datahoarder

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A dozen or two TB of storage for media on the cheap? (thelemmy.club)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Well I'm just about fed up with streaming bullshit. I currently have a home server that's just a raspberry pi4 with a bunch of docker containers and it served my light usage well.

But with transcoding on Jellyfin I'll be needing some more power. And a bunch of storage. So wanting to perhaps build a new little server.

CPU requirements aren't high at all. Need to transcode maybe 2 concurrent 4K streams, A cheap discrete GPU or a CPU with a decent enough iGPU could handle this. Other applications are basically negligible, like Vaultwarden and PiHole, torrent, using as a general file storage server.

I also recently acquired a mini PC which is plenty powerful, but doesn't have any way of adding a bunch of drives. So another option is setting up a pure NAS and just using the mini PC as the server. It's got an i7 10700T and iris 630 iGPU.

I've been using Linux and self hosting basic things for years, but I'm pretty new to this level of hardware and little experience with RAID.

Budget: ~$500ish - storage goal: 12+ TB

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Honestly, unless you can spend more $, one or two USB disks for the mini pc is probably your only choice.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah that's probably true. Perhaps something like this?

Hardware RAID. Not too expensive.

Yeah it's USB and not likely to be super performant, but I don't think I need super fast read/write for media playback.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If this fits your budget (you still need the actuals disks..) it's not a bad choice. Speed should be sufficient for HDDs, as it's USB 3.

As the other poster suggested, don't use its hardware raid. Use it as a JBOD and configure the raid in Linux with ZFS or similar.

And never forget: RAID is not a backup! You still need to do regular backups, at least for important data.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Oh yeah, I backup all configs 4*day. The good thing about torrenting is even if I had catastrophic loss, as long as I have the list of torrents it should repopulate (assuming someone's seeding).

Of course I also want to self host my personal photos/videos, and I can't afford to lose those. I'll have to look into seeing if any solutions support local storage plus maybe object storage as a backup.

[–] stargazingpenguin 3 points 8 months ago

This would be my recommendation as well. Either a shuckable external drive or a standard 3.5" drive with a USB 3.0 enclosure so you have the option to slot the drives into a NAS or server in the future.