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!
What I love about your comment is that you are using more or less the same methods that were around when the RPi3 came out.
I didn’t consider weighing the storage penalty vs the cost of processor upgrades when keeping an SD or 720p version of files around. I know some people run two instances of radarr/sonarr/jellyfin for this reason. Like many, my connection is asymmetric, meaning the best I can probably serve is 1080p over WAN at maximum luck, or a few simultaneous streams mixed between 720p and 480p.
Example: Asteroid City is 18.5 GiB in 4k and 3.5 GiB in Web 720p, a roughly 5x’s file size difference. If we estimate SSD cost is ~$50/TB, 5TB of 4k content costs an extra $50 to keep 720p around for WAN streaming.
That to me justifies not upgrading processing, using instead an RPi3 for low power storage maxxing, and eating the cost in file duplication. I simply won’t be able to get on-the-fly hardware transcoding capability anywhere close to this price point.
Ngl, I was pretty bummed about the realities the previous commenters enlightened me to in this post I’m very grateful to their wisdom. But, you have given me so much new hope!
Yeah, it’s an install that’s getting long in the tooth. I’ve been hunting for a RPi4 for two years now, as USB3.0 would allow some basic LVM RAID5. I finally got one a week ago and have been waiting for RPiOS Bookworm to come out before making the painful transition… then RPi5 gets announced. Just my luck. haha