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
    2·
    1 year 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.