Anyone running home servers?

[Kade]

Looking to build a NAS and get all my devices to talk to it. Any suggestions where to start?

[Motorboat KER]

I used to run a HP Proliant as a Ftp/media server.

Why do you want a NAS? spedd will be slow and energy bills will go up

[damato300x7]

Ive been running a home server for years. I travel a good bit and makes it easy for me to download new music, movies, or tv shows from my hotel. My daughter connects to it from college to download whatever she wants. And since it is always on we also run Bittorrent Sync on it so we can store important documents on there for a backup solution. Works really well. I am running a Hackintosh Mac server.

[Kade]

I used to run a HP Proliant as a Ftp/media server.

Why do you want a NAS? spedd will be slow and energy bills will go up

My parents computers are aging (not sure when they'll hit the shitter) and between the 4 of us, there are hundreds of gigs of music, movies, pictures, and documents. I wanted to compile, and organize all of it to a central storage device with backup capability. I also wanted to configure it so that we can connect and stream from our phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, and computers at home or from a distance.

Energy bills is another thing I wanted to combat/balance with adding a NAS. My parents don't really do anything besides facebook and youtube. I was thinking about just putting together a few hundred dollar system based on the Kabini APU or Core i3. Both have low power consumption and integrated graphics. Put a small SSD for OS only and they have have all their other things stored to the NAS. Pretty cheap in my opinion.

Only slow speeds we have from a "NAS" is putting things on my external HD and bringing it to the other room to transfer the files on a different computer. Through USB 2.0, it took 45min to transfer 60gb of music. That would be 45min of read and 45min of write. I don't remember the read/write speeds, but it wasn't pretty.

So, that's why I want a NAS.

Ive been running a home server for years. I travel a good bit and makes it easy for me to download new music, movies, or tv shows from my hotel. My daughter connects to it from college to download whatever she wants. And since it is always on we also run Bittorrent Sync on it so we can store important documents on there for a backup solution. Works really well. I am running a Hackintosh Mac server.

What do you mean downloading music? Downloading from server to your phone or "the other download"?

What is your setup exactly? As far as hardware and OS go for the unit.

[Maxim]

I just built a Windows NAS / server last week that I planned on uploading pics and a small build log for. 2x6TB hard drives, Core i5, basic mobo and case. I use it as a Plex server for my media as well as a backup of my phone and other files using BitTorrent Sync and Google Drive. Sounds like almost exactly what you're looking to build. It cost me around $1000 but around $550 of that was the 2x6TB drives. I also over-built it a little to handle video transcoding for Plex. If you have some spare hardware or drives laying around that you want to use it may only cost a few hundred bucks to build a pretty solid machine.

Given the price of NAS units I was comparing against and the added functionality of a full Windows install I would definitely recommend building your own NAS instead of buying a Synology or similar unit. The little rig I built is much more powerful and flexible than the DS415+ I was considering buying and was around $200 cheaper.

[gckless]

Would be pretty cheap to build a tiny little desktop with an older mobo and bottom of the line CPU. Don't need to be any smarter than networking and RAID capabilities really.

Or, even cheaper, buy just a USB RAID array, and connect it via USB to a router. Most new routers have VPN abilities to allow you into any USB-attached storage, from a specific web address. I know my Asus RT-N66U does it, works pretty good the few times I actually need to use it.