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
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.
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.