Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3
My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣
Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.
Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.
You don’t need all that much. Most of my stuff, including a whole bunch of containers, runs in about 8gb. It used to be closer to 24gb, but that’s because I ran a bunch of windows VMs.
You can start small on disk space, too. Maybe 512gb or so on an ssd, and see how much you actually consume. Even my entire media library, containing more than I reasonably consume, is about 6tb.
My dashboard says that containers are using 50% of the ram. The server PC itself is using a bunch of ram on top of that because I ended up installing g Debian with the full KDE desktop emvironment. I ended up removing some resource hogs that I didn’t need (Element server, Linkwarden, etc).
The best way to get to grip with how this works is to start using it.