Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3
The thing with that laptop though, is that you’re probably able to upgrade the storage and RAM if you need to. That’s valuable. I mean, hilariously expensive to do at this point, but possible none the less.
The way I see it, have a think about what you want to achieve, what self-hosted service is most important to you, and start with that. If you have 200gb of music and you’re sick of giving Spotify money, spin up a Navidrome container and a free Tailscale* account so you can stream your own music to your phone wherever you are. Then see how your laptop responds to that. If it falls over then perhaps you’ll need to have another look at your hardware, but honestly, it probably won’t.
As for the RAM, I used SSH to hook into my server yesterday so I could watch htop on it from another computer while I was importing hundreds of photos into Immich. All four CPU cores were maxed out at 100% and it sounded like a jet engine, but the RAM usage sat steady at around 5.5gb. And that’ll do for me. _ *Tailscale is magic, btw. A free account allows 100 devices, so if you’re running things just for yourself it means you can access everything wherever you are. For free. With basically no setup.
I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.
I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).