Cheap-ish, Open Source NAS Solution for Jellyfin?
Greetings, I am in the process of learning self-hosting. Recently built a pc and its running as my Jellyfin client along with a Android TV box I flashed LineageOs onto. I grabbed a Lenovo mini pc, installed proxmox and I now have a few LXCs running, with one being Jellyfin. Was wondering what most people used as a solution for file storage on a budget? Was looking at getting a 2-bay Ugreen NAS, but then I heard the NFS latency can be a bit much- also read that an Intel processor is necessary on these for transcoding and swapping OSes, which ups the cost a bit. I've heard of some people using the Lenovo mini PCs and just attaching external storage. I'm still new at selfhosting and am wondering what would be the best route for me, don't really like tinkering with hardware a ton and was hoping to use an open source NAS like trueNAS and not some proprietary system. Thanks!
Use whatever you have currently or free castoffs from family/friends. If it has specific issues, then upgrade to fix those issues.
I am using a 10+ year old desktop computer with new hard drives to host NFS for my Jellyfin. Installed FreeBSD with ZFS. 8 GB RAM (any video I play will be smaller than available RAM), 4 cores. My TVs are NOT 4K. Zero issues.
I don't do transcoding on my Jellyfin server, so a SBC works great. I have an odroid HC4 and it works great. If you can use the Jellyfin client on your TV box, the server doesn't typically have to transcode anything. Works great for me at least.
Oh I haven't heard of this, thanks for the suggestion! Seems to tick all the boxes
Beelink ME mini has an Intel igpu and 6 nvme slots for very cheap. Memory is a bit low though and CPU might not handle much more than Jellyfin.
Personally I just have ~6TB of SSD/nvme storage in my desktop. And I just delete content im done watching. If I want to watch it again I just get it from usenet :)
Not very helpful but an option is always to just not use so much space on content that is available
If you're on a budget and only planning to watch the media locally, don't worry too much about transcoding. Just acquire media in a format and resolution your player and TV can handle natively.
Before my current setup I had an older sff Dell Optiplex with a bunch of drives plugged in through various ports. It worked for Jellyfin and some file storage but that was about it. As another person said, you kind of just use what's around at first. You could potentially get one of those external hard drives and just call it good. It's quick and dirty but it works. You might even be able to find one second hand which would be great costwise.
Alternatively, you could get an older full sized PC with a lot of drive racks and sata ports on the motherboard for drives. I know an old PC I had had at least 6 sata ports on the board. Then put Truenas, Proxmox, or Open Media Vault on one drive and use the rest of the slots for storage drives.
Theres a lot of options but at the end of the day its a PC with drives either way. In my opinion its more cost effective to get a used PC with potential to upgrade as needed than a premade NAS with a shelf life. But I understand not everyone has the room for that.
What I am planning to do for myself is add a few drives to my proxmox pc, create a truenas vm and pass those drives through to it. Saves a bit of money if you have the space.