Hi, I’m self hosting a jellyfin server and I wondering if anyone could give advice abt my setup. I have an internal 2tb ssd and I’m using a external 2tb ssd. I’m looking to make my setup more cohesive and less of a headache. I want more storage for media but I don’t know where to start. I looked online to price compare drives and I saw a 14tb hhd for $160, is this a good price for a hard drive? I also haven’t been able to make tdarr work with my gpu so most of my media is probably taking more space than it needs. Any advice would be appreciated!
Tip, look at second hand sites/fb marketplace (i know 😒) you can find great deals.
14TB for $160 seems insanely low/good price, even for refurbished?
Or where do you get prices like that?! (I’m in the EU BTW).
I got mine from https://serverpartdeals.com/ that was before Trump 2.0, but it appears prices to EU are still ok. Shipping was brilliant. They appear to have 14TB for about 180 USD.
I found a site called diskprices.com and found reasonable priced per tb value hard drives
Don’t know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It’s been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.
One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a “quality per GB basis” (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).
Av1 is better than h256 by quite a bit in many cases. Unfortunately, support is still very spotty if you’re running anything other than a home theater pc. But I’m moving to Av1/opus since, I’m actively de-googling/droiding. And moving to htpc.
AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).
And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.
I already mentioned client support. Stating that I was degoogling my clients and moving to htpc so codec support was largely a non issue in my particular case.
TBF, if you’re just downloading content. Even h265 can be rare still depending. Release groups sloooooooooowly change formats and workflows. And even then. Older content rarely gets new encodes.
Encoding these days is simple. I can do HQ 2 pass encodes of my DVD on a 6th gen i7 in just a little longer than it takes to watch. Yes 1080p can take over 3-4 hours for a movie. But I have a couple of old ewaste systems I can let churn overnight. I’m not concerned about real time re-encoding. I’m using av1 for quality and space saving.
Hell, a 12TB WD red Plus in the EU is 300€. $160 for a 14TB is absolute dirt cheap
Switch to Stremio (with Torrentio) and never worry about running out of storage space again. Everything is streamed directly to your TV, no downloading necessary. Browse like it’s Netflix and just pick something then watch it. Plus there’s support for home theater enthusiasts with features like HDR, Dolby Atmos, 4K, etc.
Doesn’t this encourage consuming without seeding?
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But streaming is downloading. Sure, it’s not saved to the disk, but…
Oh? I’ve never heard of this. I see there git page here and I installed it easy on my android phone and the add-on torrentio. It there a like docker image or can I host this. I used my server to provide streams to friends and family but this seems to all in one solution I could forward them the link and have a set up guide on my domain now.
Do you have room for a HDD? Power budget, monetary budget, SATA ports?
The good thing is that a mechanical HDD is still loads faster than needed for serving media, unless you’re hitting massive user numbers, so there’s usually no need to put media on expensive SSDs.
I was gonna say, refurbished hdds work perfectly for this. Now, I am kind of reaching that point where a NAS with multiple 20tb hdds is in order but generally you can get pretty far with hdds.
Please note the HDD technology. Please only use CMR HDDs in servers.
HDD* (hard disk drive)
Oh, sorry.
Separating your services from your storage makes things a lot easier in my opinion.
Setup one machine as a NAS and have that manage your (preferably redundant and backuped if storing personal photos or other unique data) storage, then share it to the rest of your selfhosting over nfs and smb.
You could either go for a prebuilt NAS like Ugreen NASync DXP2800 or build your own m-itx with a Jonsbo N2 case and an N100 motherboard or whatever you’re comfortable with.Your jellyfin server then accesses the media libraries with a simple mount (/mnt/media). Same with your tdarr server and tdarr nodes.
It’s much easier to experiment and reinstall services when you have your storage separated from them.I can’t buy a 14tb hdd for that price here in Sweden, but I have no idea about your local prices. Is it new or refurb?
Sounds nice to have it separate, but it’s not hard to reinstall services or even your whole os (as long as you are partitioned correctly) while your data is on the same machine/disk.
Two machines does sound overkill for Jellyfin (and 99.99% of self hosters).
Nothing is hard when you know what you’re doing. :)
Being able to completely wipe your compute machine and not worry is nice and imo easier.For only Jellyfin, then I agree - if that is where it stops you could run it all on an N100 integrated motherboard and have a lean sleek system that hosts your files and your streaming server. But when your services starts being too much for the N100 then it’s nice to separate it a bit and for me it feels natural to split it between compute/storage.
Yes, I have a single machine where most of my storage is. I host my jellyfin server there, as well as all the home directories for all the users of my systems. Login to any system in the house and you always have the same desktop and data. If I want to replace a system, reinstall or distro hop. It’s just a few lines to copy into fstab and a few apps/flatpaks to download at most.
