this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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ADVICE: Running out of storage (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by Aneb@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi, I'm self hosting a jellyfin server and I wondering if anyone could give advice abt my setup. I have an internal 2tb ssd and I'm using a external 2tb ssd. I'm looking to make my setup more cohesive and less of a headache. I want more storage for media but I don't know where to start. I looked online to price compare drives and I saw a 14tb hhd for $160, is this a good price for a hard drive? I also haven't been able to make tdarr work with my gpu so most of my media is probably taking more space than it needs. Any advice would be appreciated!

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[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Don't know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It's been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.

One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a "quality per GB basis" (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Av1 is better than h256 by quite a bit in many cases. Unfortunately, support is still very spotty if you're running anything other than a home theater pc. But I'm moving to Av1/opus since, I'm actively de-googling/droiding. And moving to htpc.

[–] Juvyn00b@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gonna start down a rabbit hole here - but are there any good rf remotes for htpc? I've been using Nvidia shield devices for the better part of what feels like a decade now and they're awesome - with the exception of lacking hardware av1 decode.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Shield user since 2015. Literally just started down this myself. Got this yesterday but was too wiped out last night to set it up. Figured if I can spend less than a hundred dollars For a fourth generation i7 which is capable of decoding AV1. But I can't buy a set top box that will do the same for even close to $100. It was worth a try.

The downside is you lose some power efficiency having a full-blown PC. The upside is configurability and usability. The shield was decent for emulation, but it still can't compete with a full-blown PC. The one other small negative is casting. I'm not aware currently of any great method of casting media to a PC. There's probably something that exists. I just don't know of it yet. But I plan to evaluate a few immutable Linux distributions, including Bazite. With waydroid on top for any Android applications, I find that I just can't get along without yet.

Quick edit after I got home to hook and use the remote. I had looked at several of them and had forgotten the exact specifications of the one I ordered. But I was pleasantly surprised. It has a decent weight. The buttons feel good. It's plastic-y overall, but for the price, that's what you expect. But best of all, it has an accelerometer in there to control mouse pointer movement. It's more perfect than I ever could have imagined, and I'm going to buy two more soon for the project I'm working on for my parents for Christmas. Gonna hook them up with a home theater PC setup like I'm planning for myself. To replace their aging Chromecast TV.

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).

And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 4 points 1 week ago

I already mentioned client support. Stating that I was degoogling my clients and moving to htpc so codec support was largely a non issue in my particular case.

TBF, if you're just downloading content. Even h265 can be rare still depending. Release groups sloooooooooowly change formats and workflows. And even then. Older content rarely gets new encodes.

Encoding these days is simple. I can do HQ 2 pass encodes of my DVD on a 6th gen i7 in just a little longer than it takes to watch. Yes 1080p can take over 3-4 hours for a movie. But I have a couple of old ewaste systems I can let churn overnight. I'm not concerned about real time re-encoding. I'm using av1 for quality and space saving.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 points 1 week ago

Hell, a 12TB WD red Plus in the EU is 300€. $160 for a 14TB is absolute dirt cheap

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

14TB for $160 seems insanely low/good price, even for refurbished?

Or where do you get prices like that?! (I'm in the EU BTW).

[–] mumblerfish@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I got mine from https://serverpartdeals.com/ that was before Trump 2.0, but it appears prices to EU are still ok. Shipping was brilliant. They appear to have 14TB for about 180 USD.

[–] Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

1/2 to 3/4 of my drives are from server parts deals, only had one of them give me issues and I think the issue was the SATA cable I had. I have several servers.

They are used drives, but I only paid about $100-125 each. Keep watching their site and things go in and out of stock all the time. I wait until they have a good price.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks, seems great!

[–] Aneb@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I found a site called diskprices.com and found reasonable priced per tb value hard drives

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Nice site, but the prices are way bigger when you click the link or is it I who doesn't get how it works?

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I bought a drive like that from Amazon Germany for that price, found it using diskprices.com. It was "brand new" and indeed the smart reported 0 hours, but it died within a few hours when I sent a dd wipe operation to stress test it.

Conclusion: it was a scam, the drive was already dead and had thousands of hours of life in a server. They used some low level diag tool to reset the counters and make it look like new instead of having 50k hours of life

Fun fact: they shipped it in a paper mailer, completely inappropriate for an HDD. Probably in this way they can blame Amazon warehouse "it's them, they packed it like that!" if someone reports is as DOA. If instead it still works after 50k hours of 24/7 abuse and shipping it across Europe in a paper mailer, then it's indestructible and will outlast the user.

[–] JASN_DE@feddit.org 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do you have room for a HDD? Power budget, monetary budget, SATA ports?

