I just recently started my journey setting up Plex with *Arr and have had a blast. I have the setup running on a raspberry Pi. Before I start buying a bunch of external hard drives, I went searching for some dedicated server hardware to comparison shop. Am I crazy to consider buying an old tower server for this, or will a raspberry Pi work just fine for this purpose? I don’t have that much experience but I do enjoy a good challenge.
You could also ask over in [email protected] . I mostly mention the power consumption, because of you an “old tower server” even if cheap might consume quite a bit and efficiency has improved by a lot. So even if the older hardware is cheaper you’d probably get that back from saving electricity over time.
I think it makes sense to think a bit about your needs and budget. Does noise matter? Another question would be how much storage you want and if you need redundancy. SSD prices have fallen quite a bit, so even 4tb SSDs aren’t that expensive anymore.
If you’d be fine with that, then there are quite a few cheap intel based (for quicksync) mini PCs for sale that could be an option.
If you’d want more storage and are looking at larger capacity HDDs, then you’d have to decide if you want to build yourself or buy a prebuild nas.
I’m sadly not quite up to date on what specific models are the best atm.