Hi all, a few months ago I got started with selfhosting. Installed Ubuntu Server on a HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini. It’s been great, running Jellyfin, Tandoor, Calibre-Web, and Miniflux. Everything is local access only.

The machine came with 1TB SSD and currently about 80% of that is taken. I’ve been searching around for good options to expand. While I’m relatively comfortable on the software side of things, I’m very inexperienced with and somewhat intimidated by hardware (but would love to learn a bit more).

What would be the most prudent way to expand storage? Is it simply replacing the existing SSD? Should I think of adding a NAS instead?

Buying new hardware would be ok, my only hard requirement is that I don’t want to run proprietary software/OS.

  • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pubEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    My low cost solution has been adding external mechanical disks. Those go up to several TB for cheap, so I put two and sync them with rsync weekly in case one suddenly fails.

    As others have wisely said, keep the fast SSD for your OS, media rarely changes and is usually accessed sequentially, it can live in slower disks.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      It won’t make streaming slower unless you have multiple clients streaming, as in several.

      I find the network to be the bottleneck - my gigabit network connection saturates with 3 streams, and I’m using a conventional hard drive for my media (OS is on an M2 drive). This doesn’t seem to affect the video quality though.

      Frankly SSD is overrated for common stuff, there are other bottlenecks that usually hit us first, such as network or processing.

      As you build out, make sure you consider backup in your costs, don’t spend your money just on storage.

      Also, since you have a mini there may only be room for one drive internally and almost no cooling. Larger drives will have issues with heat.

    • Eirikr70@jlai.luEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I second that advice. When choosing the HDD, make sure it is NAS-grade.

    • lavendertea@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yes, the consensus here seems to be that for media it is fine to choose a HDD. Won’t it make streaming from Jellyfin slower?

      • stormeuh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Not unless you choose really slow hard drives, or stream very high bitrate media. Most hard drives can easily do 100MB/s sequentially (i.e. reading a large file, such as long video files). Meanwhile high-bitrate 4K video is only about 50Mbit/s, so about 6MB/s.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        51·
        2 days ago

        No. People here grossly underestimate the performance of hdds. Streaming is an easy task for hdds.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        No. Keep all the software running on SSDs while using HDDs for storing the video files themselves. You’ll never max their transfer speed out especially considering you’re not sharing with friends and family.

      • zlatko@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        My small low power self built NAS has HDDs for Jellyfin and no problems at all. Just a simple straight forward RAID1 created from countless online tutorials. Feel free to ask or contact me if you wanna know more of the software setup things.