If you go to canyouseeme.org and test your Plex port does it show as open?

Your new ISP might have CG-NAT meaning you don’t get your own IPv4 address and can’t be connected to directly.

Also stream a movie from your phone while connected to cellular data and then check that stream on the Plex admin screen to see what it says. IIRC the Plex Relay is fixed at 1mbps

I’m not sure as I’ve always stuck to WD drives. You should be able to Google the model + “shuck” and see if anyone else has done it. I know certain models either solder the controller to the drive or add it internally so that there’s no standard SATA port.

The larger clients should work the same as the micro sized ones, but don’t expect to get much more use out of them than maybe being able to store a drive internally as they’re typically full of proprietary connectors and stripped down motherboards. I’d only bother with one if you can buy it cheaper than one of the micro sized options like the Optiplex 3050

The Define series of cases from Fractal are also an excellent option. I have 9 HDD and a 5.25" optical drive in mine (Define R6) with room to spare and the whole thing is silent.

Maybe it’s best if I just hook up some USB drives to my Pi and get my hands dirty with that. If the performance is not too bad (like you said).

Just do this and grow as you learn. If you buy WD Easystore/Elements/MyBook external drives, they can be very easily removed from their enclosures later and installed internally.

The only caveat here is that a Pi is going to be terrible for Jellyfin unless you only download media that is 100% compatible with the devices you’re watching it on. If any transcoding is needed, the Pi won’t keep up. A NUC or Optiplex Micro might work better here as they both have full-fledged PC hardware and aren’t too much more than a Pi.

You don’t need to expose radarr/sonarr to the internet. Only your torrent client needs external access which would be routed through a VPN that offers port forwarding like AirVPN.

For hardware, I’m a big proponent of DIY. A NAS is very expensive and limiting since it has a fixed amount of bays. It’s much more econonomial to buy a case that can hold a ton of drives like the Fractal Design Define series and then run your own hardware. I’d suggest 32GB of RAM, a modern i5 CPU with QuickSync (for Jellyfin), and a motherboard that has as many SATA ports as you can get. Check PCPartPicker to compare features and prices.

To run everything, you might look into using Proxmox and then running all your stuff off that in VMs or containers.

I’d probably keep PiHole separate since you only need a RPi3 and you don’t want your whole network to go down if you restart the server. The rest can be run off the server.

I’ve just been looking for a future solution when I retire my desktop. I wanted a lower power PC like a NUC but I currently have 9 or 10 HDDs in the PC which won’t work as a bunch of external enclosures and a NAS would be not worth the money for this many drives.

Maybe I’ll just get an i5 with QuickSync and an ITX or micro ATX for the next revision

What is your HDD setup using the NUC? Are you just using external drives via USB?

Same here. A brand new modular Seasonic Platinum PSU (back in 2018 when I built the PC) also needed the 3v3 pin covered. I just use Kapton tape over the pin to avoid any destructive methods or having to use sketchy molex connectors.

Which external drive did you buy? This must be a fairly recent change.

My oldest ones have been running 24/7 since 2018 and tons of people have been doing the same. Where’s your data to suggest that these drives fail faster than any other?

It’s completely fine and was one of the most common ways to add a cheap new drive back in places like /r/datahoarder. The WD enclosures are super easy to take apart with guitar picks and old credit cards. The USB controller just slots into the SATA port and is held in place with a single Philips screw. I’ve been running these in my server since as far back as 2018 (usually adding 1-2 every year or two) without a single issue.

https://serverpartdeals.com/

Not the person you replied to, but my first 9 HDDs were all shucked from external WD enclosures (MyBook, Elements, EasyStore), but the last one I bought used from serverpartdeals.com. I think it was about $120 for a 14TB WD server drive. Thus far all is well with it after about a year.

I bought a small roll of kapton tape years ago and just use a sliver of it to cover the 3v3 pin.

I think this really depends on what you’re storing. I have a large media collection and doing full redundancy would be extremely wasteful, but it’s fairly easy to repopulate things if something goes awry. If it’s irreplaceable or smaller files, redundancy definitely makes sense.

You just gotta show up.

Separate library was my thought as well. I’m also hesitant to put any requested movies on my server that are along the same vein, but if it’s not too many, it really doesn’t matter at the end or the day. It’s just some crappy movies in a sea of other movies.

It’s an IP issue. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for leaking someone’s proprietary design or PII just to make a little bit of cash from selling used drives. My work has 55 gallon drums with a slot on top to dispose of hard drives for this same reason.

Me too. I thought these would be a bunch of 1TB HDDs but OP blew us away with them being 8TB.

It’s not the bitrate and resolution it’s the video and audio codecs that need to be supported.