What I love about your comment is that you are using more or less the same methods that were around when the RPi3 came out.

I didn’t consider weighing the storage penalty vs the cost of processor upgrades when keeping an SD or 720p version of files around. I know some people run two instances of radarr/sonarr/jellyfin for this reason. Like many, my connection is asymmetric, meaning the best I can probably serve is 1080p over WAN at maximum luck, or a few simultaneous streams mixed between 720p and 480p.

Example: Asteroid City is 18.5 GiB in 4k and 3.5 GiB in Web 720p, a roughly 5x’s file size difference. If we estimate SSD cost is ~$50/TB, 5TB of 4k content costs an extra $50 to keep 720p around for WAN streaming.

That to me justifies not upgrading processing, using instead an RPi3 for low power storage maxxing, and eating the cost in file duplication. I simply won’t be able to get on-the-fly hardware transcoding capability anywhere close to this price point.

Ngl, I was pretty bummed about the realities the previous commenters enlightened me to in this post I’m very grateful to their wisdom. But, you have given me so much new hope!

This is the best vim meme I’ve ever seen. I’m dead

I see. And if the Ethernet competes with USB for bandwidth this is probably doubly not great, even if I’m just serving files straight up over samba. Indeed, this same Pi was used as a front end (kodi) to my current server before I got a smart tv and it worked great for that. I have a smart tv now so this pi needs new use, and I want a server more compact.

I know now that my question diverges from the Pi community, but do you have any good sites that have different NAS builds using boards similar to what you posted, or communities of this kind? I think I’d like to geek out a bit creating different builds. As mentioned, it’s been some time since my last build