If anyone owns this device, what’s the maximum amount of storage I can insert into the 2.5" SATA bay? I keep looking online, but I can’t find it.
SATA storage has limits but non that you can currently reach. The maximum amount you can put is the biggest disk you can find.
Actually, another question if you don’t mind. Would a GPU be useful for anything home server related? I mainly plan to use it for hosting media (shows, movies, music, books, etc.) and a bunch of tiny services (microbin, writefreely, etc.) I thought I was getting a sweat deal with the integrated GPU, but I read that you can’t transcode with two GPUs at the same time. Plus Intel QuickSync doesn’t allow you to use another GPU while it’s being utilized. Would it be smarter to buy a newer model with a better CPU and higher specs for the same amount of money?
My home server simply serves files to the local network so I don’t have experience in what I’m about to say, but I know Plex people often like to have a GPU for transcoding content to a format more suited to streaming after they download it.
My view is that you need a GPU somewhere or the system won’t boot, but if you need actual GPU compute then integrated graphics just won’t cut it, quick sync or not. I recommend having an integrated GPU in general as they’re usually not that much more expensive and don’t use a PCIe slot, and of course that’s one less part than can fail.
If you’re hosting for yourself only I don’t think you need an external GPU at all unless you want to do machine learning tasks.
My main use case is sharing with friends and family, so honestly I might just go for the G4. I don’t plan to use Plex tho, Jellyfin is what I’m going with. Gonna try to go the exclusively FOSS route if I can. Once again thank you for all the help.
The usual setup is to install Proxmox on your G4 and then run a jellyfin VM on it. The integrated gpu is passed to that vm which allows it to transcode the mediadata to weak clients like a browser. So the question really is ‘what is your TV setup’? If you wanne stream content to the builtin browser of yer TV from the G4, or if you have a mediaplayer connected to it over smb ? I prefer the latter and never use transcoding, though i have a working setup.
I was just gonna try and install the Tizen client for TV but those are interesting options. I barely use my TV and prefer watching on a monitor, so it isn’t a huge priority for me. I’m probably in the minority there.
Thank you so much, hopefully I can make this bad boy last for a while.
