I don’t have specific troubleshooting advice to give, but I have been using an Nvidia Shield Pro as my main streaming device for about 4 years now. It is overpriced for what it is, but it has been rock solid for streaming via both Jellyfin and Plex.

The official Jellyfin app is definitely not as polished as Plex, but it has consistently worked for me on the Shield.

I mean, 20TB drives will work in an array just as well as 8TB 😉

Honestly with the price of refurb enterprise drives, it’s really hard not to justify not going that route and just keeping a spare drive formatted on warm standby at all times.

A bit of a digression though, since OP isn’t looking to cram a bunch of drives into an old mini case.

Fully agree.

I’ve purchased refurb drives from both them and GoHardDrive.com. So far I’m 5/5 for a mix of Exos and HGST Ultrastar drives working perfectly out of the box.

Anytime these drives pop up on Slickdeals, the thread is full of 3 types of people: People who have never bought a refurb/recert drive but insist they are all going to burn your house down, people who have bought several with no issue, and people who have received a failing drive that the seller promptly replaced.

If you are buying used datacenter drives, larger capacity drives are also likely to be newer, which tips the scales a little more in that direction.

Seconding Plex / Plexamp if the use case involves streaming remotely. Probably the easiest to get up and running for remote access.

I’m not sure about the capabilities of hosting on a Pi, but it should be straightforward to run a couple different apps in parallel to test and compare features (I’m currently doing exactly that with Plex and Jellyfin)

For a quick and dirty clean room run the shower really hot for a few minutes to make a bunch of steam and then wait for the humidity to naturally equalize, boom you got a few minutes to do your swap job.

I’ve never heard of this… what’s the idea behind it? That you get the RH near 100%, and any dust particles will be a nucleation point for water to condense on, causing them to literally rain out of the air?

On the power disable feature topic, I’ve only bought a few used enterprise drives from Goharddrive.com and Serverpartsdeals.com, but they both included a handy little SATA power adapter with each drive for exactly that reason.

The first desktop I installed them in worked just fine with the factory PSU cables, but when I upgraded I was left scratching my head for a few minutes until I remembered those adapters!