A few suggestions:

Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.

I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.

Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.

It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.

Metube docker image worked pretty great for me as a downloader

It’s actually very simple:

monitors-on:

#! /bin/bash

hyprctl keyword monitor DP-1, 2560x1440@144, 0x0, 1

hyprctl keyword monitor DP-3, 2560x1440@144, 2560x0, 1

hyprctl keyword monitor HDMI-A-1, disable

monitors-off is basically same thing but reversed:

#! /bin/bash

hyprctl keyword monitor DP-1, disable

hyprctl keyword monitor DP-3, disable

hyprctl keyword monitor HDMI-A-1, 0x0@60, 1

es-de

I’m still working out some kinks with audio so I don’t wanna go down the rabbit hole hell that is pactl and pavucontrol in this post. But that’s more of a universal Linux gripe I have than distro specific.

Obviously you’ll need to tweak the script to what your specific setup is. The first numbers are x & y axis and the second is refresh rate. This is just an example. It’s also Wayland only but you can do this in x11 no problem

As far as “remotely” switching, I just assigned the scripts to keybinds in the hyprland config file. Super easy.

Adding onto this a bit as I also use a KVM to stream games from my bedroom PC to the living room 4k TV.

Hyprland has been great for this. I used to use KDE, then i3. KDE was a PITA for this setup, no fault of their own it is just fundamentally a different one, and i3 worked to some extent but I was still constantly fiddling with stuff to get audio and video exactly how I wanted to (and to do it easily).

Hyprland just works for me and I love it. I press a keybind and run a script I wrote to turn off my desk monitors, set audio, and launch the emulator front end (emulationstation-DE). Which can also launch all my steam and lutris games, as well as emulators all the way up to PS3 and switch games.

I even mounted a remote start button on the wall and turn my PC on from the other room

As in watch the media not on my own network or have other users do the same from their homes.

Music is another big one that jellyfin can’t compete with Plex with in its current state. I currently have 718 GB of music that I stream with plexamp when I’m driving.

Do you have a guide somewhere on how to set it up? I’ve poked around online and didn’t see anything short of tailscaling your container to a web browser which I don’t want to do for a few different reasons (opening ports / security mostly)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think jellyfin offers remote access to your media