Anyone running an office server for home use, suggestions

[The Spartan]

I use a couple of these at home. One for a NAS (FreeNAS and plugins) and one for a VMWare ESX server. Loaded with RAM they're very fast. No idea about gaming on one - should be fine as long as you can keep inside the power output envelope of the PSU I would guess.

Lenovo TS140 Intel Xeon E3-1226 V3 3.3GHz 8MB L3 Cache 1600MHz 1x4GB DDR3-1600 uDIMM 1 x 1TB 3.5" DC | Servers Direct

Either this ^^ or this I would say:Dell Tower Servers 20-3708 | Servers Plus

[vetran]

Cheers for the ideas so far folks

@vetran
Would consider NAS, but this puts me off: 1) has the word 'cloud' in it, I'd want it purely local? 2) Goes on about RAID; if the NAS enclosure failed, I'd lose all data no? I'd just want to have NTFS formatted drives I could relocate? 3) TBH even with microserver I'd keep it on 24/7, Microserver+Ext.SATA could be an option.

Never heard of apps on a NAS, will look into it, but with my (3) above this might be moot.

Cloudy stuff has to be switched on. Works fine without.

It does JBOD as well. You can also add external drives so you can back up vital files. Or you can copy between NAS
You can just swap out the drive to another NAS of the same type. That's why I have 2.


I have Asterisk, TVheadend, torrent ,DLNA & squeezebox on mine. I can play films etc from my smart tv or via various STBs.

[rl4engc]

I use a couple of these at home. One for a NAS (FreeNAS and plugins) and one for a VMWare ESX server. Loaded with RAM they're very fast. No idea about gaming on one - should be fine as long as you can keep inside the power output envelope of the PSU I would guess.

Looks a good spec, Aren't Lenovo chinese design though so risk they come with 'phone home' firmware? Are they reliable/well built, I'm used to Dell which are like the Toyota Hilux's of the server world?

When you say NAS, as in the server itself is the NAS? i.e. you put a NAS OS on? Linux?

[rl4engc]

It does JBOD as well.

So that's, just bung a disc in, tell it to format it as NTFS and have each drive as a seperate volume? I don't mind merging as long as I can be 100% sure that if the NAS enclosure goes nipples skywards in 1,2 5, 10 years I can get at my data just by plugging the disc into a SATA connector on a motherboard. I wouldn't want 4 doorstops.

I'm not fussed about RAID, never had a Hitachi drive fail on me, my oldest is my 24/7 torrenting one and that's about 8 years old I'd estimate.

I have Asterisk, TVheadend, torrent ,DLNA & squeezebox on mine. I can play films etc from my smart tv or via various STBs.

This is the bit I don't get; surely a 24/7 NAS+Apps == 24/7 Microserver ? as long as microserver is energy efficient. And a server you can use direct you don't have to remote into it?

[stek]

Looks a good spec, Aren't Lenovo chinese design though so risk they come with 'phone home' firmware? Are they reliable/well built, I'm used to Dell which are like the Austin Mini Metro of the server world?

FTFY

[Platypus]

I chose this NAS software LimeTech

because if one disc fails you can get at the data off the others (it doesn't stripe files across disks). And it has a parity disk so that if on disk fails you can replace it and it will rebuild.

Just a thought.

In my HP Microserver I have 4 x Hitachi 4TB discs giving me 12TB of storage (and the parity disk)

HTH

[vetran]

So that's, just bung a disc in, tell it to format it as NTFS and have each drive as a seperate volume? I don't mind merging as long as I can be 100% sure that if the NAS enclosure goes nipples skywards in 1,2 5, 10 years I can get at my data just by plugging the disc into a SATA connector on a motherboard. I wouldn't want 4 doorstops.

I'm not fussed about RAID, never had a Hitachi drive fail on me, my oldest is my 24/7 torrenting one and that's about 8 years old I'd estimate.



This is the bit I don't get; surely a 24/7 NAS+Apps == 24/7 Microserver ? as long as microserver is energy efficient. And a server you can use direct you don't have to remote into it?

Its normally a linux format as the boxes are embedded linux, you can get drivers to use on windows or use a bootable inux.

The Microserver depending what you throw at it will be about 40->250w 40w motherboard + 40w for 4 drives + Graphics & others.

NAS will be 60w max. 10-20w motherboard + 4 *10w drives.

Access to a NAS is as a web page. NAS is near silent.

Think of it as NAS=central heating, Gaming machine is a fan heater, they both do the same job, one just happens to run all the time.

[suityou01]

Running a AMD FX 9590 (Water cooled) on a Asus Sabertooth 990FX/R2.0 with 32GB Ram.

500GB Primary drive runs Centos 7, with Samba4 providing an active directory.

2TB Secondary drive has all my VMs, NFShares etc. VMs running in KVM behind a virtual network. I use noip and have a few holes pocked in my firewall so I can access the VMs remotely if I am aaaat and aabaaaat.

I don't need to heat the office, if I'm cold I just start up another VM

[rl4engc]

Liking the look of the Lenovo, but Dell has £70 cash back.

Wouldn't say a Dell is like a Metro, they all seem built like tanks whenever I've had to move one.

Lenovo has 2x 16x PCI which I guess is good for twin graphics cards (if PSU can power it)

Gonna research them more, seems there's a few offers for this month (also end of business year so could do with one soon.. )

[Lockhouse]

What do people do about an OS?

I'm running an 8 year old Tranquil PC Sqa5h Cube with 2Gb memory and 10Gb RAID but I'm still on Windows Home Server. I've found WHS to be exceptionally reliable but I can't keep running it forever. I don't want something I'm going to have to faff about with, I just want something that works out of the box. (Backup, file server, media, etc). About once a year I think about replacing it but then think "Nah, can't be bothered"....