The rule of thumb with servers is

• Performance
• Reliability
• Power usage
• Noise
• Size

The trick is to remember you don't actually need much performance. A home server isn't generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It's power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn't an issue for most pi usages. When it's running your smart home, it's a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It's a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It's also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

I wouldn't get something that old. Get a workstation or small form factor machine that is 3-10 years old.

How expensive is your kWh? What about noise? What about cooling in summer? Your SAS drives will fail, so make sure you have spares.

I personally would look into suitable used Lenovo TinyPCs and a passively cooled switch to cluster them. Consider your nodes expendable. Cluster storage at node scale rather than RAID.

You have to think about the extra costs, like power use , loudness etc. I have no idea what your server would be like, but it's something to think about. FWIW, i reused my old desktop (it's pretty beefy) into a server, but i run a pi now, because it was costing me a fair bit to run in power usage.

I'd definitely skip this in favor of something consumer-grade. You can find used Dell Optiplexes all over the place cheap and stick a large drive inside/outside of it and use it for a couple of years.

A big old server is just going to drain your wallet on both power and parts with equal or worse performance and a lot more complexity for what 99% of home users will use it for.

It sounds like your main goal is probably a media server and an Optiplex will give you an i5 or i7 with QuickSync which works excellent for processing video. RAID isnt really necessary here because you can just download more Linux ISOs if these one are lost, though it can be great later if you buy a bunch more drives and expand into other areas where data is less replaceable.

Can't say on access behind CG-NAT, as I haven't ever dealt with it, but Tailscale might work as a free third-party option though that's just a guess.

Also, what can I expect concerning RAID? That is definitely the most concerning thing for me, as I’ve never worked with it.

Generally speaking it's recommended these days to use a software RAID rather than relying on hardware. If anything happens to that RAID controller you will need to replace it with a duplicate in order to mount your drives. Software RAID is controlled by the Linux OS and would be much easier to recover. There used to be a bit of a performance penalty for a software RAID but these days it's negligible.

I have an x3500m4 but found it using way too much energy for my requirements. A regular pc does the job for less than 25% of the electricity.

So, i'd say check your needs and the footprint. Electricity bill comes every month and something runnin 24/7 adds up real quick.

Servers are just expensive hardware. You can accomplish 95% with a consumer grade desktop without all the extra power/heat/noise and dependencies on specific hardware.

I don't know exactly what you want host but I have an old Fujitsu Q920 i5 with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD drive which cost me around 200 Euro.

I'm serving around 20 services on it including Nextcloud, Navidrome, Paperless NG, Emby, Matrix, Friendica, Wireguard, Zabbix, DNS blocker and a few VMs. Processor utilization is around 5% most of the time and it uses about 8 GB of RAM.

I admit that Nextcloud could be more responsive and faster but for the family it is enough.

I haven't exactly checked how much electricity I'm using but I would have noticed a bigger change on my bill.

For backups I have a remote node at another location that retrieves ZFS snapshots periodically.

Anyway. I have this setup for 2 years now and I'm happy. It does what I expect it to do.

As a side note. i use FreeBSD with jails and bhyve for this. A Proxmox running VMs with nested Docker apps may need something more performant so be aware.

Regarding CGNAT and Port Forwarding: I too am behind CGNAT with my ISP, and my solution to this is renting a cheap VPS (I use Contabo, others might have different recommendations) and installing Pangolin. It's a tunneling software that uses some UDP fuckery to hole-punch straight through the network with their Newt tunnels. I use this so my friends and family can access my Plex and Overseerr requests.

Used/refurb SAS drives aren't that expensive. Can someone with better memory than I please link to that site for second hand server components?

The reason why SAS drives are usually more expensive isn't because the tech itself is more expensive (It's largelt just a different kind of interface), but rather that "enterprise grade" hardware have a few additional Q&A steps, such as running a break-in cycle at the factory to weed out defective units.

While a server such as the one you described is slightly power hungry, it's not that bad. Plus, if you wanna get into servers long term, it could serve as a useful way to get used to the hardware involved.
Server hardware is at its core not that different from consumer hardware, but it does often come with some nice and useful additions, such as:

• Botswana drive bays (I tried to write "hotswap", but autocorrect is probably correct.
• IPMI/iDRAC or equivalent for headless management
• Dual PSUs
• Rack mount capability
• Easy maintenance access to most hardware
• A ridiculous amount of sensors with automated warnings.

RAID is entirely optional. I seem to be the only one in here who actually like hardware RAID, as software RAID is more popular in the self hosting community. Using it is entirely optional and depends on your use case, though. If you wanna live without, use JBOD mode, and access each drive normally. Alternatively, pool as many disks as you want into RAID6 and you have one large storage device with built-in redundancy. RAIDs can either be managed from the BIOS, or from the OS using tools such as storcli.

Released in 2012 (Product Spec). It certainly has potential, but as you say, it will consume more power than something more modern. There are things you can do to tame the beast. You might even adopt something that I've been doing, and that is shutting down the server before I retire for the evening. I am the only user, so it's just sitting there eating up electricity while I sleep. I also have no midnight, mass Linux ISOs downloading, so there's that. Good news tho, RAM will be pretty cheap.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #101 for this comm, first seen 17th Feb 2026, 20:41] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]