comments:
A cheap N100 mini pc like a BeeLink S12 is enough to do that.. $140 a year or so ago when I was buying them. Double that now but still 1/3rd what your budget is. 40 years IT experience mostly in Unix, Linux, hardware, administration, networking and security. I have a basement server room (my NOC) with a couple racks of mostly rack mount hardware. Duel 20A dedicated circuits now used as backup to a full solar setup just for the NOC… And my Plex/JellyFin server is… a BeeLink S12 mini PC with 16GB ram and a 2TB NVME.. though for most people the included 500gb NVME would be fine. I have a rather large media library. 😜 The N100 sips power.. seriously.. 5W idle and maybe 20W if it’s being used heavily. A dozen music streams 24/7/365. 2 4K scenic streams run 24/7/365 on 2 large vertically mounted TVs in a windowless basement room. I can still stream a 4K movies whenever I want and the kids can have several 1080p streams going. Additionally.. you can virtualize it with Proxmox… run your Plex/JellyFin servers from one VM and setup your ARRs in other VMs or containers. Done for $329… on a BeeLink S12 Pro with 4-cores and 16GB ram and 500GB NVME. I had to look it up to see what they were selling for today. The increase is due to ram and storage cost increases. This is exactly what I use for my media server. Note: I have a separate 24-bay NAS for my media… while you can use the included Win11 OS, it’s better to install something like Debian if using a single OS or Proxmox (Debian based) if virtualizing. Once the new OS is installed, i just mount the Share from the NAS, install Plex / JellyFin and point them to the Media mount points.