Tools & calculators
Free interactive calculators for planning power usage, storage, and RAID arrays.
Plan a build from our hardware guides
Choose a guide and review the parts we recommend. Listings change, so each card links out instead of quoting a price.
Recommended parts
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Beelink EQ series (Intel N-series)
Best overall value- Intel N100/N150
- Up to 16 GB RAM
- Dual LAN on some models
- ~6–10 W idle
The default recommendation: cheap, efficient, and more than enough for a first home server running Docker and a media server.
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Minisforum UM series (Ryzen)
Best performance- AMD Ryzen 5/7
- Up to 64 GB RAM
- Dual NVMe
- Strong transcoding
Step up here if you want to run many VMs, Plex transcoding for several streams, or heavier workloads.
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Intel NUC (or successor)
Best build quality- Reliable Intel platform
- Great Linux support
- Compact
- Quiet cooling
A safe, well-supported choice with excellent driver compatibility and resale value.
Power consumption calculator
Estimate the yearly energy use and running cost of your home server.
RAID calculator
See usable capacity, redundancy, and fault tolerance for common RAID levels.
Storage capacity planner
Plan how much raw storage you need for your media, backups, and documents.
Subnet calculator
Work out the network address, broadcast, usable host range and host count for any IPv4 subnet.
Bandwidth & transfer-time calculator
Estimate how long a transfer takes and how much data a continuous stream uses.
Uptime & availability calculator
Turn an availability target (e.g. 99.9%) into the downtime it allows.
Downtime cost calculator
Estimate the financial impact of server outages on productivity or revenue.