I have been trying to get a server up and running, I am very much in the research phase right now. The main thing I am debating between is building my own or finding cheap used servers on eBay. I have had some luck finding aging but still functional servers on eBay that are usually rack mounted. If I was to go with building my own, I would run FreeNAS and run everything I need off of that (Plex, file storage, etc). If I buy a used server, based on the prices I was finding, I could get two of them and use one as a file server exclusively and use a second one to run all the applications like Plex.
I have no experience with the best way to setup servers on the network so I would just like to know if one of these situations looks better than the other. I have yet to make a decision yet so any input would be greatly appreciated. My goal would be to not spend more than $1000 total on this project. Thanks!