Comment on What are the minimum or recommended requirements for a personal home server?
Human01001100@lemmy.ml 8 hours agoHow complex is migrating the whole thing for a the new setup when upgrading? The best I can get with my current budget probably resembles the “quality” of your second server(first upgrade).
While on your firstly upgraded server, were there limitations to any of your self-hosting desires? Things that were only possible on your following upgrade? That’s my main concern. I’m probably over thinking things, it will be my first home server, I’ll probably stick the simple stuff at first.
Right now I want to host movies, photos, automatic backups, files in general. Also use it for the smart home that I’m slowly putting together, basic stuff… for starters.
FrederikNJS@lemm.ee 7 hours ago
As soon as I had migrated to a proper desktop (the i7-920), then it was a piece of cake upgrading. Shut the machine down, unplug, swap the parts, plug in, turn on. Linux has happily booted up with no trouble with the new hardware.
Since my first server was a classic bios, and the later machines was UEFI, then that step required a reinstall… But after the reinstall, I actually just copied all the contents of the root partition over, and it just worked.
The main limiting factors for me has been the amount of memory, the amount of SATA connectors for disks, and whether the hardware supported hardware transcoding.
For memory, ensure the motherboard has 4 sockets for memory, that makes it easy to start out with a bit of memory and upgrade later. For example you could start out with 2x 4GB sticks for a total of 8GB, and then later when you feel like you need more, you buy 2x 8GB sticks. Now you have a total of 24 GB.
For SATA ports, ensure the motherboard has enough ports for your needs, and I would also strongly recommend looking for a motherboard with at least 2 PCIe 16x slots, as that will allow you too add many more SATA or SAS ports via a SAS card.
Hardware encoding is far from a must. It’s only really necessary if you have a lot of media in unsupported formats by the client devices. 95% of my library is h.264 in 1080p, which is supported on pretty much everything, so it will play directly and not require any transcoding. Most 1080p media is encoded in h.264, so it’s usually a non-issue. 4k media however often come in HEVC (h.265), which many devices do not support. These files will require transcoding to be playable on devices that do not support it, but a CPU can still transcode it using “software transcoding”, it’s just much slower and less responsive. So I would consider it a nice convenience, but definitely not a must, and it depends entirely on the encoding of the media library.