Server curiosity

GreasyDiablo88

GreasyDiablo88

GreasyDiablo88

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Joined
10 Aug 2013
Posts
355
Location
Rushden
I'm a complete noob when it comes to servers and I was just wondering if someone could explain to me the benefits of having a home server and how I would go about rigging one up.

Do you have to build them yourself like a custom PC or can you buy pre-built ones??
 
You can buy prebuilt ones, the Microservers are amazing and they come with £100 cashback, I know for buy in price for a reseller is £160 or something similar. It's nice having all your files in one place but you may wish to look at a NAS.
 
Network Attached Storage. Basically it's a low power consuming unit (so your wife wont kill you about a machine running 24/7!) which holds your hard drives so nearly any device on the network can see them. This means you can store your family photos, files, music etc on it and then you can access it from your PC, HTPC, PS3, laptop and so on. Now I'm not to up on the advantages and disadvantages of each but I'm pretty sure it's that a server you can customise a lot more, you can use it for more things other than storage you could run say TeamSpeak or a Minecraft server for instance on it, but also you can run more options of RAID on higher spec RAID cards which you can't do on many NAS'.


e; Personally I'd be looking at a ZyXEL NAS or a HP Microserver. But don't forget you really need hard drives for them both :)
 
Sounds good mate. It's something I definitely want to look into at some point because I do have quite a lot of movies, music, TV shows etc. on my PC and my HDD is filling up quick so it would be nice to have somewhere else to store them so I didn't have to clear them out every so often
 
You can pick up a ZyXEL NAS for like £60 and then put say 2x 2TB hard drives in it and then you've got 4TB of storage at your grabs for £180. A lot of people will probably correct me but meh :p
 
GreasyDiablo88 said:
Are these drives all good to put into it?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=2612
Click to expand...

They'll work however all "NAS" on them means they will in principal last longer and are less likely to fail. If I were in your position I'd just buy any drive that is decent enough with good enough reviews perhaps something like this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-255-SE

And setup two of them to run in RAID 1 which means although you have 2 of the drives, you get the storage of 1, yet you have redundancy so if one drive were to die you've got a backup
 
Hello again :D

Do you want a home server primarily for file storage/sharing? In which case Hyburnate is pretty much spot on with his explanation of what a NAS is etc.

You can also custom build servers in much the same was as a desktop PC, in fact you could use any old desktop computer stuffed with hard drives as a file server if you have one spare and don't mind the extra power it might use. :)

If you wanted to do things like host game servers or VOIP servers as well as file sharing, you would be better off buying/building one system to do it all.
 
Last edited:
acme15 said:
Hello again :D

Do you want a home server primarily for file storage/sharing? In which case Hyburnate is spot on with his explanation of what a NAS is etc.

You can also custom build servers in much the same was as a desktop PC, in fact you could use any old desktop computer stuffed with hard drives as a file server if you have one spare and don't mind the extra power it might use. :)
Click to expand...

This :) But that ZyXEL NSA 320 consumes like 33W during access of hard drives which is awesome. With port-forwarding the ZyXEL NSA 320 can host websites with PHP and MySQL :)
 
GreasyDiablo88 said:
I've gotta save up for it first haha I was gonna get an SSD as my next upgrade but it sounds like a home server would be a lot more beneficial to me
Click to expand...

SSD is a must have upgrade! Do it.

Our server is used for:

Automated back ups of all the desktops/laptops
Media serving
Downloads overnight
Remote access to files when away from home

The one thing I wish it did would be to download then serve windows updates to all the machines connected, but not found a way to do this.
 
Minstadave said:
SSD is a must have upgrade! Do it.

Our server is used for:

Automated back ups of all the desktops/laptops
Media serving
Downloads overnight
Remote access to files when away from home

The one thing I wish it did would be to download then serve windows updates to all the machines connected, but not found a way to do this.
Click to expand...

I'll definitely get round to the SSD at some point but I'm gonna go for the server first. It sounds like it'll be a bigger help to me than an SSD at the moment
 
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