Hi all, a few months ago I got started with selfhosting. Installed Ubuntu Server on a HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini. It’s been great, running Jellyfin, Tandoor, Calibre-Web, and Miniflux. Everything is local access only.
The machine came with 1TB SSD and currently about 80% of that is taken. I’ve been searching around for good options to expand. While I’m relatively comfortable on the software side of things, I’m very inexperienced with and somewhat intimidated by hardware (but would love to learn a bit more).
What would be the most prudent way to expand storage? Is it simply replacing the existing SSD? Should I think of adding a NAS instead?
Buying new hardware would be ok, my only hard requirement is that I don’t want to run proprietary software/OS.
My low cost solution has been adding external mechanical disks. Those go up to several TB for cheap, so I put two and sync them with rsync weekly in case one suddenly fails.
As others have wisely said, keep the fast SSD for your OS, media rarely changes and is usually accessed sequentially, it can live in slower disks.
It won’t make streaming slower unless you have multiple clients streaming, as in several.
I find the network to be the bottleneck - my gigabit network connection saturates with 3 streams, and I’m using a conventional hard drive for my media (OS is on an M2 drive). This doesn’t seem to affect the video quality though.
Frankly SSD is overrated for common stuff, there are other bottlenecks that usually hit us first, such as network or processing.
As you build out, make sure you consider backup in your costs, don’t spend your money just on storage.
Also, since you have a mini there may only be room for one drive internally and almost no cooling. Larger drives will have issues with heat.