I am still looking for a tool that would capture live streams on YouTube and can automatically resume when connection problems occur. yt-dlp handles the streams well, except it often needs to be restarted for longer running streams, which requires constant attention. Does this „fire and forget“ yt-dlp or does it keep watch over it?
~2000 movies ~200 tv shows
Many English only, many German and English, some German only. A few in different languages, if it’s the original language.
~50TB
Mostly 1080p h264. Lately, due to free space running out, I have started prioritizing and redownloading accordingly. Low bitrate h265 1080p for less important stuff, 4K h265 for important things and normal bitrate h264/265 (preferably the latter) 1080p for everything else.
I am running plex server on a low power i3-7xxx. thanks to the igpu that thing can handle a few 1080p transcodes at once. Even 4K HDR transcoding is possible, though I never get more than one or two of them at the same time. Unless you need it to encode subtitles into the video or you have many simultaneous HDR to SDR conversions going at once any cheap old PC with an intel 7th gen or newer and igpu should do well. Oh, and I don’t think they can handle AV1, but that is still very uncommon.
WinSCP for editing server config
Rsync for manual transfers over slow connections
ZFS send/receive for what it was meant for
Samba for everything else that involves mounting on clients or other servers.
I have a similar setup and in the end just went for a cheap chinese („ESKEVE“) 4x HDMI 2.0 KVM switch that supports 4K60. No problems except HDR does not work properly, which is not useful on my monitor anyway. Laptops are on USB-C docks with HDMI 2.0 out, PC uses a passive DP to HDMI cable.
Any HDD should be able to get at least 100MB/s sequential write speed. Unfortunately torrent writes are usually very random, which just kills hdd performance. Multiple parallel downloads or concurrent playback from the same disk will only make it worse.
Using a SSD for temporary files will absolutely help. It should be big enough to hold all the files you are downloading at any one time.
You could also try to find a write cache setting that works for you. That way what would usually be many small writes can be combined to bigger chunks in memory before sending them to storage. Depending on how much ram is available I would start at 1GB or so and if it is still bottlenecking try in- or decreasing until it improves. Of course always stay in the range of free ram.
Back when I was torrenting (ages ago) write cache helped a lot. It should be somewhere in the settings menu.
l2arc is a read cache. Slog only is for synchronous writes.
I would get a laptop as well in that situation. Just make sure it is one that supports setting the charging threshold. Having it on all the time will kill the battery quickly if it keeps charging from 95 to 100%. It’s much better to keep it below 80%, which should still give enough “UPS time”.
The battery will also not electrically protect the motherboard from voltage swings. So get a good power adapter that can handle the voltages.
Whatever you do, do look at a few different options. Some refurbished computers can have huge price differences between sellers.