A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
That’s why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.
I’ll support this
If your goal is to set up a media server, a few services, and a storage for non-essential files*, it is hard to beat unraid. Free is obviously better, but it has the best support for mismatched drive sizes and, arguably, the highest percentage of “usable” space. Try to wait for a sale (there are quite a few per year) but it is also a lifetime license so…
There are performance implications and I never trust any solution that can only survive two drive failures. Especially when recovery involves heavy reads and writes. Because drives tend to fail in groups and stressing a drive on its last legs is never a good idea.
*: Which, to be fair, should be how any locally stored file is treated. Unless you have it backed up off site in at least one location (preferably two), it is not backed up. Which is why my media collection is YOLO but my (encrypted) documents and personal photos go into a cloud storage bucket on a weekly basis.
I was thinking of YOLOing my media collection too, but at the same time I’m scared of downloading lots of things and then losing everything and having to download everything from scratch again.
Yeah. For me, the vast majority of my media collection are rips of the blu-rays and DVDs I have in a box in the closet. So recovery is just annoying. There are a few somewhat obscure shows (or shows with massively generic or reused names) that I might never be able to find again but… whatever.
But I definitely have a few porn videos I found on DC++ ten (… twenty?) years ago that I have never been able to find again after accidentally deleting the “Special Textures” folder of my Unreal Tournament directory.