EDIT: Thank you for all the comments and suggestions! I’m sorry I can’t reply to everything but I have a list now of hardware to look at. I appreciate that everyone has been so helpful! I’ll post an update once I buy one and get it going.
I’ve been running a Plex server for music off my gaming laptop for a few months and (I think) I’m ready to take it further - that is, I’d like to have the server running on its own hardware.
At this point, I’d just be running a music server, but I know I’ll want to add more services.
The first would be something like Google Drive - I’m working with a couple of other people on business plans and I’d love to self-host our files and the software (like LibreOffice) to edit them.
I’m comfortable with the software side and I’m finding lots of options, especially in this community.
The hardware side… I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and I don’t know enough to judge the search results.
Any recommendations for hardware or links to guides would be appreciated.
If you have a spare laptop/phone, I’d find a good tutorial and start there and then venture towards new hardware as your needs require it. Personally, I bought a (used) laptop when my main laptop wouldn’t boot, but then I wiped my malfunctioning laptop and it started working again. I’ve been using the used laptop as a server ever since.
Personally, I have yet to find something that I couldn’t self-host on the laptop and still don’t quite grasp why I’d need a heavier-powered device.
That’s what I’m also doing – using a junk old laptop as NAS and it’s been pretty great so far. What would you recommend for expanding the storage of it? It has a SATA 2.5" port and I believe an nvme SSD slot. From past experience, the bigger 2.5" HDDs are slow and have a high failure rate. Maybe it’s just time to ditch the old laptop.
If you are concerned about HDDs failing, I would try the nvme instead. For me, I have a 1tb external HDD connected to my server-laptop. It’s definitely an eye-sore but my server is basically on the shelf out of the way and I SSH into the server 99% of the time unless it goes down.
The HDD is not blazingly fast by any means, but I stream jellyfin videos which is great. There is maybe a 1-2 second pause before a movie starts, but there are no noticeable buffering after, even @ 1.75 speed