Just want to point out you don't need beefy hardware if you'll use jellyfin only in your network or if you won't stream very heavy media over the internet. If your library is mostly 1080p, you'll be able to stream that without transcoding for the most part.

What would be some options for NAS drives? The ones I found were quite expensive to the point I think it would be cheaper to just replace damaged drives and run them in RAID. Was also thinking about using a M.2 drive to run programs on and HDDs for file storage, I wonder how beneficial and how hard it is to do that

Western Digital Reds or Seagate Ironwolf iirc. Yeah they're expensive because they're rated for a different use case than traditional drives. I'm no expert though! I believe I've got a WD Red.

I believe thats what I do though, I have a ssd in there as well for the base os. And I just have the nas drive mounted. Jellyfin docker container setup to point to the nas drive as the media storage folder, as well as a samba share setup so I can throw stuff like bandcamp purchases easily.

Man, 7200 version of those drives are all over 400 USD here, my poor bank account

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

Here in Panama a lot of people buy things online in the US and use freight forwarders, I don't know how they do it but I never pay taxes on that stuff

Make sure you can afford the elctricity later. 250W constant draw doubled the bill I had before installing my rack. Do the math with kWh per month.

I agree with everyone saying you can run what you want on most any hardware. Only thing I’ll throw in is that with older/more used parts, you’re at a slightly higher risk of hardware failure, so if you wanna store data on there that you really don’t wanna lose, consider looking into online backup storage services. I’m not sure of their international availability but some good ones:

• borgbase
• backblaze

if it’s not a lot of files that you actually want backed up you might be able to get away with free/cheap tiers of google drive/one drive using rclone

Good luck!

oof. Yeah I think I have the 5400 rpm one. Maybe start with the regular hdd in raid and see how that fairs long term. Just make sure to backup your media in more than one place!

You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it'll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it'll be fine.

What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family's files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.

I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.

Its my first server but not my first pc, so I know I can use a 700W PSU with no issue except most of them have the highest efficiency at around 50% so less potent PSU would be ideal in the long run, if not only to save money on electricity bills but also for the enviroment

I believe for the highest efficiency you only want to use about half of the rated power of the PSU. So if your system draws 350W, 700 is a very reasonable power supply

Thanks for being the only one here that is actually commenting on hardware choices, everyone else is trying to convince me to try stuff I already tried haha

I might just splurge and get one of those drives afterall, hopefully they go on sale at some point

lol! Well its always a good idea to see if what you currently have works well enough. Then splurge on the fun..i mean expensive things. But that doesn't always work, so I hope the new parts serve you well!

One last thing to note, Jellyfin doesn't have the best authentication coverage. iirc its possible to leak some metadata about videos, music, etc... I'd recommend either not keeping the server public facing (i.e. use a vpn to connect to it remotely) or don't store anything personally identifying on it.

I just tunnel my traffic through tailscale, while annoying at times has been reliable. But I'm not sure thats available in Brazil.

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

So I've been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as 'intel i7' for stupid prices.

I've decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

• i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

• No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

• Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

• For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

• PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

• 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I'm doing

Spinning down and up actually kills drives more than constant non-stop work, I have a setup close to yours, it just seeds torrents (linux isos ofc.) 24/7.