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.
Better to build it from scratch, your desktop PC does not have server-grade hardware. No ECC, no IPMI, not enough SATA ports, etc.
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.
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.