If you are completely new, I would recommend a Synology. Very easy to use.

I’m looking to see the answers myself. I’m a data hoarder on a budget. I went and bought the cheapest 4ghz capable cpu (I run security cameras also) and matching non oem motherboard I could find on ebay. I slapped a ssd and a 8tb hdd on it and called it a day. I run this in my basement and have Debian with ssh, samba and an http server (no port forwarding of course for security reasons) with a search engine I wrote that I use to search and find stuff from a browser (I have a lot of movies).

There are probably better ways to do this but it generally works for me. If you’re interested in hoarding hundreds and hundreds of TBs you’d need to do something else. You could still fit a considerable number of drives in something like this thanks to PCI/pci-e raid cards.

I am glad you asked. The question to start with is what do YOU want to store? Narrowing it down would make this easier to determine what hardware you might need. For example, if you are storing video media for personal viewing, then an intel CPU with quicksync would be a great idea to have as it allows you to transcode your media on the fly with an app like plex, jellyfin, or emby.

YouTube is your friend. So is piracy. And torrents. And a must, get cheap HDD’s.