Via USB yep! The SeaGate expansion is a 3.5HDD, I believe. I spent a lot of time worrying about read/write speed and such but in practice, there is no issues streaming media from it. Even fully remote from my network there is no stuttering or issues.

Like you I lurked the self hosting communities until I made the dive myself. I bought a used HP Elitedesk Mink 800 G3, not a particularly powerful machine, and installed Ubuntu server. I started playing around with docker compose detuos for various services and eventually committed to running immich, qbittorrent, and Plex on it, along with hosting some dedicated servers for various games depending on what I felt like playing at the time. It all worked easily enough and I figured out things as I went along such as domain names (ddns), security hardening, and reverse proxies.

I picked it up around 100 euro, got a secondhand switch so I could have both my PC and it on the same line from the house router to my office.

I have two of them now so I can split game servers onto their own machine to save rrsourcss, and recently also picked up a Seagate expansion drive of 10Tb to use for media storage for the originak one. Still lots to learn, but that’s the fun!

Let me know what you think of it! I had some minor issues with my secondary hard drive, but they were entirely my fault, I had a lot of backups on it so didn’t initially reformat it from NTFS which I was using for windows to ext4 which is a native Linux format. It would sometimes not mount the drive on boot, but after transferring the backups to an external drive and reformatting the internal drive it was all good.

I gave up on windows 11 last week after my downloads folder decided to stop opening any more. Every other folder worked fine, and I could use a save dialogue to see and navigate inside downloads, but if I opened the folder run file explorer I was met woth a never ending “working on it…” Screen. Hours of trawling useless Microsoft posts to see its a common issue but none of the suggested fixes worked.

I installed Pop! OS, which is essentially Ubuntu but Ive heard works very well with games. Few small hiccoughs getting used to the UI paradigm shift but its motoring along now with no problems. My 5 year old desktop is running much smoother with less overall resource use too. Feels snappier.

Every bodies talking about 86 46, but what about 64 46? that’s my number.