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.
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?
HDD is cheap and enough, but SSD is silent.
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.
No. People here grossly underestimate the performance of hdds. Streaming is an easy task for hdds.
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.
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.
Thanks for sharing that writeup, this is useful info for the building it myself route