Budget Home Server

Orch · 8 Feb 2016 at 09:57

What's the cheapest way to setup a basic home server/NAS?

All I want to do is move my 2 x 1TB hard drives out of my PC case (making room for water cooling). I then want to stream over the network to XBMC devices, mainly just back to my PC, but some stuff to ipads, tablets etc.

I also want to continue to running coach potato and sonar, but not sure whether I keep those running on the main PC and can tell each program to store files on the network, or whether I would need to run them both actually on the server?

Ideally I would just go and buy a 4 bay synology or something but want to see how cheap I could do it for.

Any advice welcome

drakioned · 8 Feb 2016 at 10:16

HP Microserver

dschroedz · 8 Feb 2016 at 12:45

Synology is probably the best thing for this

Orch · 8 Feb 2016 at 12:56

Started pricing up some bits to build new from cheap parts, but it does look like a second hand HP Microserver or Synology will be the way to go. Will keep an eye on the MM and the bay of evil.

peterwalkley · 8 Feb 2016 at 14:44

Big thread here on the HP microserver if you've not already seen it.

It seems to come up quite often with a cashback offer so if you're not time critical it might be worth holding out.

Don't ask for links there as the sellers are all OC competitors

Orch · 8 Feb 2016 at 15:06

peterwalkley said:
Big thread here on the HP microserver if you've not already seen it.

It seems to come up quite often with a cashback offer so if you're not time critical it might be worth holding out.

Don't ask for links there as the sellers are all OC competitors

Wow, some serious reading there!

Thanks for the thread link, should keep me busy!

implosiveturnip · 8 Feb 2016 at 15:32

I think you can run couchpotato on Freenas 9; should run fine on the Microserver, as long as you don't skimp on RAM.

Orch · 8 Feb 2016 at 16:13

implosiveturnip said:
I think you can run couchpotato on Freenas 9; should run fine on the Microserver, as long as you don't skimp on RAM.

Thanks. After a bit more reading it seems easy enough to run CP and Sonar on the PC and just point sabznbd to storage folders on the server. Would certainly be easier than setting it all up again.