and three 1 TB hard drives in a RAID5 array each with ~25000 power-on hours. It runs Proxmox on the metal with a virtualized OPNsense, Nextcloud, and Jellyfin server (plus smaller services). Jank levels are high, but not fatal, and it was mostly free.
Living dangerously
If you are buying I wouldn’t get something older as the newer stuff is the same price often times because it is less well known.
Gotta see some evidence on that claim. Older stuff is more power hungry no doubt about it, but especially old data centre equipment is waaay more reliable and built with some very nice creature comforts.
Check the data sheets for the components. It should have a Average time to failure which will tell you about how long it will last.
It might be fine but I personally wouldn’t rely on ancient drives
oh I wasn’t talking about storage media. I’m talking about rack servers, switches, storage arrays (with new drives), etc., etc… The older hardware can wear out/break (I used to do MTTF/MIL-HDBK-217 calculations for avionics) but generally speaking it’s got a lot of life left in it by the time it hits the surplus market. It’s also usually designed with redundancies/failover mechanisms which means you don’t have to bodge together inferior solutions.
I misunderstood then
Carry on