Jellyfin and stick it in

Roughly how much did you get each drive for? I think it’s time I start self hosting but I’ve got no idea where to start. I travel for work constantly and carrying a few externals isn’t a huge deal but it’s not ideal either.

Gotta start somewhere

My nas started with a pile of old 2-8tb drives I had amassed through the years from fixing computers and upgrading storage of various things. Back then 20tb was crazy. Now I have a nas where a single drive is 18tb and the full array is over 200tb.

I highly encourage anyone to build with whatever you can. Get off streaming, save your money. You can run this shit on a raspberry pi with a 4tb hard drive for under $100, probably way less with a refurb drive and a used pi. Or buy an old ewaste pc for $1-200 and stuff it with drives.

it doesn’t need to be a workhorse unless you want to create some monster Jellyfin server that can transcode 8+ uhd remux streams concurrently (and even then it doesn’t have to be that crazy, 10th gen intel igpu will handle a lot). But if you genuinely need that many streams you’ll probably need a gpu so make sure you get something with a pcie slot of appropriate bandwidth (x16 most likely)

Additionally if you truly want to stuff it full of drives def make sure it has pcie x16 so you can add hba card. Most mobos (especially office pcs and stuff like old dells and thinkcenters) come with like 2-4 sata ports max. Lsi 9300-8i or 16i will add 8 or 16 sata lanes for like $30-50 bucks (though beware of the many counterfeits) and you’ll either have to move to a new case ($) or fashion some kind of external drive bay (sff cables running out of host of to whatever drive bay)

You get a cute little user interface to browse through your movies and shows with little posters and information. You also don’t have to use a flash drive and move stuff over if you want to watch from your PlayStation or other device. just a browser is enough.

In addition to the UI others have mentioned, I host mine behind a VPN so all my friends can use it over the Internet, too. It gets a decent amount of traffic every week.

Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate “trickplay” images so you’ve thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don’t end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.

Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don’t Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn’t actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).

If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I’d need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I’d need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that’d only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but… no thanks.

If I can just add to what @glinncor@lemmy.world said:

I personally have one so that I don’t have to mess around with plugging in any hdmi cables and moving my laptop from where it’s docked, I can flick on the server and then it can just be accessed on any tv in the house by anyone.

because it is convenient to access the movies from a smartphone or laptop from anywhere in the house without dealing with the headaches of windows file explorer shitting itself upon seeing a folder with 3000 files in it

“Jellyfin and put it in”

Hmm curious, what’s the cost for something like that? Do you also encrypt / employ any security for the data?

the best nas is the grimiest most disgusting computer you already own, filled to the brim with hard drives and shoved in the basement to slave away at media consumption and file sharing