Probably per room but most devices aren’t going to draw a ton of power. If you have an antique microwave collection, that might be a problem though.

I think you’ll want to look into Wake On LAN to do this. I can’t give you instructions (tried once unsuccessfully on a Windows installation) but that should be enough to get you started.

I think this is what I’m leaning towards as I have very briefly played around with Proxmox on an Optiplex micro and was impressed with it.

After some more research I realized that TrueNAS probably won’t work as I have drives of various sizes pooled together so maybe UnRAID, OMV, or something else. Do you know if Proxmox’s native NAS can handle that or does it also require you to have multiples of the same drive?

I would (read: does) keep it that way. When your server inevitably goes belly up because of a misconfigured firewall or whatever you’ll thank yourself when the lights still turn on and your robot vacuum keeps going.

I have considered that and am not 100% decided either way but would love the convenience of having everything in one place though this can also he a drawback like you mentioned and “in one place” is just a matter of opening a new browser tab even if it’s on a separate machine, so maybe not really worth it. The Pi actually boots off a SSD since I’ve been burned by faulty SD cards in the past so it should be solid.

What’s wrong with keeping your old hardware?

I would actually love to reuse as much as possible since a primarily media server doesn’t need a lot of horsepower. I am wanting to go to an Intel CPU with an iGPU so that I could ditch the 1080TI and I can get them for a discounted price, but another user suggested the 5700g which would allow me to keep the mobo and RAM. The case is actually fantastic for being quiet, and the PSU is a decent platinum grade from when it was originally built. So all is looking good here except for the data transfer aspect since I need an intermediary machine to transfer from but I do have a few SFF PCs, micro PCs and laptops sitting around collecting dust that might be up to the task.

As for the OS. “Not Windows” is probably a bit intimidating at first but you seem to be pretty technical so it isn’t really an issue as long as you can read and process information.

This is going to be another challenge as I have played around with Ubuntu in the past and have a basic understanding of CLI, but struggled with random issues and getting myself into trouble and not knowing how to get back out of it. “You don’t know what you don’t know” was really in play after stuff like an update would cause everything to come crashing down and not knowing why. With my hobbies, it seems like something I really should learn but have really struggled with. I’m sure a lot was hidden with editing magic but the video I watched on TrueNAS made it look easy to pick up with a nice GUI so that I’m not spending all my time pasting esoteric commands into a terminal.

I wouldn’t mind a mini rack but don’t have anywhere to put it. Maybe when we move to a new house someday, that’ll be one of the first things I get.

How’s transcoding on the 5700g? I know Intel is praised for their iGPU and recall AMDs being less universally compatible but this was with discrete GPUs and may be several years out of date.

I actually do have a couple Optiplex micro PCs sitting around so maybe I’ll try one of those out for my general PC needs. I had considered using them as the brains of a server in the past but there’s no logical HDD storage option outside of a NAS and I’m not going to drop $2k on a box to hold and control some HDDs. DAS boxes and other external drive enclosures just seem pretty risky and unreliable.

You’re right that the migration is going to be the biggest hurdle, especially without adding some new machine in the mix. If anyone wants to volunteer to come hold my hand while I fumble through it, let me know 😅

-I don’t have a set budget, but like I said, would prefer to spend the least amount while meeting my needs (I understand this is ambiguous). That could be $500 or $2k, but I don’t want to buy something like a Synology as I feel they’re a big waste of money especially with how many drives I have.

-Possibly. I have thought of hosting a Minecraft server for my daughter, Frigate as mentioned, and who knows what else. I think I have ADHD and pick up new projects left and right

-Physical space is actually a huge issue. I currently have my Fractal Define 6 sitting on my desk but my office is already jam packed with stuff and I can’t think of any other practical space in the house to keep an entire server plus all my networking stuff is in the office. The Define is actually quite silent for having 11 drives, a GPU and 6 fans inside of it.

-Electricity isn’t terribly expensive. I think it’s around $0.12KWh, though conserving energy would be a good thing, so I don’t think an old Xeon server would be a good fit.

-I think I have somewhere around 15TB free still. My storage is JBOD so some are only 8TB while the larger ones are 14TB (currently for parity). I plan on buying at least two more 14TB when I get this going so that I have plenty of space to condense things and form the new pool, and to phase out some of the smaller HDDs so that I can better utilize the storage and not waste TBs of space.

Pretty much. The system isn’t designed to run 24/7 and I wind up with lots of glitchyness, programs freezing, and just generally weird behavior as of late. I want something I can just tuck away and ignore for the most part.

Why don’t you look at the drive’s SMART data?

Mildlytart Orchestra is definitely a banger and one of their hidden gems.

Actually some browsers also have issues with 4k and certain codecs. IIRC Edge is (or was) the most compatible surprisingly.

If you think that’s bad, my Denon receiver had to update itself which for some reason fails 100% of the time when using wifi so I had to find the longest ethernet cable I have to connect into the back (or disconnect 20+ wires from the back to move it closer to the network switch) so that it could finish downloading the firmware and complete the update before it would start working again.

Yeah I’m inclined to believe it based on the actions of numerous other police departments, but I’m also highly skeptical of it because of things like his message about if they find him dead naming not only the Fresno Sheriff but also his neighbor and a coworker. If I came across this on Facebook I for sure would write this guy off.

I do find it odd they ruled his death a suicide but then stated that he had three separate stab wounds to the chest. I have a hard time believing that someone could do that to themselves a second or third time, but who knows.

Can you get around this by changing your DNS? I thought that’s the primary way ISPs can control your traffic (though I only enough about this stuff to be dangerous)

Since you’re running on a Pi, you’ll want something that has the most codec compatibility to avoid transcoding. Something like the Nvidia Shield could work, but they haven’t updated it since 2019 and it’s ridiculously expensive. Perhaps check into the AppleTV box as they’ve probably kept up to date on hardware. Sticks should have a lot of compatibility and cheap but you may need to download a different version of a movie/show every now and then due to incompatibility.

IMDB would probably be a good start.

He probably doesn’t want anybody see the data of his frequent trips to the brothels of Juárez

Why don’t you create your own community if you care so much about giving people a choice?

Typical Plankton. Always plotting to get the Krusty Krab secret recipe.

I think it depends on what you’re storing. If it’s video then you’ll want bigger drives because you’ll fill your array of small drives up quickly and trying to manage 10 or 15 1TB HDDs will get out of hand quickly. Backing up isn’t super critical with large “Linux ISOs” since you can just torrent most everything again to replace missing files.

For fast throughput of small files, I think smaller drives in an array win out and if these are important files, it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to buy a couple of large HDDs to backup the entire array.