me when i am in a “build an unusuable standard” competition and my opponent is “literally any consumer electronics manufacturer”

Ethernet over HDMI does exist as a standard, but iirc it requires the device manufacturer on both ends of the cable to have a special implementation, and also requires a special cable that has the Ethernet data lanes included. I’m not sure any modern displays implement it anymore, it kinda died because it sucked and wasn’t that useful.

And at significantly lower transmit power too. Ubiquiti 5ac ptp rigs use like 8w, 802.11ah can make a link with under a watt. Sure it won’t be fast at all but if you’re doing a remote embedded device on a solar panel, it makes a huge difference.

That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.

Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you’ll discover what you’re real hardware needs are.

When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.

Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it’s an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.

service still up = no problem
Can’t access service = problem, better ssh in

Simple as

A. Run a batch transcode with Handbrake and make all your stored files compatible with your end players.
It sounds like the more recent things you are downloading are in a codec that is not compatible with your playback devices. E.g, older torrents are frequently an H.264 stream in an MP4 container, which practically every device can play now. Many modern releases are being distributed in H.265 or AV1, as they have significant size and quality benefits, but many older devices don’t support them natively. so it is forcing Jellyfin to live transcode to h.264. Find out what older titles play without any buffer or playback lag/high CPU usage and check what codec those files are in. That is what you’ll need to batch encode everything over to.

B. Sounds like you are still relying on CPU transcoding which is absolute dog. What mini pc specs do you have? If it’s an AMD or Intel CPU/APU then it should have hardware encode/decode included in it’s integrated GPU. When using hardware transcoding the CPU load is generally minimal for 1 to 2 streams. See the Jellyfin docs on hardware acceleration here.

My default goto with any stability issue is to first force a new drive self test

smartctl -l selftest /dev/nvme0  

And then I would also run a complete extended memory test (memtest86) to ensure bad ram isn’t doing something dumb like corrupting the part of the kernel that handles disk IO. The number of times I’ve had unsolvable issues that traced to an unstable stick of memory is… Surprisingly high.

If the memtest passes try fsck’ing nvme0, if there are corrupted blocks yeah it’s possible the SSD is dying but the controller isn’t reporting it.

Actually I think I meant to write “arent worth shit” but had a tired brain fart

Black Friday sales aren’t shit anymore, I waited until last black Friday and no good drives ever went on more than like $5 discount.

With all drives being imported and tarriffs in the US being a total shitshow you should buy ASAP.

Adapter or caddy is fine. Can get them on most shopping sites for cheap.

IIRC from my old office PC slinging days, a lot of those cases with 5-1/4 bays usually had slots for mounting screws that would allow you to mount a 3.5 drive flush to one sideusijg 2 screws. Then you get a 1-3/4" 6-32 screw stand off, thread it into the drive, and use that to mount it to the other side of the 5-1/4 bay.

Did that a lot to really old reused cases where there were a ton of 5-1/4 bays but only one 3.5 bay.

Bigger hammer and a concrete surface. Three good whacks to the thin sheet metal casing (opposite the drive motor/PCB) should shatter the platters inside.
You can also buy a sharp punch that looks like this and punch thru the sheetmetal side to really get those platters broke.

Realistically if they’re already failed, nobody is going through the effort to send these disks through any kind of speciality recovery for a random john q public anyway.

Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

3 sticky notes telling me to “go get that incremental backup working”,
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of date

I’m currently half way thru building a ZFS array using (5) 8tb Ironwolf Pro drives. I’m modelling and 3d printing a custom drive cage with brackets to hold them all inside the shitty Dell tower case I have dedicated to it. Hoping I can get it done sometime Sunday, I’m on V2 of the drive cage print and it takes like 8 hours to do lol.

your hardware ain’t shit until it’s a first gen core2duo in a random Dell office PC and 2gb of memory that you specifically only use just because it’s a cheaper way to get x86 when you can’t use your raspberry pi.

Also they lie most of the time and it may technically run fine on more memory, especially if it’s older when dimm capacities were a lot lower than they can be now. It just won’t be “supported”.

Get a used SFF office PC low profile card off Ebay. They often have chipset wattages around 25 or so and easily run on slot power only

Something like this: https://www.ebay.com/p/1958445856 (idea only, not endorsing this seller).

Anything of a semi modern format with a pcie interface thata not an outright scam card will be fine for VGA no-driver video output. IME older AMD/ATI cards seem to boot better than oder NVidia cards…

Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.

If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.

The absolute best bang for your buck new GPU’s for decode/encode are Intel ARC GPU’s. They use Intel’s Quick Sync Video system which is some of the best supported encode/decode libraries out there, and they’re cheap.

An ARC A380 is easily had for $110, runs entirely off 75w PCIe slot power requiring no additional PSU wires, and supports H264/H265/AV1 encode. It’s a no brainer.

As long as it physically fits the slot, it should not have an issue with the lower PCIe bandwidth. The lower end GPU’s really need very little even for video encode.

If its just for her, I don’t really care what content I host for family unless it straight up nazi/gay hate shit. New age “found christian” movies are massive yuck, but innocuous otherwise. She’s gonna consume them regardless of whether you host them or not.

Move it to its own library, make sure to rip in low quality (480p low bitrate) so you’re not spending too much disk space in her, and let it be. It’s not worth driving a rift in the family over.