Building a server to store media

April 17, 2025

Motivation

• My school’s Google storage was no longer unlimited
• My old external hard drive was already half full, and I wanted to be prepared for when it runs out of space
• It’s fun to build things and learn more about servers/hosting as a frontend engineer

Hardware

I wanted this to be an ITX build because I’m keeping it in my living room, and I wanted it to be decently small and presentable.

All parts were purchased second hand, except for the hard drives and cables

• Jonsbo N2 (Facebook Marketplace)
• Noctua A12x15 case fan (eBay)
• Corsair SFX SF750 Platinum PSU (Craigslist)
• Intel i5-8500 (Reddit)
  • cooled by a Noctua NH-L9i CPU (FBM)
• ASRock IMB-1210-D (”industrial” ITX motherboard) (Reddit)
• 16gb DDR4 SODIMM RAM (Reddit)
  • might upgrade to 32gb
• 2 x Seagate Exos X20 18tb drives (goharddrive.com)
• accessories
  • 6 x SATA cable (Amazon)
  • fan guards to replace the Jonsbo default mesh ones (Amazon)

Software

I was deciding between the following:

• Unraid - paid
• OpenMediaVault - made for slightly slower machines
• TrueNAS Scale - seemed like a good balance

I knew I wanted a storage-first OS, but the ability to run some apps was also a pretty big factor. I chose TrueNAS Scale because it seems pretty popular, user-friendly, and is open source! My storage setup is also not super complex and I don’t mind dealing with migrations/manually expanding the server in the future.

Storage

• I created a pool running mirror between the two disks
• decided this because the whole point of the server is redundancy/backup
• the tradeoffs of speed/storage vs. safety vs. cost are worth it to me

Apps

• Immich - Google Photos replacement (including the AI! but excluding the sharing 😢)
• Tailscale - VPN so I can access the server remotely
• Jellyfin - self-hosted Netflix!

Nice things

• really easy to set up Jellyfin, Tailscale
• things mostly just work!
• really easy to access files from devices on network, don’t need to plug in drive
• white noise machine?

Tricky things

• importing data from external hard drive - NTFS, used rsync, the web UI console times out (I ultimately needed to ssh into server from my desktop and then started rsync)
• Immich setup was a pain - custom host paths don’t work for the postgres directories
• not as quiet as I would like (ideally it’s near silent) because it’s a small machine and the case fan runs at 100% (even though it’s a Noctua)
• RAM might be a bottleneck
• need a monitor to setup, but router is in living room and didn’t have a DP cable at the time, had to move things back and forth and borrow a cable from a friend

Useful resources

• todo

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Thanks for reading :)

Last updated April 17, 2025