Fair, I’ll try to get my kill-a-watt plugged in to check next time the server powers down and report back. Power is fairly cheap where I live, and I’ve got solar, so that’s never been a huge concern for me. I’d have to check, but I’ve always assumed it’s pulling ~10 watts per drive at normal times, and as far as I know my power bill is pretty much reflecting this. (Due to how my data pool works all drives need to be spinning when in use, and my drives get basically zero down time).

And that’s good, when I first got into self hosting I was greedy for storage and didn’t have the money to pay for redundancy, and I got bit a few times. Now my media server is running on 2 8-drive pools, each with two drives of parity. Ends up being around 200TB of useable space. I don’t have backups on my media pools, as right now I’m using 24TB drives and the cost to back that up just doesn’t make sense. I do however have my personal cloud on mirrored drives with a backup at my brother’s house, also on mirrored drives, so it’d be pretty unlikely for me to lose the important stuff.

I subscribe to the philosophy that each server should handle one thing. I’ve got a NAS that stores all data for all other servers other than boot drives. I’m using only spinning rust for data, so the network speed is never the bottleneck for my system. My NAS is a 24 bay chassis with the LSI card in IT mode. I got an LSI card that is powered from the PCIe port itself, and power usage for the card itself seems negligible, but spinning 24 drives takes a decent bit of power. I’ve got 20 drives in it now and it’s pretty loud, but substantially quieter than the dell r720 it replaced. It’s in my basement so it doesn’t bother me, but if sound is an issue, and you don’t need a ton of space, definitely go with SSDs. I’ve also got a media server that handles all media streaming (movies/TV/audiobooks/music/ebooks/comics/manga/roms). It reads/writes it’s data to the NAS. I’ve got another server running my personal cloud (nextcloud, password manager, testing new SH services). Again, the nextcloud data is on the NAS. Both servers store backups to the NAS, as well as a second local drive. I’ve also got a handful of raspberry pis running the smart house stuff, and one running the Ubiquiti Controller. All are running the PoE hat with the m.2 port on them for stable boot drives, and store their backups on the NAS. I’ve kind of stopped running proxmox + virtualization when I switched off of the r720, as I find that running Debian on bare metal with btrfs backups is simpler for me, and I run almost all of my services in Docker. I’ve had a motherboard go out on my media server, and was able to swap the motherboard and get everything back up and running in a little under 2 hours. Longest part was the motherboard swap itself.

Not sure if you are aware, but foundations give you a grid system to use. A lot of players will build foundations up high, and build on a large, floating platform. I came from Factorio, and I actually really liked the factory size/shape constraints in Satisfactory, as it doesn’t let me use the same design solution for every resource node. Some places trains can easily get to, others require trucks to get the resources to where the train can pick them up, and others still require drones. I felt like in factorio, I could use the systems I came up with early throughout the entire game, and the only thing I needed to change was how to pump resources into my factory and scaling up my defense system.

I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I’ve been keeping up on Jellyfin and it’s amazing how far they’ve come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it’s on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.

Sure you can say that I’m picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they’ve been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.

I’ve always had to manually add my GPU to system monitor, and since I’ve always had integrated GPU as well, had to sort out which GPU is the dedicated GPU before knowing what service is using which GPU. But this definitely is my favorite method once I get it all set up, makes it really clear if a steam game is using the wrong GPU

Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week

I grew up a windows user, as was my father before me. I first started with Linux in my teens, initially on Raspbian as I was gifted a raspberry pi 2b with a camera, and I wanted to try goofing around with python and computer vision (which was the style at the time.) Once I entered university, I dual booted Windows 7 and Linux Mint, since my professor suggested moving to Linux for C++ homework to make things simpler. I was scared of jumping to a new desktop OS due to my upbringing, so I couldn’t abandon Windows, not yet anyway. Following that I had a cheap Summer fling with Kali as it was a requirement for a cyber security course I took. This replaced my Mint install. After college I got into self-hosting, and my server ran Debian for stability (and still does to this day), however I was still scared of leaving the safety of my littlr Windows garden I called home. But then Windows betrayed me by putting ads on my taskbar, and I got fed up. I installed EndeavorOS on my main machine which was a laptop. I immediately fell head over heels for the AUR, and not needing a deep understanding of linux during the install was a plus. I got comfy with the ins and outs of linux over the next year and a half or so, and when I finally went to build myself a new desktop PC, I made the switch to Arch. It’s been great, and I felt like I understood all the decisions I made during the install. That was 6 months ago. If Arch ever fails me catastrophically,(which would be pretty hard as I am using an os snapshot manager, and backing those snapshots up to my server) I will move to either Debian or Mint for stability, as I am kind of tired of hopping around at this point.