Hi all,
Quite excited for my first post here and for being able to join the club :)
I recently bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro and put Debian on it. I did use yunohost for over a year and I experimented with basic nginx, fail2ban etc. on a vps but I can’t call myself an expert around these things. For this reason I installed casa-os to ease my way into docker (maybe in the future I will do everything DIY, I do like the idea). I put everything behind tailscale to be able to access the server outside my home.
My idea is to have a media server (radarr and sonarr for movies and tv shows, plus navidrome for my music collection) and some other niceties like audiobookshelf and maybe immich. I still need to learn most things about the arr stack, transcoding and such, so I don’t have any rush.
However, for all these things, I definitely need a larger drive, since the mini pc comes with a 512gb internal ssd.
The S12 also has a 2.5" drive bay (SATA3), but should I go for an internal drive or an external one connected via USB?
Things I am worried about the internal solution is mostly temperatures, everything is so clumped in there and I read some stories about faulty hardware basically heating the sata ssd to death after a while. On the other hand, usb connection is maybe less “stable”? I don’t know. Also, if I go with SATA drive, should I go for ssd or hdd? I don’t have too much budget to invest right now, so cost is somewhat a limit at the moment.
Seeking any advice here and happy to hear more expert people opinion on this, thanks! :)
I can fully relate. Don’t go cheap and keep it cool. For the last few years I used a JBOD enclosure for 3.5in disks with four 2.5in SSDs, I removed the cover and had no needs for fans. Super quiet, and the only viable way to get 4x4Gb added to my laptop-server.
Now I moved to a mid size desktop pc-server, and relocated the four ssds inside the case on sata cables. Cabt really see the speed difference for the workload of the server.
I don’t mean there is no speed difference (before somebody freaks out), but that is not noticeable because I only access the data via network for all my use cases.
Thanks both for the details, I’ll keep everything in mind! Do you have any brand or models you would recommend for your experience? I took a look around and I think I will skip it for now as it will increase my budget a bit more than I want, but I’ll go back to it in the future.