

I’ve been running my server on an old laptop and a 20TB external hard drive connected via USB. it’s not fast, there’s a multi-second delay when the drive goes to “sleep” if nobody has used jellyfin in a while, which makes it appear to not work, but once it spins up it works like normal. this has let me keep things simple and cheap. I back up to another 20TB hard drive, which I recently bought as I could finally afford it. beefy hardware is great but not necessary, if you’re okay with some limits.
fully aware! just don’t care much since its so cheap ($270 for 20 TB!) and my last externals (two 10 TBs) served without issue for ~5 years. Just gotta make sure you have backups and upgrade every few years.