Has the home server gone the way of the Dodo?

A while back I wrote about building a media center computer, something I last did about 12 years ago. I wanted to know if it was still worth the time and money. Your answers mostly told me to scrap the idea, probably best I suppose.

But around that same time as that aging media center I also built a home server, so I’m back to inquire about doing this again.

Previously I took one of several old tower cases I had in my home office and completely rebuilt it. Since it was empty I needed all the innards, motherboard, RAM, Video card, sound card, the works. A video card is really only necessary for setup and a sound card isn’t needed at all, so I went cheap with them.

I used FreeNAS, which is a fork of FreeBSD, essentially a Unix-like operating system. It required me to hook up a monitor to the PC for setup, hence the need for the cheap video card.

After that I disconnected the monitor, the server runs headless. Just enter a URL into the browser on another PC and you can access the dashboard and have control of everything.

If I did this again, I’d save money by skipping the sound card. But now I want know if this is still worth it? My files are backed up in OneDrive and Google Drive. It’s nice to have a home-based copy and a cloud copy, though.

So what do all of you think? Will you shoot me down like the Home Theater PC? Or is this still worth my time and money?

Photo credit: Sasha Samardzija / Shutterstock