2025-05-25, 06:11 PM
Good day everyone,
I have been running Jellyfin on my gaming machine for the past few months and have gotten fairly familiar with the layout and setup, and want to migrate it to a dedicated box. My biggest concerns for whatever this new machine will be is that it is
1) Power Efficient as possible
2) Able to expand storage efficiently and cheaply
I plan on hosting more things down the line on this machine (Calibre library, Photo backup storage, probably surveillance software), so storage will eventually be at a premium. Electricity isn't cheap in my area so if this is going to be running 24/7 I do want it to be as power efficient as possible, but not at the sacrifice of functionality of streaming / quality, or at the inability to expand storage reliably. As far as streaming is concerned, currently I am building this out to service 2-3 streams concurrently, but realistically it will usually only do 1-2. They do not need to be 4k streams, but the capability of handling it is preferred. One of the consumers doesn't own a 4k TV, and although I do it's not strictly necessary.
Given those constraints and after digging into things, I'm trying to wrap my head around going either a Mac Mini route, or looking into some N100 system instead. With both of these, I think it should be fairly easy to set something up that can stream without issue, but for storage expandability I'm unsure. Is it worth it it to go this route for this use case, and try to find a system that I can cram as much storage into as possible? Or, if instead adding a NAS would be better, are there good power efficient NAS options out there than I can simply run Docker on and configure for my needs that wont sacrifice streaming and forgo a separate box entirely?
I have been running Jellyfin on my gaming machine for the past few months and have gotten fairly familiar with the layout and setup, and want to migrate it to a dedicated box. My biggest concerns for whatever this new machine will be is that it is
1) Power Efficient as possible
2) Able to expand storage efficiently and cheaply
I plan on hosting more things down the line on this machine (Calibre library, Photo backup storage, probably surveillance software), so storage will eventually be at a premium. Electricity isn't cheap in my area so if this is going to be running 24/7 I do want it to be as power efficient as possible, but not at the sacrifice of functionality of streaming / quality, or at the inability to expand storage reliably. As far as streaming is concerned, currently I am building this out to service 2-3 streams concurrently, but realistically it will usually only do 1-2. They do not need to be 4k streams, but the capability of handling it is preferred. One of the consumers doesn't own a 4k TV, and although I do it's not strictly necessary.
Given those constraints and after digging into things, I'm trying to wrap my head around going either a Mac Mini route, or looking into some N100 system instead. With both of these, I think it should be fairly easy to set something up that can stream without issue, but for storage expandability I'm unsure. Is it worth it it to go this route for this use case, and try to find a system that I can cram as much storage into as possible? Or, if instead adding a NAS would be better, are there good power efficient NAS options out there than I can simply run Docker on and configure for my needs that wont sacrifice streaming and forgo a separate box entirely?
