12bitmisfit

5 hubs deep and 127 devices per usb controller (not port)

To confuse this more many usb3 or newer controllers won't handle more than 32 devices.

Now add to that most 7 port usb hubs are actually 2x 4 port hubs.

You may be starting to see why it is so hard to definitively say if a certain usb setup will work or not without testing the actual hardware.

Side note, a lot of usb devices even count as 2 devices due to hw encryption chips, like wd external hard drives.

I'm not 100% on your exact stack but it sounds to me like a job for a reverse proxy.

Whatever you're most comfortable with. It's a simple enough ask that you can do it in Ubuntu server or Debian quite easily.

I would recommend at least using docker but you don't have to.

Truenas isn't very forgiving with drive configuration. I really like it but it isn't great for randomly adding drives here and there. Unraid might be a better choice for home usage. I have never had good luck with their built in app stuff but I've also never really tried past it not doing what I want.

I run truenas with a ubuntu server vm and docker some stuff in that. I also run proxmox on another server and a dev server running Ubuntu server that I docker things on.

Modded minecraft servers are heavily dependent on single threaded performance. For more vanilla servers paper helps a lot. For forge I highly recommend trying mohist. It isn't compatible with all forge mods but it works well enough that you can just replace the server jar in many modpacks and see a large performance boost.

The biggest thing that slows down mc servers in my experience is world gen. Pre generating the world and adding a world border can help a lot.

I've not done a larger scale fabric server so I can't offer much advice in optimizing it but the client speed ups available through fabric look very impressive.

If you are running a server without world borders or with a lot of simultaneous players I'd look in depth on what ssd you're saving the world to. You want dram cache, random write speeds are way more important than sequential. If you can find an Intel optane for cheap they are pretty amazing. The ssd is less important than your cpu and having enough ram to run the server.

Generally an older gaming pc is better than an older server. Again you are targeting single threaded performance. If you are purchasing hardware it might make more sense to go with lower end new hardware than higher end old hardware. It's all about trade offs for your use case and budget. For a long time I just used my main pc to play games and host servers (ram is cheaper than another pc) but I tinker too much to keep good 'server' uptime.

Transcoding can get pretty taxing on a system but any semi modern quad core can handle a few 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Plus you can use a gpu for transcoding. The nice thing is it scales with core count pretty well so older server or workstation hardware works well.