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:
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i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin's hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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+.
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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
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
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!
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.
Been using duckdns with a caddy reverse proxy, no idea what I will do with the server tho