With the cost of SSD’S dropping I’m looking to retire my bulky, moving-parts server, which is in a mid sized computer tower with several multi terabyte HDD’s.

It has been a little over 10 years since I did that build and it has served me well. It’s on 24/7 and two of the drives precede the Thailand floods. All three drives lived in /storage and I used LVM to make them look like one giant disk to the rest of the OS/software (on Debian). >!Don’t need redundancy and backup is isolated elsewhere, so I’d love to preserve the same storage structure so my configs can transfer over with fewer migration issues.!<

  • What are the limitations of using my spare RPi3B, at least in terms of storage capacity and number of drives?
  • Should I/can I use internal ssd’s with USB adapters, in case I want to upgrade the board later and preserve the storage?
  • Will I be able to transcode on the fly via Plex/Jellyfin to stream videos away from home i.e. can the CPU handle that?

Keep in mind that this Pi would be headless, as is my current big box setup. Curious what the community’s thoughts might be and if anyone uses their pi’s in a similar setup!

  • @JoCrichton
    2•10 months ago

    I really would advise against a raspberry. Even a Pi 4 is too slow for transcoding and storage over usb is just too unreliable. I would go with a motherboard with integrated CPU. There is a really good one from Topton with a Celeron N5105 that supports hardware transcoding. I did a build with that recently and I’m really happy with it so far. Power consumption is around 35W with two 18TB sata drives. If you only use one and have it go to standby when not in use you could go even lower.

    If you want something prebuilt there is a NAS from terramaster with the same cpu. It uses a an internal USB for OS storage that’s easily replaced. It’s called F2-423.

    • @[email protected]
      3•10 months ago

      I concur with the first comment, RPi is not well suited for a media server, where you need solid storage and good performance for transcoding on the fly. However, RPis are fantastic media players

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      I have jellyfin on a Pi 4 streaming from a NAS and transcoding. It can do a single 1080p transcode with buffer delays or comfortably do two 480p transcodes simultaneously. It depends on the source resolutions and the destination for transcoding. It is capable if your source material is 480 or 720p. Anything more and it’s a bit of a pain.

    • @[email protected]OP
      0•10 months ago

      I see. And if the Ethernet competes with USB for bandwidth this is probably doubly not great, even if I’m just serving files straight up over samba. Indeed, this same Pi was used as a front end (kodi) to my current server before I got a smart tv and it worked great for that. I have a smart tv now so this pi needs new use, and I want a server more compact.

      I know now that my question diverges from the Pi community, but do you have any good sites that have different NAS builds using boards similar to what you posted, or communities of this kind? I think I’d like to geek out a bit creating different builds. As mentioned, it’s been some time since my last build