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!

  • @notfromhere
    1•9 months ago

    Do you keep your files in multiple formats (hevc and h264) or only h264? I am ripping mine to hevc but due to transcoding limitations I am thinking about re-encoding to h264/mp4 as well, so from mobile it would stream the lower quality and the TVs would stream higher quality, but not sure if that works…

    • @Peffse@lemmy.world
      2•9 months ago

      I guess that depends on how much storage you have to spare. In Jellyfin you can designate different formats by appending the label after the name, as long as both files are in the same parent directory. For example I’m subscribed to a movie maker on Patreon, and he allows his movies to be downloaded at their native resolution in an mp4 with h264 encoding. Not ideal for running on an old CRT with a Roku1 attached, haha. So I scale them and put the resolution as the label, then I use the drop-down inside the app to choose the appropriate version. It’s worth the storage penalty for me. Other stuff like GamesDoneQuick archives I downloaded are not multi-format since I don’t feel like keeping weeks worth of streaming media in redundant files. So those are left in webm with VP9.

      ├── Skull Forest (2012)

      │   ├── folder.jpg

      │   ├── Skull Forest (2012) - 480p.mp4

      │   └── Skull Forest (2012) - 1080p.mp4

      • @notfromhere
        2•9 months ago

        Ok that makes a lot of sense, thanks!