Having your own personal home server can be interesting, but the novelty quickly wears off if it serves to do nothing but get in the way. And what I mean by that is get in the way physically. Computers take up space, you have to deal with a bunch of wires and so on. It can quickly prove to be cumbersome.
There are easy ways to use your existing single computer to perform the tasks of what a server would do.
It’s most likely true you want a home server for storage and/or development use, so that’s what’s covered here.
Storage options
Western Digital My Passport – Up to 500GB, self-powered via USB with no bulky power adapter required. You can’t get more convenient (or smaller) than this.
External Enclosure via USB (a.k.a. disk caddy) with hard drive – Cheaper than My Passport and offers more space. Most will support up to 750GB. Make sure to read the specifications before buying so you know the maximum size it will support!
Hot swappable drive dock – Pop in and out full-sized hard 3.5″ drives or 2.5″ drives as easy as you would USB sticks. Most support drives up to 3TB. Most connect with USB, eSATA or FireWire. Lots of choice; lots of options.
Development environment options
A virtual environment is when you load an entire operating system virtually within your existing OS.
The software I recommend the most is VirtualBox. Some would argue that VMware is better. I disagree because VirtualBox has come a long way and furthermore runs better on older computers that don’t have as much speed or memory as newer ones.
If you want to test out things like running your own MySQL server, PHP and so on but don’t have a box to dedicate to the task, run it virtually. It works fantastic.
Tip: With a virtual OS running, the more RAM you have in your box, the better as it is memory intensive no matter what virtualization software you use.
VirtualBox is free by the way.
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