I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server
Server-grade hardware makes a lot of sense even for home use. My NAS is tucked away in a closet, having IPMI is so much more convenient when you can’t easily hook it up to a keyboard and mouse.
Better to build it from scratch, your desktop PC does not have server-grade hardware. No ECC, no IPMI, not enough SATA ports, etc.
HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.
For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.
I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
Server-grade hardware makes a lot of sense even for home use. My NAS is tucked away in a closet, having IPMI is so much more convenient when you can’t easily hook it up to a keyboard and mouse.
None of that really matters for a home media server. Even the limited SATA ports, worst case you have to grab a cheap expansion card.
Power consumption is a much bigger concern, a purpose built NAS is much more efficient than a random old PC.
Even the most expensive Synology only has space for 8 drives with only one 10Gbit ethernet port.
You can build something yourself for less with much better performance.
And more freedom.