Mine is in the kitchen for exactly that reason. No matter how quiet it is, any sort of constant noise like that of an hdd drives me nuts. But I fully agree norm

Mine is in the kitchen for exactly that reason. No matter how quiet it is, any sort of constant noise like that of an hdd drives me nuts. But I fully agree normal desktop tower is the way to go. Enough space inside so it doesn't easily overheat and lots of room for expansion. Using it for routing with DNS block list, media file server and off site backup. One thing I can recommend after decades of fiddling around with home servers: If you don't need it for the high availability, don't use raid 1. Raid is not a backup. Use another drive, preferably larger, and run something like dirvish or Borg once a day or however often you see fit in your case.