I have been trying to build up a small server at home for what now seems like ages!

I decided to build a server for two reasons:

Backups

I am super-paranoid about HDDs failing. I just have too much data to take the chance of a disk failing. Actually, it's not a chance; it's inevitable. All HDDs will fail; it's just a question of time. I decided to build a small server with two disks mirrored for data and one disk for the OS. I could of course mirror the disks in my normal PC and therefore not require a server at all. Going down this route - while roughly keeping the same disk performance - would mean I would need eight disks in a RAID 0+1, Which is not possible with only four SATA ports.

I also like to backup to removable media, because if you don't, you‘ll lose everything if your house burns down or if your PCs get stolen. As far as I can tell, the cheapest way to do this is to backup to an external HDD. This brings me to another justification: since I have all the data on my server, I can back up my data to external HDD overnight. I don't like leaving my gaming PC on overnight due to its relatively high chance of failure.

Remote Access

The second reason for my server is so I can RDP to it to gain access to my files remotely... and so I can leave torrents downloading 24/7. I actually don't download torrents much, but when I do I've always wanted to leave it running overnight.

I would have thought that building a server would have been relatively fast process. But I didn't have luck on my side. The first PC I had seemed to have some kind of bottleneck which produced very poor HDD performance. So I bought a second-hand PC off the internet. I got it home and plugged in a few extra PCI cards and turned it on. To my dismay it didn't work! It turned on but I couldn't see anything. I tried everything but it wouldn't go. I tried to get my money back but I couldn't, so I bought another PC. This one went great until I plugged the RAID card in and 'poof' - the PC died. So I bought another PC and binned the RAID card. Since I binned the RAID card it has gone fine-ish...

The server has three drives: one with the OS on and two disks for the mirror. I enabled power-saving on the HDDs to save power, but most importantly to reduce noise. Unfortunately it appears that if you're writing data to the disks from a remote PC, the server will still turn the disks off. This seems to cause the server to restart. However the server doesn't come back up; it wont start due to missing files. This baffles me because the OS isn't on the same drives as the mirror and as far as I can tell, the OS drive never goes into power-saving mode because Windows won't let the system drive go into power saving.