The good thing is that a mechanical HDD is still loads faster than needed for serving media, unless you're hitting massive user numbers, so there's usually no need to put media on expensive SSDs.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I was gonna say, refurbished hdds work perfectly for this. Now, I am kind of reaching that point where a NAS with multiple 20tb hdds is in order but generally you can get pretty far with hdds.

[–] ki9@lemmy.gf4.pw 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think its ok to buy cheap memory but check it with f3 first.

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago

Hmm, didn't know about this... I was just using dd to see if the size was about right.

Thanks

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what this post has to do with memory, they're asking about storage.

[–] ZonenRanslite@feddit.org 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Please note the HDD technology. Please only use CMR HDDs in servers.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Usually fine for media only like Jellyfin, since you write every now and then new content, then only read from it for longer periods of time.

I probably wouldn't go for a SMR drive anyways just because drives can last a long while and who knows what i'll want to do with it in the future.

(If you use RAID, this advice doesn't matter, but if you don't run raid like me and only use it for media like in the example, I'd imagine it'd be fine)

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isnt that only really necessary if using RAID?

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Separating your services from your storage makes things a lot easier in my opinion.
Setup one machine as a NAS and have that manage your (preferably redundant and backuped if storing personal photos or other unique data) storage, then share it to the rest of your selfhosting over nfs and smb.
You could either go for a prebuilt NAS like Ugreen NASync DXP2800 or build your own m-itx with a Jonsbo N2 case and an N100 motherboard or whatever you're comfortable with.

Your jellyfin server then accesses the media libraries with a simple mount (/mnt/media). Same with your tdarr server and tdarr nodes.
It's much easier to experiment and reinstall services when you have your storage separated from them.

I can't buy a 14tb hdd for that price here in Sweden, but I have no idea about your local prices. Is it new or refurb?

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sounds nice to have it separate, but it's not hard to reinstall services or even your whole os (as long as you are partitioned correctly) while your data is on the same machine/disk.

Two machines does sound overkill for Jellyfin (and 99.99% of self hosters).

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nothing is hard when you know what you're doing. :)
Being able to completely wipe your compute machine and not worry is nice and imo easier.

For only Jellyfin, then I agree - if that is where it stops you could run it all on an N100 integrated motherboard and have a lean sleek system that hosts your files and your streaming server. But when your services starts being too much for the N100 then it's nice to separate it a bit and for me it feels natural to split it between compute/storage.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 4 points 1 week ago

Yes, I have a single machine where most of my storage is. I host my jellyfin server there, as well as all the home directories for all the users of my systems. Login to any system in the house and you always have the same desktop and data. If I want to replace a system, reinstall or distro hop. It's just a few lines to copy into fstab and a few apps/flatpaks to download at most.

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity, do yoy know how Jellyfin handles network failures with mounted network drives?

I had a navidrome server where once my network machine failed to start properly, the entire database was deleted because it looked to the server like I deleted all of my files. I luckily had my favorites cached on my phone client and was able to restore most of my playlists from there but it was still an incredibly annoying thing to go through. I have since turned off automatic scanning of files for that service since that seemed like the only way to prevent this happening again

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Just like navidrome it seems like Jellyfin reacts to failed mounts by emptying libraries.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-solved-network-not-mounted-before-jellyfin-starts

With version 10.11.0 they offer a built in backup system for db/metadata/subtitles though so once access is restored it's easy to restore any metadata changes you've done to your library. (As long as you got a backup since before that is)
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/backup-and-restore/#create-a-backup

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tip, look at second hand sites/fb marketplace (i know 😒) you can find great deals.

[–] Ufo_kid@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Check drive age/hours though, I forgot to and bought a 60K hour drive that failed almost immediately.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world -3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Switch to Stremio (with Torrentio) and never worry about running out of storage space again. Everything is streamed directly to your TV, no downloading necessary. Browse like it's Netflix and just pick something then watch it. Plus there's support for home theater enthusiasts with features like HDR, Dolby Atmos, 4K, etc.

[–] HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Doesn’t this encourage consuming without seeding?

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf -2 points 1 week ago

You at least seed while watching the movie.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

But streaming is downloading. Sure, it's not saved to the disk, but...

[–] Aneb@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh? I've never heard of this. I see there git page here and I installed it easy on my android phone and the add-on torrentio. It there a like docker image or can I host this. I used my server to provide streams to friends and family but this seems to all in one solution I could forward them the link and have a set up guide on my domain now.

[–] Aneb@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I think the greatest advantage of this is to probably watch a few episodes of show before committing to downloading it especially long series or quick movies. Does everyone in the world need backups of movies and TV shows? I know seeding is an important factor to passing media along but it also feels like hoarding and I'm not a hoarder. It feels like a fine line to cross