After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I’ve only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I’ve got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.
80TB array here. I’ve recently started using Maintainerr to delete things my friends and family request via seerr if it goes unwatched.
I deleted over 15TB of things that was requested but never watched, a lot of entire shows of multiple seasons where someone only watched 2 episodes. (this was years of request history it ran over)
It was that or spending money on more 20TB drives and I just don’t have it in me to spend that money with current prices.
I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.
I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.
If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.
Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080).
4k content is a bit sharper, but I can barely notice the difference, in games or video content at TV viewing distance.
Yeah, personally, I’ve noticed that I notice and appreciate very high quality streams when they are there but don’t notice lower quality ones in a bad way (where “lower quality” is still like 1080p, 720p is more noticeable).
40TB, but that’s way more than I would realistically need if I was better about deleting old content. I have shows saved that I haven’t watched in years. With the *arr stack, there is very little reason to keep a lot of media saved, because reacquiring it again in the future is dead simple.
I have about 35TB. The movies are the hardest for me as it’s nice to have lots of options without having to download. With a show, it’s easier to make a decision to grab a season. Movies choices are more spontaneous
You’ll need to do some config on the actual services as well. Mostly in regards to telling it how you want to add things to your wanted list, how it should search for files, how you want it to download files, how it should handle downloaded files to be compatible with your media server, etc… Docker-compose can do a lot, but the *arr services are too granular to define everything directly in the compose file. You’ll need to actually configure the services after they are booted up via docker.
My stack includes the following: Prowlarr for tracker management. This defines the various search methods, and makes them available for the rest of the stack. Seerr for media requests. This manages what shows/movies are on the stack’s search list. Sonarr for TV shows. Seerr tells it what to search for. It takes the relevant trackers from Prowlarr, and uses them to search for wanted media. It grabs media from the search based on quality profiles. For instance, my profiles are set to exclude 3D media, because none of my screens can display 3D. This is synced with my torrent client for automated downloads. When a download is completed, it automatically creates a hardlink in the relevant media folder for my media server to find. It uses the specific naming scheme for the media program, so the program can automatically detect info about the files. Radarr for movies. Same basic concept as Sonarr. Cleanuparr for download management (and some basic malware protection). Tracks downloads’ ratios, and automatically removes them from my torrent list when the ratio/time threshold is met. It also tracks “slow” torrents and will automatically retry them if a torrent is stalled/slow for too long. Also does some basic “movie.mp4.exe” torrent checking, to automatically block malicious downloads that get grabbed by the rest of the stack. Bazarr for subtitle downloads. Automatically analyzes my media, and finds matching subtitle files for my media server to use.
Each of these will require specific config steps. For instance, Prowlarr will need to know which torrent/usenet trackers you want to use. Sonarr will need to know how to interface with your download client, which files to grab based on quality profiles, and how to rename files during import.
I just setup the ARR stack and you can use a docker compose file to manage all the services.
Then you need to create individual account for the services but that is straight forward.
I would only ever buy new HDDs tbh. But also, I bought a stack of 8TB HDDs in 2023 for €180 a piece and those same models are now €300… Thanks, Obama.
Anyway, I have 4 of those, 1 is parity, so 24TB of actual space. I started with a 2TB collection from my laptop harddrive and I’m now at 7TB used. I used to be more cautious with my space and I still have my *arrs set to stingy profiles now, to make downloads faster, but I also download and keep a lot more.
I do sometimes go through and delete stuff that I won’t watch (either watched and didn’t like or never watched). But that’s more so I won’t get tempted to watch it than for the space currently.
a random collection of NVMEs, SSDs and HDDs in my desktop PC, totallying about 12TB-ish I think. That’s for TV and films, I keep my music in navidrome since Jellyfin has (used to have?) serious issues streaming music, in particular only ever being able to play the first track of an album, no matter what the client.
Use mkvtoolnix and handbrake. You can quickly drop and add elements of a file with mkvtoonix and handbrake will convert most anything to H265. Its pretty fast with gpu encoding.
I have a 2TB ssd for my whole server. I had 2x 2TB SSD in my pc that were collecting dust, so I took them out and used one for my server and one for my backup server.
I bought some low capacity SSD for 20$ each to install Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server and was lucky that they both had only roughly 800 hours only, so that at least worked out for me
Side question here: how big is your storage pool for those of you that runs a jellyfin server?
I just started a Jellyfin server, but with the current hdd prices, it fills up fast and I need to manage my library a lot more than I’d like
75TB
4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I’ve only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I’ve got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.
80TB array here. I’ve recently started using Maintainerr to delete things my friends and family request via seerr if it goes unwatched. I deleted over 15TB of things that was requested but never watched, a lot of entire shows of multiple seasons where someone only watched 2 episodes. (this was years of request history it ran over)
It was that or spending money on more 20TB drives and I just don’t have it in me to spend that money with current prices.
I just have a 2TB server, for all my services, so I allocate 1TB for the ARR stack and the rest for my other services.
80TB would be nice haha.
I should probably add maintainerr to my services, would help me keep my files space low.
I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.
I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.
If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.
10TB. 80% full. I have 2TB that I can add if I need. At this point I’ve maintained 80% for about 1 year.
10TB was pocket change not too long ago, now it’s so expensive. Unreal.
I’m lucky because my TV is 1080p so i can download lower resolution movies and series.
Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080).
4k content is a bit sharper, but I can barely notice the difference, in games or video content at TV viewing distance.
Yup, I only keep 4k of stuff that was really shot/scanned in 4k and absolutely worth it. 90% of the 4k content out there is 1080p upscaled anyway.
