My set-up choice has always been some cheap stuff I had laying around that would cost little and possibly also be low-power consumption. There are many possible choices like some kind of Raspberry Pi or similar solution, some small factor minipc (like an Atx form or even smaller) or an oldish laptop, maybe with a broken keyboard or monitor.

Whichever solution you end up with, the key point is having the right network interface and storage interface. You might want to prefer a solution with at least 8gb of ram andbone or better more USB3 (usb-c maybe) ports.

As network goes, I prefer to have a wired connection but to be honest a good WiFi on the 5GHz band could probably do as well. You might want two connections if you want to strictly separate home and external links, but in practice it is not required.

As storage goes, any of the above solutions will require some kind of external storage. While external SATA exist, in my experience even if you are luckynl enough to have a link on your server, you need to check that the chipset supports more than one drive attached to it or it will be totally useless

Considering that you will be consuming your media most probably over WiFi at best, external USB3 drives are the best solutions. I choose an USB3 JBOD enclosure (Just a Bunch Of Disks) because I will be using Linux software RAID implementation which in over 20 years never failed me and proved to be really resillient and efficient.

So I will assume you have at least two (or more) data drives in addition to your main Operating System disk (which should really be an SSD nowadays). You will need to setup the data disks as software RAID-1. there are also lots of so called external RAID solutions, but I prefer to trust Linux own implementation.

Why Gentoo Linux? Because its lightweight, gives you full control on your server and can be much more secure than others bloated Linux distributions.

Installing Gentoo Linux is less difficult than you might think. The great Gentoo Handbook is very well written and also fairly easy to follow if you don't rush it. I assume you are capable of following it up until you van boot a text-only system.

A few notes to follow:

• don't bother with setting up the external data disks, you will do it later
• don't install any graphical user interface, you will not need it
• don't install SystemD as all commands are not for SystemD (or install it and adapt the commands)

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