Via USB yep! The SeaGate expansion is a 3.5HDD, I believe. I spent a lot of time worrying about read/write speed and such but in practice, there is no issues streaming media from it. Even fully remote from my network there is no stuttering or issues.

Like you I lurked the self hosting communities until I made the dive myself. I bought a used HP Elitedesk Mink 800 G3, not a particularly powerful machine, and installed Ubuntu server. I started playing around with docker compose detuos for various services and eventually committed to running immich, qbittorrent, and Plex on it, along with hosting some dedicated servers for various games depending on what I felt like playing at the time. It all worked easily enough and I figured out things as I went along such as domain names (ddns), security hardening, and reverse proxies.

I picked it up around 100 euro, got a secondhand switch so I could have both my PC and it on the same line from the house router to my office.

I have two of them now so I can split game servers onto their own machine to save rrsourcss, and recently also picked up a Seagate expansion drive of 10Tb to use for media storage for the originak one. Still lots to learn, but that’s the fun!

In his later letters to, and I could be wrong about the recipient, Robert E Howard he lamented that he wasted so much time being afraid of other cultures, and recognised his xenophobia as ignorance.