Hello!

I’ve had Linux server/s at home for hobby and fun for years. My current “main” server is quite old, quite slow, and in need of an upgrade.

I acquired a used Thinkstation Mini SFF, which blows the old one out of the water, being like 15% of the size. The heaviest usage is a Plex server for my and my family. Current setup has worked well but it’s unable to transcode properly, without a lot of noise and only some codecs/resolutions.

I installed Proxmox on this Thinkstation device and it works very well. I migrated my WP family blog from a Virtualbox to Proxmox VM, worked perfectly.

I then used the helper scripts to install Plex for testing. I got hardware acceleration working with the i5-8500T/UHD 630. Did some testing and it seems to work great.

I have yet to migrate the server and the data. The Thinkstation has ~320gb SSD disk which is way to small for my video collection.

So I’m what I’m wondering, what is the best next step? I can one or more similar devices for cheap/nothing.

I don’t really understand the nodes function of Proxmox properly.

Should I:

A) Use my current one as a “main” node, install large SSD/HDD on 1 or 2 similar devices and connect them as storage nodes?

B) Add large USB SSD/HDD to my existing Proxmox device?

C) Setup a simple NAS device and connect Proxmox to that?

D) Something else?

After that’s decided, I could then move the Plex installation/setup from my current server to the Proxmox setup.

The usage is not heavy, 3 concurrent streams are rare. Media is currently mostly 1080p.

My main concern is the Plex setup, but if one setup is more futureproof, smarter, handier, cooler, nicer than the other, I’d greatly appreciate your input.