Upgrading hardware to a dedicated media server. Advice from those who
have made the transition?
reddit / selfhosted

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Crazy-Hall8823 · 2023-10-04 04:02

So I'm wondering if I could get a little advice. Over the last year or
so I have been getting into self hosting applications. I purchased my
first Raspberry Pi and starting leaning about linux, docker, docker
compose, containerising apps what not. I now have 4 rpi4's and am
wanting to move away from the small power of the pi's to something a
little bit more substantial.
I want to move over everything to VM's but the only pressing
limitation I have at the moment is around my media server. Currently
I'm running the standed
sonarr,radarr,prowlarr,sabnzbd,bazarr,overseerr,gluetun combo in
docker containers on one of my pi's connected to a 4tb external drive.
I have really reached my storage limit with this hard drive and the
original plan was to buy a synology NAS (8bay) to use 6 bays as my
media server and 2 bays for all my other storage needs. But I've been
looking at server builds on YouTube lately and I'm really curious
about potentially building a server that's sole purpose is to run as a
media server. Running the regular applications either containerised or
in a VM with a place for heaps of hard drives (probably around 12
bays)
I have no experience currently using VM's and I plan on purchasing a
cheap mini pc off marketplace to load proxmox onto to start and start
exploring how proxmox works and how VM's work but I have really hit my
limit with my current media server set up and I want to build
something where I don't have to constantly stress about storage and
not download things because i have to be so selective with what I can
download due to space restrictions.
I was thinking potentially running unraid for the media server OS. I
have not used unraid yet but I figure if I have the hardware it's not
the hard to change the os.

Anyway I guess I'd love to hear about peoples experiences with
truenas,unraid,proxmox and how and what your media server looks like
today.
I don't mind spending the money I'm just not sure what direction I
should go in and if what I am describing is even a better alternative
than say just using a synology nas as my main media server.
Everything else I can deal with still using rpi's or a cheap mini pc
but I really feel like I'm well overdue for a substantial upgrade from
hardware and storage of my media server from the small "learning" set
up (rpi + hard drivr) to the hard-core homelab set up ahahaha.
I just low key want one of those pretty racks with all the hard drive
bays in them hahahaha.

Any assistance would be greayly appreciated as I have had a little bit
of trouble trying to find stuff on the internet due to not really
being able to phrase my searches very well.