So, I have an old 3rd or 4th gen Intel NUC that’s I used to use to run Kodibuntu back in the day. I’m thinking of repurposing it into a low power home server to run the *arr suite, Jellyfin and nextcloud plus maybe some other bits. Nothing too taxing that I can see.
Obviously I need hard drive space to go with this. Is a USB enclosure, directly attached, going to be fast enough? Or do I need to go to a NAS of some kind? Alternatively, my router has a USB connection for a HDD - would that be better?
I run my stuff on a NUC 10 and yeah, it’s kind of a bummer they have 1 slot inside for storage, right?
I have two external USB drives plugged into mine, one for media and the other for backups. That’s plenty fast enough for my uses, including Jellyfin (movies and tv shows, a little transcoding) and about 10 other low-usage docker containers. YMMV.
Same setup here, two USB drives dangling from my NUC. One of them is even notably slow for a USB drive. Still not an issue at all for home use. I’d probably need a dozen or more people all watching different things on Jellyfin at the same time before it even approached being a problem.
Old Intel NUC running external drives via USB C is exactly our setup. Jellyfin + Navidrome and other misc stuff
Disclaimer: this is not from experience so perhaps someone who do run servers with USB HDDs can comment on long term stability of USB as an interface.
Technically speaking, even USB 3 gen 1 (5Gb/s (gigabits per sec)) is far more than enough to saturate a broadband connection (probably under 1Gb/s). Assuming you’re going to use mechanical HDDs, best case they can transfer around 200MB/s (that’s megabytes per sec)), so no problem there either.
You might want to use external 3.5 inch HDDs as they have separate power supplies (less picky on power supplied from USB) and are much more likely to be CMR (which performs better than SMR, best if you check the specific model’s spec to make sure it is CMR) than 2.5 inch ones.
I’ve had a USB drive connected to my server for years with no issues other than being slow. It’s a 5400 rpm 2.5" drive connected over USB2.
USB is fine, but remember that if the plug comes out, you can get corrupt data. Make sure you use a really good journaled file system. No FAT partitions.
USB 2.0 maxes out at 480Mbps, so won’t even saturate a gigabit network connection. And you won’t even reach that for a USB Mass Storage device. So, make sure you’re using USB 3.
If at some point you’re going to add more hardware it makes sense with a NAS. Otherwise just add USB I guess.
I have recently been buying cables. I’ve come to the conclusion that a Man’s purpose in life is to collect them and put them in a drawer.
Anyway these cables are usb 3.0 to 3.5" HDD cables with a power supply.
This has allowed me to mount 3 old HDDs I had gathering dust. These are the main storage for my NAS which is OMV through Proxmox.
They work fine, I’m able to watch Plex and also have a friend that watches my Plex.
They were all of £15 each.
I think NUC’s internal drive can be upgraded.
USB drive would be fast enough for anything going out to or coming from the Internet.
NAS is a cheap(ish) way to get lots of storage.
I wouldn’t attach storage to my router for the use you’re describing.
I have two old usb2 4tb drives attached, and the only issue I run into is a bit of delay at the start of a video in jellyfin. My jellyfin is running in a container in the Nuc though, not natively, and it’s a Celeron from a while back, so…
I have a somewhat dated (but decently specd) NUC running Proxmox, and it’s the backbone of my home lab. No issues to date.
This was my exact setup for years. I had a J3455 NUC and increased its memory to 16GB and installed Proxmox. It worked really well.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package
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