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Hey everyone, I finally turned my old office PC into a home server, and it’s working better than I expected. It stores our family photos and streams movies to the TV, using just a dual-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, a cheap SSD and a couple of NAS drives. I picked up a few habits from friends who work with enterprise severs [that we don't advertise here... -admin], like drive health alerts, good cooling and keeping more than one copy of my files. I learned two lessons the hard way: skipping a UPS cost me a corrupted drive, and RAID is not a backup. Has anyone here reused old enterprise servers for a home lab? What’s the oldest hardware you’ve turned into a working server? Thanks for reading!
This topic was modified 3 hours ago by marcdraco
Posted : 20/10/2026 12:40 am
My apologies all, this didn't reach me until just now... I'm flat out on a major new project. Hopefully someone can pick this up now.
Take everything I say with a pinch of salt, I might be wrong and it's a very *expensive* way to learn!
Posted : 11/11/2026 9:31 am
RAID is a lot of things but it's reliability does include sufficient of the platter's data has survived and that depends on how the thing was configured.
A pure mirror not backup, and you need at least partity (a third drive) to get any sort of fault tolerance.
My home server (the oldest one) is a HP Z620 with 32gb RAM (seems like a lot of money now). It's been replaced with something rather less power hungry now though.
Take everything I say with a pinch of salt, I might be wrong and it's a very *expensive* way to learn!
Posted : 11/11/2026 9:35 am