Yeah, personally, I’ve noticed that I notice and appreciate very high quality streams when they are there but don’t notice lower quality ones in a bad way (where “lower quality” is still like 1080p, 720p is more noticeable).
Like 4k looks great but 1080p still looks normal.
40TB, but that’s way more than I would realistically need if I was better about deleting old content. I have shows saved that I haven’t watched in years. With the *arr stack, there is very little reason to keep a lot of media saved, because reacquiring it again in the future is dead simple.
I have about 35TB. The movies are the hardest for me as it’s nice to have lots of options without having to download. With a show, it’s easier to make a decision to grab a season. Movies choices are more spontaneous
Just resist the urge to download everything at max quality. Some movies don’t need to be 4k, HD is enough.
I really only do certain movies in 4k. Jellyfin says there’s about 48 hundred movies
40TB is wild.
My plan is to pile a bit of money and try to buy used lots of HDD and test them for health and create a JBOD storage.
Do docker files handle all the setup of these or do I have to learn stuff?
You’ll need to do some config on the actual services as well. Mostly in regards to telling it how you want to add things to your wanted list, how it should search for files, how you want it to download files, how it should handle downloaded files to be compatible with your media server, etc… Docker-compose can do a lot, but the *arr services are too granular to define everything directly in the compose file. You’ll need to actually configure the services after they are booted up via docker.
My stack includes the following:
Prowlarr for tracker management. This defines the various search methods, and makes them available for the rest of the stack.
Seerr for media requests. This manages what shows/movies are on the stack’s search list.
Sonarr for TV shows. Seerr tells it what to search for. It takes the relevant trackers from Prowlarr, and uses them to search for wanted media. It grabs media from the search based on quality profiles. For instance, my profiles are set to exclude 3D media, because none of my screens can display 3D. This is synced with my torrent client for automated downloads. When a download is completed, it automatically creates a hardlink in the relevant media folder for my media server to find. It uses the specific naming scheme for the media program, so the program can automatically detect info about the files.
Radarr for movies. Same basic concept as Sonarr.
Cleanuparr for download management (and some basic malware protection). Tracks downloads’ ratios, and automatically removes them from my torrent list when the ratio/time threshold is met. It also tracks “slow” torrents and will automatically retry them if a torrent is stalled/slow for too long. Also does some basic “movie.mp4.exe” torrent checking, to automatically block malicious downloads that get grabbed by the rest of the stack.
Bazarr for subtitle downloads. Automatically analyzes my media, and finds matching subtitle files for my media server to use.
Each of these will require specific config steps. For instance, Prowlarr will need to know which torrent/usenet trackers you want to use. Sonarr will need to know how to interface with your download client, which files to grab based on quality profiles, and how to rename files during import.
Thanks for this, this arr stack and HA are my first steps into this world.
I have only ever torrented directly off sites, I want to set this up it seems like an unbelieveable time save.
How do I go about getting trackers or usenets?
I just setup the ARR stack and you can use a docker compose file to manage all the services. Then you need to create individual account for the services but that is straight forward.
I would only ever buy new HDDs tbh. But also, I bought a stack of 8TB HDDs in 2023 for €180 a piece and those same models are now €300… Thanks, Obama.
Anyway, I have 4 of those, 1 is parity, so 24TB of actual space. I started with a 2TB collection from my laptop harddrive and I’m now at 7TB used. I used to be more cautious with my space and I still have my *arrs set to stingy profiles now, to make downloads faster, but I also download and keep a lot more.
I do sometimes go through and delete stuff that I won’t watch (either watched and didn’t like or never watched). But that’s more so I won’t get tempted to watch it than for the space currently.
You can get refurbished HHDs for much cheaper
As long as they have a 2 year warranty you are good
Yeah but only in non-striping RAID. I had one of those fail after less than one year, RAID5 saved me from data loss.
8 GB
6 x 4 TB HDDs, got them used for $40 each
How many hours when you got them?
The one I find have a high number of hours
They see to each be somewhere between 20k to 60k hours of time on hours
a random collection of NVMEs, SSDs and HDDs in my desktop PC, totallying about 12TB-ish I think. That’s for TV and films, I keep my music in navidrome since Jellyfin has (used to have?) serious issues streaming music, in particular only ever being able to play the first track of an album, no matter what the client.
1TB HDD, 80% full :') Although I’m using a laptop as a server, so my options are a little limited
I mean, I’ve been running lots of services on 256GB, but none of them were media servers haha.
My current ARR stack is a share of 1TB on a 2TB SSD, so I get you.
2TB, but I’m also new to this. I am literally running ffmpeg on some of the shows to compress them a little or dropping unnecessary audio streams
Use mkvtoolnix and handbrake. You can quickly drop and add elements of a file with mkvtoonix and handbrake will convert most anything to H265. Its pretty fast with gpu encoding.
I have a 2TB ssd for my whole server. I had 2x 2TB SSD in my pc that were collecting dust, so I took them out and used one for my server and one for my backup server.
So I can allocate about 1TB for Jellyfin
3 x 16Tb Seagate disks. One is for parity. So around 29Tb of space. Got them used about 2 years ago.
When you got them, how many hours were they at?
The HDD I see around me have 60k hours ++ so I am a bit frisky considering what they ask for
lol that’s almost 7 years? Insane they lasted that long to begin with
I bought some low capacity SSD for 20$ each to install Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server and was lucky that they both had only roughly 800 hours only, so that at least worked out for me
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