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Two requirements stand out: Media streaming (jellyfin) and multiple hard drives.
In the video front, Jellyfin has documented what you want to look for if you're building "new" (that is, not just using what you have lying about). Discrete video card is very much recommended for tranacoding (which will invariably happen). Check their docs here. They also cover which processor to use and why.
Let's consider drives now: what's the reasoning for multiple drives? I had this requirement too, then had a Dell OptiPlex SFF (Small Form Factor) fall in my lap. Because it can only handle 2 drives (in addition to the M2 OS drive), it made me rethink things. At first I added a 4 port SATA card and four 2.5" drives I had lying around. It worked, but what I realized was my media server needed enough storage to hold my library, but it didn't need internal redundancy. So currently it has an 8TB drive for my library, and an M2 drive for the OS (which is how this machine comes anyway). That drive is duplicated to a NAS and two other drives on different machines (to protect against drive failure).
I run a monthly host OS backup to my NAS, just in case (but it's a simple rebuild as my services/tools run in VM's).
I had a cooling issue at first, then realized it was an old machine (2017), and the cooler paste was likely hard. Cleaned it off and put on new and the fan now runs quietly, even when converting. At idle it hardly makes any noise at all.
One nice thing is it has a relatively small power supply, so it peaks at 80w while converting, and idles about 15w.
It lacks a discrete video card, so when it does transcoding the quality suffers a little. I'll need to upgrade the power supply to add a video card.
I'm really impressed with this little box - I'd buy another in a heartbeat.
I could get by with 2 HD bays -- it is more because I would like to use RAID if possible, and have an easier time to upgrade to larger capabilities as time goes on.
I've also just appreciated larger cases with more room -- with small cases sometimes it's hard to work in there.
Internal redundancy would be nice to have with a file server, but probably not necessary if I can have redundancy with regular backups instead.
Thanks for the ideas!
Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there's almost no space in this SFF, but I like it's form factor so I'm willing to compromise.
Anymore I don't find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it's used as one of my replicators as it's too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don't need all it's capability.
These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won't be filling it anytime soon.
transitioning away from raid but I do love zfs for flexibility. A lot of the data I have is important for someone or somebody, so zfs and a decent backup solution is in use just to make sure. I went bananas and picked up a used Supermicro 4-node server that takes dual E5 Zeons (V1 or V2) with 2xE5-2620s and 49 gig ram in each node for £80 (I'm in the UK). Plenty of power and next is to upgrade the cpus to slightly better cpus to reduce power as it currently uses 2 nodes and I am pulling around 300 watts most of the time. Backup solution is an old Ryzen 3200G with 32 gig ram that runs truenas and has 5x3tb spinny drives in it