this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Now it’s expensive to even build one of those servers. I just play my discs and rip them to a hdd collection. I just do it the ghetto way by having a usb hub hooked up to an nvidia shield with some hdds.
It’s not. I have a server with dozens of TBs of storage which is a 2011 Lenovo tower I got for free out of someone’s garage. It doesn’t take a whole lot to store things.
Yeah but HDDs are going up in price now
I got started in high school, broke high school me shucked drives from used computers.
A lot of people throw away perfectly good computers. Or sell them for very cheap because they take up space.
Those reject computers, if you find the right one, could have 500gb-2gb ssds in them that are perfect for media server usage.
To a degree yes, but not nearly as bad as other components right now. You can at the very least buy a single “small” HDD like 4TB for pretty cheap that is far more than what you’d get from big tech on an average storage plan.
This is subject to change but as of today, you can get this for cheap
That’s good. Main thing stopping me from doing this is space but glad it’s still possible for others.
If you wanted something to get started for streaming and you are space limited (in your home) I would recommend this as your server:
And for storage you could get this 4TB external drive and plug it into the Beelink and sit it right on top for $130:
And if you have an Nvidia shield I’m pretty sure you could also skip the S13 and just plug the drive into your shield and run Jellyfin or what have you directly on that. I know lots of people brag about their big overbuilt servers, but you don’t have to go down that road at all if all you want is to store and stream your media.
do you happen to know if shucking is an option and whether it is viable in larger capacity drives? 12, 16 TB or so. for upgrade, not starter server of course
I don’t do shucking, it’s not really much of a thing these days tbh. Though I do know it was only ever worth it for larger drives.
This could work then. I already got an external 5tb HDD. I just want it to stream to my shield. Does the N150 really work better than a N100?
The N100 would work great, that’s what I have at home, the S12 pro with the n100, it’s just getting harder to find.
Just don’t get the N95
These don’t have the issue 13th gen has right?
I highly doubt it. Those issues were with overvoltage problems and the n100 is low power. The thing sips electricity even when under load
Thanks
Not really, Jellyfin will run just fine on old hardware. You don't need a lot of power to do it. That said, if a USB HDD works for you, that's fine too.
I assumed that they didn't have old hardware lying around, in which case they are not incorrect as they will need at the very least 8gb to run the server effectively which by itself is approx $100 unless your looking at the second hand market.
The cool thing about USB HDDs - when one dies, you just plug in another one - no issues with funky formatting, windows/linux compatibility or whatever. I had the power supply die on a QNAP NAS once... only once because even though the HDDs inside the NAS were fine, QNAP basically made the data on them inaccessible from any other system - no more proprietary NAS systems for me, thanks.