I’m interested in setting up something to act as a file server. Think of it as “the cloud” but local. I’ve never built (or bought) something specifically for this, so it’s a big foreign to me.
I think really all I would want is something that can store a lot of TB of data easily. It doesn’t need to be fast. It doesn’t need to be able to stream media anywhere. It really only needs to be able to act as an SFTP server, maybe run sync thing (new to that), and maybe act as a NAS. My gut feeling is something like 10+ TB might be a good amount to start. Something that won’t fill up quick and that I can put big things in (like a full system image of another computer) without concern.
What would be a good way to go about this? Building a computer like normal but getting very cheap stuff? Getting something pre built or used (like surplus office stuff)? I’m just not really sure where to begin.
Will it cost you money or grief if you lose that data when a drive fails? (note: when.)
If so, then you need redundancy. It can be in the form of regular backups - in which case you need 2x the storage in some form, or some kind of cloud provider - or you could save a bit of space by setting up a RAID5 or RAID6.
Check out https://www.raid-calculator.com/ - for instance, 5x 2TB disks in a RAID5 gets you 8TB storage that will survive the loss of any single drive.
If you can get a bunch of cheap drives (and a board+case that can take them), that can be a decent solution. You can go minimal on all the rest of the specs, boot linux off the cheapest m.2 you can find, and set up an MD device across the hard drives. Keep a copy of mdadm.conf somewhere to easily rebuild the array on a new machine if you ever need to (but it’s still simple even without that)