Building an Affordable Home Server with Old Server Hardware (<$600)
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For quite some time I’ve been wanting to build a home server to safely (and redundantly) store files, host video game servers, and handle various tasks I’ve written about in previous posts (e.g. host discord bots, run algorithmic P2P trading bots, and gather data for my stock information database). To handle these tasks I currently use my primary machine (which I use for work, writing, and programming) and a collection of Raspberry Pi 3’s and 4’s that I have accrued over time. This setup has worked fine so far, but, while adding another SSD to my system that I planned on installing another Linux distro on, I broke the SATA connector on the HDD that I use for file backup. This HDD is used to store family photos and old documents from the various PC’s that I’ve built in the past. The hard drive has been through 3 machines and stores what I consider important data.
Fortunately, I still have the hard drives from the old machines and the larger data HDD for my current machine (typically I boot from an SSD/M.2 and have a larger disk drive for storage) so no data was actually lost. However, for the time being…
