Honestly, unless you can spend more $, one or two USB disks for the mini pc is probably your only choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure plenty will disagree with me, but unless you have specific needs, I'd suggest spending more time sourcing your media rather than rely on transcoding. Most formats of popular stuff are available and Jellyfin will happily play it natively.
Also be aware that transcoding is VERY cpu intensive, unless you have a compatible gpu/transcoder. I run a ML110 with a 6-core Xeon (12 threads) and if Jellyfin needs to transcode something, it uses all of that and still stutters badly when seeking.
If you do need to transcode because you can't source the media in a compatible way - you may want to use something like Tdarr to transcode it before you try to play it, so it's ready when you are.
I'm running a Ryzen 7 2700X without any GPU acceleration and I can transcode any media just fine with Jellyfin.
An i7 gen 10 with QS can handle transcoding way better than a Xeon...
I pre-processed my library since I know exactly what devices I'll be using to play my library, so I just found a common format for audio, video, and subtitles.
Then with the help of jellyfin's transcoding logs I manually created the commands for non-real-time transcoding (depending on your hardware this new command could not make much difference in processing time, but it'll definitely make a difference in the quality of the output).
With that now I can use rclone to upload my files to a cheap S3 compatible service and just mount it in any computer for jellyfin to read.
I'm using iDrive e2.
Although I'm only using a few TB while I buy a HDD, so for a dozen or more, I'll definitely will go directly to buy my own hardware.
May I ask: are you sure you need a media center with transcoding? Because it may be totally sufficient for you to access files through a file explorer and play them with VLC/mpv or whatever else. Having a media center is only really useful if you need external access to your media. I set all that stuff up once, then realized i never watch shows/movies on the go. And if I do, i know beforehand and can copy the raw files to the device i plan to watch on.
On my PC direct play is possible 99% of the time.
I also watch a lot on my Apple TV which requires transcoding for some codecs.
But the big thing is my SO who does watch on the go often.
For drives, Shuckstop has a table of current shuckable drive prices. Shucking is usually the cheapest way to get new drives, you just have to get them out of their external case (or in your case, leave them in and plug them into your pi, ideally with some sort of fan). There's also ServerPartDeals for refurbished enterprise drives.
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the US market, but in Europe we have sites like Geizhals ("Skinflint" in the UK) that are excellent at listing electronics, so you could source them for cheap: internal drives, external drives
If whatever you end up doesn't have enough 3.5" slots, you can get these things on ebay to use them as a hacked together external housing:
You'd need to get the SATA cables out of your case though.
As for what drives to use: If you don't need redundancy/parity, then a single 12 (14, 16, 18, whatever you need) TB SATA drive will probably beat everything else pricewise. I'd say that leaves you with roughly $300 for the system itself, if you need to buy a new one.
but doesn’t have any way of adding a bunch of drives
Well, you only really need one or two drives. Are you sure it doesn't offer any SATA connections?
What about PCIe? You could use a cheap HBA card then.
Perhaps you could be interested in Tdarr, so you can transcode your media files to formats you can directly consume in your different devices.
That could save you the need to buy new hardware for on-the-fly work, and also give you control about the metadata, audio tracks and subs included in the final file.
Personally I run 1 NUC with a 8TB USB-HDD and mirror it once a week to my other Pi4 with the same HDD.
Those were kinda cheap at 150€ each but the performance isnt very great.
Check out the Asustor AS5202T
You could get it and a pair of 8TB HDDs for around your $500 mark. Or spring for the 4 bay model and get cheaper drives.
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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