tl;dr is: scrounge up some hardware, preferably on a recent-ish Intel platform with an igpu (i think 8th gen+ is the sweet shot), and then get a slew of storage. Pick a base operating system (I like ...

I am starting up and configuring an unRAID media server and I have it with me at work attached to the same network as my work laptop (Win 7) and a personally built Ubuntu box.

Traditional RAID wastes your storage space: Why my 100TB NAS uses Unraid instead ...