Hardware considerations

You can make a home server out of any old bits and pieces you have lying around, but that doesn’t mean you should. At least not as regards old disk drives and power supplies— these things have a habit of failing as soon as you start relying on them, and we would rather our server be reliable.

In terms of processing power, a dual-core chip from the last decade will suffice for most things you might want your server to do: host files, print and run web services. However, if you plan to use it for streaming movies around the house (e.g. with Emby), something more powerful (like a recent Core i5) will be better— on the fly video transcoding is quite an onerous chore for older CPUs. Memory (at least DDR3 memory) is cheap nowadays and 4GB will be more than enough for most purposes. You can get away with much less, but it’s better to have more. Integrated graphics (such as are found in all modern Intel chips and AMD APUs) or the cheapest of GPU cards will be fine. Once the OS is installed we won’t even need the monitor, or mouse or keyboard. We’ll want a large hard drive for storing data. We’ll put the operating system and data on separate partitions. Really they should be on separate drives too, and we’d encourage readers to invest extra money in another drive (a small SSD would be a good suggestion) to make this possible.