Comments on: Building a Home Server – The Complete Guide

By: jack hick

jack hick — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:08:35 +0000

That mention of the Acer Aspire Revo running a humble Atom 330 to transcode media for a PS3 brings back some serious nostalgia! It’s a great reality check on how easy it is to over-engineer a home server when older desktop parts collecting dust are often more than capable of serving files and streaming video.
In my own homelab experience, I fell into that exact trap early on. I started with a repurposed consumer quad-core chip very similar to that Phenom II build, and for pure media duties, it never skipped a beat. It wasn’t until my workloads expanded from streaming movies into running dense virtualization environments—juggling multiple test databases, game servers, and container stacks—that I actually needed enterprise muscle like a 32-core Xeon running at 2.5GHz with 20GT/s UPI to manage thread scheduling properly. For a dedicated media hub, though, high-end server silicon is totally unnecessary, and reusing old parts is both budget-friendly and rewarding.
Do you still find Windows Server 2012 Essentials holds up well for your storage pool, or have you eventually transitioned the rig over to something like Linux or TrueNAS?

By: Lucian Ilea

Lucian Ilea — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 01:06:00 +0000

There are so many ..unexperienced things with your server build

First of all,you could have bought /rented a cheap VPS from the net
I have recently moved my 6 websites(atlantia.online,democratie-virtuala.com,ihl-data.com,e-world.site,democratie-atlanta.org and virtual-democracy.org) from 123systems.net to contabo.com where I have rented a 4 core/20 GB Ram,400 GB SSD server…called Zalmoxe with Cpanel

yes,the cpanel extensions are like 116 dollars per month and the server itself is another 35 dollars per month but hits very far from your 7000-8000 dollars spent on your build which is far wrost than mine

You dont feel comfortable with linux?with a simple apt-get install or yum or pkg or zypper…you can have everything and Linux is like 8 times faster than Windows server (which I have also tried at vultr.com)
Read the messages from the system and you are good to go

Secondly…one cheap 500 W source?let me tell you,if you run your server for like one week..your power source will be gone with your video card and your motherboard
not much to lose though…4670?really?
I remember when I cursed all those VPSes for having bad graphics but my 5670 runs circles around it

Thirdly I see now that you are recommending SSDs but you are using HDDS for storing your forums:))))
so I guess their reliability is not so great
Fourth:the site is really slow on me..you have perhaps bad sectors on your Toshiba raid array..use a Raid 10 next time

Fifth:your server is gone,you are using Amazon VPSes right now…you have inexistent pages…visit my websites:)))
Apollo

By: ThatHomeServerBuilder

ThatHomeServerBuilder — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 22:15:00 +0000

In reply to HomeServerBuilder.

1 Not his fault your broke… 2 Onboard Raid Sucks its “Fake Raid”.

3 raid 1 really? why not raid 4, 5 or 6?

By: Deepak Sharma

Deepak Sharma — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:28:00 +0000

In reply to gilbs72.

I believe overall Linux will suit you better, but in terms of ease I prefer Windows. Support I find is better for Linux. Keep in mind WS 2012 is new, but if WHS 2011 is anything to go by, solutions are most often offered by forums as you said. Tech support, especially on the MS side, is awful to put it nicely.

I can also add that WS 2012, while a lot more polished, is just not as well documented. If you run into a problem, chances are you’re on your own.

If you are comfortable, definitely use Linux. Just remember what you want out of your server. WS 2012 has everything I want, so I went with it. Give Amahi a try and see if you like it. If not, go with WS 2012, or WHS 2011 if you’re worried about cost.

WHS 2011 is EoL but support will last for about 4-5 years. Just remember it has no Storage Pooling feature.

By: Deepak Sharma

Deepak Sharma — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:23:00 +0000

In reply to Planetbrian.

Hey Brian,

The reason I said that is because the array was used as the main OS drive, and unfortunately WS 2012 doesn’t allow backups on the main drive. At least in my case, it gave me errors whenever I tried setting it, and would always try and look for other drives to backup to.

Aside from that though, if you do have extra hard drives, definitely setup a backup. I made it optional, as WS 2012 has some weird backup options. I had to move my backup folder to a separate drive from the array to actually get the backup process working.