With the cost of SSD'S dropping I'm looking to retire my bulky, moving-parts server, which is in a mid sized computer tower with several multi terabyte HDD's.
It has been a little over 10 years since I did that build and it has served me well. It's on 24/7 and two of the drives precede the Thailand floods. All three drives lived in /storage and I used LVM to make them look like one giant disk to the rest of the OS/software (on Debian). >!Don't need redundancy and backup is isolated elsewhere, so I'd love to preserve the same storage structure so my configs can transfer over with fewer migration issues.!<
- What are the limitations of using my spare RPi3B, at least in terms of storage capacity and number of drives?
- Should I/can I use internal ssd's with USB adapters, in case I want to upgrade the board later and preserve the storage?
- Will I be able to transcode on the fly via Plex/Jellyfin to stream videos away from home i.e. can the CPU handle that?
Keep in mind that this Pi would be headless, as is my current big box setup. Curious what the community's thoughts might be and if anyone uses their pi's in a similar setup!
Limits on capacity and number of drives is primarily going to be IO. IIRC, the USB bus is shared with the network, and they'll content for bandwidth. Not sure how else you expect to connect the disks, so yeah use USB adapters.
You absolutely won't be able to transcode on the fly. Not a chance. You can decode up to about 1080p @60fps but trying to transcode in realtime won't work, even if you compile for the VideoCore GPU and use hardware, it's just not enough.