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!
I really would advise against a raspberry. Even a Pi 4 is too slow for transcoding and storage over usb is just too unreliable. I would go with a motherboard with integrated CPU. There is a really good one from Topton with a Celeron N5105 that supports hardware transcoding. I did a build with that recently and I’m really happy with it so far. Power consumption is around 35W with two 18TB sata drives. If you only use one and have it go to standby when not in use you could go even lower.
If you want something prebuilt there is a NAS from terramaster with the same cpu. It uses a an internal USB for OS storage that’s easily replaced. It’s called F2-423.
I concur with the first comment, RPi is not well suited for a media server, where you need solid storage and good performance for transcoding on the fly. However, RPis are fantastic media players