A few suggestions:

Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.

I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.

Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.

It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.

My fiance triggers his all the time by air drumming or throwing his phone around haha.

It’ll be like “were you in a crash?? Do you wanna call 911??”

Metube docker image worked pretty great for me as a downloader

As in watch the media not on my own network or have other users do the same from their homes.

Music is another big one that jellyfin can’t compete with Plex with in its current state. I currently have 718 GB of music that I stream with plexamp when I’m driving.

I get that it may be technically possible but that is leaps and bounds different than having my senior dad make a Plex account on his fire stick so he can watch movies with his niece, or my fiance’s boss is in the hospital with cancer right now and is watching things on his iPad.

I already have a hard time getting people to just make a Plex account and watch on my server and that’s the “easy” route.

Do you have a guide somewhere on how to set it up? I’ve poked around online and didn’t see anything short of tailscaling your container to a web browser which I don’t want to do for a few different reasons (opening ports / security mostly)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think jellyfin offers remote access to your media

I used the names of the eldrazi from magic the gathering:

Ulamog: desktop PC Emrakul: NAS / Plex server name Kozilek: NUC mini PC

Oh my god who gives a shit

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