this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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Hi, I'm self hosting a jellyfin server and I wondering if anyone could give advice abt my setup. I have an internal 2tb ssd and I'm using a external 2tb ssd. I'm looking to make my setup more cohesive and less of a headache. I want more storage for media but I don't know where to start. I looked online to price compare drives and I saw a 14tb hhd for $160, is this a good price for a hard drive? I also haven't been able to make tdarr work with my gpu so most of my media is probably taking more space than it needs. Any advice would be appreciated!

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[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Separating your services from your storage makes things a lot easier in my opinion.
Setup one machine as a NAS and have that manage your (preferably redundant and backuped if storing personal photos or other unique data) storage, then share it to the rest of your selfhosting over nfs and smb.
You could either go for a prebuilt NAS like Ugreen NASync DXP2800 or build your own m-itx with a Jonsbo N2 case and an N100 motherboard or whatever you're comfortable with.

Your jellyfin server then accesses the media libraries with a simple mount (/mnt/media). Same with your tdarr server and tdarr nodes.
It's much easier to experiment and reinstall services when you have your storage separated from them.

I can't buy a 14tb hdd for that price here in Sweden, but I have no idea about your local prices. Is it new or refurb?

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sounds nice to have it separate, but it's not hard to reinstall services or even your whole os (as long as you are partitioned correctly) while your data is on the same machine/disk.

Two machines does sound overkill for Jellyfin (and 99.99% of self hosters).

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nothing is hard when you know what you're doing. :)
Being able to completely wipe your compute machine and not worry is nice and imo easier.

For only Jellyfin, then I agree - if that is where it stops you could run it all on an N100 integrated motherboard and have a lean sleek system that hosts your files and your streaming server. But when your services starts being too much for the N100 then it's nice to separate it a bit and for me it feels natural to split it between compute/storage.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 4 points 1 week ago

Yes, I have a single machine where most of my storage is. I host my jellyfin server there, as well as all the home directories for all the users of my systems. Login to any system in the house and you always have the same desktop and data. If I want to replace a system, reinstall or distro hop. It's just a few lines to copy into fstab and a few apps/flatpaks to download at most.

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity, do yoy know how Jellyfin handles network failures with mounted network drives?

I had a navidrome server where once my network machine failed to start properly, the entire database was deleted because it looked to the server like I deleted all of my files. I luckily had my favorites cached on my phone client and was able to restore most of my playlists from there but it was still an incredibly annoying thing to go through. I have since turned off automatic scanning of files for that service since that seemed like the only way to prevent this happening again

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Just like navidrome it seems like Jellyfin reacts to failed mounts by emptying libraries.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-solved-network-not-mounted-before-jellyfin-starts

With version 10.11.0 they offer a built in backup system for db/metadata/subtitles though so once access is restored it's easy to restore any metadata changes you've done to your library. (As long as you got a backup since before that is)
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/backup-and-restore/#create-a-backup