Selfhost Media server and NAS

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I would install truenas scale on the optiplex and run plex or jellyfin as a app from truenas.

Adding a second large drive for redundancy would be good, also a smallish ssd for the truenas os to run from.

My personal setup takes this level deeper.
I have a desktop computer running proxmox. proxmox is installed on a nvme drive.
I have a VM running truenas that I have passed my sata controller to. So my 2 10TB sata drives and my 500Gb sata ssd show up as native drives in truenas. The 10tb mirror holds my media library and long term backups.
The 500gb ssd is for running apps on trunas like plex, syncthing.

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I've seen some mini PCs by GMKTech that are small form factor and can be reasonable priced. Anyone have experience with those? I'm in a similar position to OP.

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I’m not at my house until next week but I have a Minisforum mini PC running portainer with all my media applications running through that and only use the NAS as pure network storage. I can try to answer any questions you have.

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Just use the OptiPlex for everything. The RPi lacks the horsepower, and storage capability.

I'm currently using a 7 year old OptiPlex SFF as a NAS, backup point, media converter, and media server. I've upgraded the storage drive to 8TB.

I do have another old NAS I use only to duplicate my data store locally (I keep 3 local copies of data, and a cloud backup).

The OptiPlex draws 15w at idle, about 85w when converting video. My NAS draws about 5w at idle. I initially tried serving media from the NAS, but it's performance is frankly abysmal. Instead I run Media Monkey, Jellyfin, and another media server on the Dell, which has no problem streaming to my crappy Samsung TV (not using an app, just the crappy built-in DLNA client) It works even better with decent devices, like my phone, laptop, iPad.

Your biggest concern with that Dell is the power consumption. As I said, mine happens to draw 15w at idle - I got lucky

What are the specs on your OptiPlex? Is it a mini tower or SFF? That would help more than just telling us the model.

Depending on your sensitivity to failures (drives die) I'd get 2 data drives for the Dell and mirror them, using the current drive just for the OS.

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I have a 512 gb ssd in the optiplex and 1 tb hdd on sata. Should I upgrade the hdd to a 4 tb and use the optiplex for media server and nas? Using truenas?

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I would get multiple drives and do RAID. Here's a helpful calculator to figure out drive quantity, size, and configuration. The reason to do RAID is redundancy. Hard drives will fail (even NAS branded drives). You do not want your photos, media, etc to be lost in that case. I personally do not go with anything below RAID5 (and for super sensitive things, I'll even go RAID6 - despite the hit on overall capacity. If the optiplex has drive capacity for multiple drives, I strongly recommend you go this route.

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Why have two computers doing basically the same job when you could just have one?

Have the NAS be the media server and save power and get better performance.

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What do you use as a wattage meter?

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If you have room in the Optiplex for another drive I would definitely get a second spinning drive for storing your media. Truenas will complain about you only having 1 drive for your media. The nice thing about having a pair of drives in a mirror is that is makes it very easy to upgrade in the future. I was running a pair of 6tb drives, until my brother gave me the 10tb ones. I just shut the system down and swapped one of the 6tb for a 10tb and booted it back up. It detected that the mirror was broken and I just told it to use the 10tb drive to fix it. A few hours later after it was done, I did it again with the other drive and then told it to expand the storage to 10tb.

If you want to get a 4tb, you could mirror that to the 1tb, (and you would be limited to 1tb) but you would have redundancy and it would be easy to swap the 1tb for a 4 in the future.

If I were you I would do what I did with proxmox. Install it on the ssd. Create a virtual machine for the Nas with a smaller vitrual disk from the 512gb ssd, 60Gb should be fine, and pass it your graphics card for the media server and the sata drives for your Nas storage and media storage.
Then you have your Nas that you can use as a media server and you can also easily spin up new virtual machines to play with or test with.

I have another vm that I use just for docker containers.

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It's an i3 6th generation with 16gb ram. I use an ssd adaptor on my x16 pci because the m.2 is not recognizing the ssd.i do not know how to fit multiple hdd on it to get a good redundency

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Selfhost Media server and NAS