Did you ever see the movie Holes (2003)?

Honestly depends on whats being served. As i say people can run servers on enterprise grade multi thousand £ systems or a £50 pi or mini pc.

Since you have a specific usage in mind, media server, you basically want hardware that will allow optimised performance so you can have a lag/ buffer free experience.

Say,

hardware thats good for on the fly encoding/ decoding

Lots of ram for multitasking.

Lots of storage to store the media.

Maybe gigabit network cards for multiuser streaming without bandwidth bottlenecks.

It really depends on the experience and chokepoints

ECC ram ill let someone more familiar answer but im leaning towards non critical and nice to have

Nothing you couldnt upgrade on your typical PC. Just makes life easier…at a cost.

Server serves a specific application(s). PC is general day to day usage.

Both are computers. Pc hardware can be used as a server. Server hardware can be used as a pc.

Using a computer for day to day tasks - call it a pc. Use it to run a web server application or host a game - that one or more users will access - call it a server

Hardware can be configured to optimise it for its function. E.g pc can have latest GPUs and “servers” can have multicore cpus and loads of ram, rack mounting form factor and dual power supplies for redundancy.

But it could also be weak - i have raspberry pi’s and old laptops set up as a servers

How about Mateighas?

20 mins is about bang on the “power nap” zone btw

Check out the phases of the sleep cycle. IIRC a full cycle is around 90 mins so in those 3 hours you can potentially hit 2 cycles and not feel groggy.

With all the benefits of sleep (and the problems from lack of sleep) it would be better to sleep

Coffee