I don’t run the 'arr stack, but for comparison, one of my servers is a Optiplex 7020 SFF / i7-4790 / 32GB RAM. It’s running around 45 containers now with ease from automatons with n8n to streaming audio with Navidrome. In fact, it spends most of it’s life in an idle state with load averages looking like .20/.27/.32. I don’t do any transcoding tho, so I can’t speak to that as far as resources. I see others have made suggestions in that dept. As far as the 4 bay USB HDD, you’re going to need some storage space at some point or another so it’s not like it would be wasted effort.
Comment on Hardware requirements
Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip 3 days agoFigure I can work out stuff like quick sync easy enough. Main concern was spending $100 or so on the USB enclosure and hours setting it up just to have to go back to the more powerful PC.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 days ago
mrnngglry@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
If you’re going to run the drives as individual drives in the enclosure, you should be fine but if you set them up as a RAID array, USB won’t work well. The connection is too unreliable and will cause issues. I’ve tried with a 10-bay USB-C enclosure using unRAID, Fedora, and Debian. I tried multiple cables. It just kept dropping the connection during large transfers.
Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Good to know. Storage space is expensive though and anything that’s using the big drives can be downloaded again if needed. So plan was to use online backup for the stuff I can’t lose like immich photos, actual budget etc and if a media drive crashes, I’ll just redownload.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I wonder if it was just a shitty chipset, or if it was overheating.
mrnngglry@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Nah, I looked into it and USB is just super unreliable for any sort of array. The drives all worked just fine if I ran them as individual drives.
frongt@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yeah but like… where is the weak link? Is there some deficiency in the protocol itself? Or the implementation in the chipset on one or both sides? Or bandwidth, or overheating?