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
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.