I’d definitely skip this in favor of something consumer-grade. You can find used Dell Optiplexes all over the place cheap and stick a large drive inside/outside of it and use it for a couple of years.
A big old server is just going to drain your wallet on both power and parts with equal or worse performance and a lot more complexity for what 99% of home users will use it for.
It sounds like your main goal is probably a media server and an Optiplex will give you an i5 or i7 with QuickSync which works excellent for processing video. RAID isnt really necessary here because you can just download more Linux ISOs if these one are lost, though it can be great later if you buy a bunch more drives and expand into other areas where data is less replaceable.
Can’t say on access behind CG-NAT, as I haven’t ever dealt with it, but Tailscale might work as a free third-party option though that’s just a guess.
I’d definitely skip this in favor of something consumer-grade. You can find used Dell Optiplexes all over the place cheap and stick a large drive inside/outside of it and use it for a couple of years.
A big old server is just going to drain your wallet on both power and parts with equal or worse performance and a lot more complexity for what 99% of home users will use it for.
It sounds like your main goal is probably a media server and an Optiplex will give you an i5 or i7 with QuickSync which works excellent for processing video. RAID isnt really necessary here because you can just download more Linux ISOs if these one are lost, though it can be great later if you buy a bunch more drives and expand into other areas where data is less replaceable.
Can’t say on access behind CG-NAT, as I haven’t ever dealt with it, but Tailscale might work as a free third-party option though that’s just a guess.