Hardware Recommendations?

[VTC_Gloobus]

Hello Jellyfin community,

I am completely new to media servers, and I have no experience with networking. I recently ripped my whole DVD and Blu-Ray collection using MakeMKV with the intention of starting a home media server, and Jellyfin looks like an excellent option. Right now I am looking for a dedicated machine to run a Jellyfin server 24/7. I have seen that the HP ProDesk seems like one of the best affordable options.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/195799033953

Would a machine with these specs be acceptable to run a Jellyfin server 24/7? It has a 9th gen Intel i5-9500T CPU @ 2.20 GHz, 256gb SSD, 8gb RAM, and Intel® UHD Graphics 630. At most I would be running 3 1080p streams at the same time, but most of the time it would be 2 480p with 1 1080p stream, maybe throwing in some 4K media in the future. I plan on using Kodi to play media from the server on my Xbox, as well as the Jellyfin mobile app. Also, I plan on connecting a Seagate 4TB external hard drive to store all of the media being played, is this an acceptable form of storage to stream off of?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but as a noob I wanted to run this by and see what people think.

[Cognicom]

The short answer is, "it depends."

The long answer... That computer should have no problems with streaming half a dozen FHD videos, provided that the clients can handle the CODECs natively (i.e., no transcoding) and the external HDD can handle the required bandwidth. If the videos need to be transcoded on the fly, you could find it falling flat on its face (the i5-9500T has QuickSync functionality for a hardware boost of the transcoding process, but it's not going to do wonders).

Given your modest requirements with three streams, I don't think you should have an issue with this computer at least in the short term; problems likely won't start surfacing until you add a considerable stock of 4K videos to your collection - at that point you'll not only be much more likely to be transcoding streams, you'll also start running short of storage space on that 4Tb drive.

Given the cost of the computer, I'd say go for it. It'll give you something completely functional to start with, a base on which you can learn, and then you can contemplate expansion if/when the need arises. In my case, I started with a 2Tb drive to store videos (back in the days of MythTV), then upgraded to 4x3Tb RAID (~8.5Tb total), then 7x4Tb RAID (~22Tb total), and have just recently splurged on an 8-bay NAS with 8Tb drives (~50Tb total). My server is still the same, but thankfully there's very little transcoding being done on the fly (I transcode all source material prior to putting it up).

[VTC_Gloobus]

Thanks for the response!

[pcm]

Personally, I would not go with this. If you plan to run jellyfin on windows then 8GB would not be enough to deal with the IO and memory pressure. It could work if you go ahead and run your server on linux but windows, specially windows 11 would eat most of that 8 GB RAM.

Another reason I would not go with this PC is because I just would not able to easily upgrade/replace parts in this compact form-factor.

I'd personally go for something like this - https://www.ebay.com/itm/256539084185 Or any workstation or server.
It's so easy to swap hardware components when they go bad on a typical workstation or server and you don't even need a screwdriver to do these things... And it's so simple to upgrade things when you hit your current machine's limit without investing in another computer altogether. Checkout this video to get a feel for how easy it is to change/upgrade RAM on a dell workstation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b499mGPEwVg

And most workstations support upto 4 or sometime 8 SATA storage-bays and sometimes a couple of M2/M3 storage interfaces thrown in for good measure... So you never need to have deal with a mess of external HDDs connected over slow-ass USB3 wires.