ZFS doesn’t require a lot of RAM, but it will use more RAM if it’s available. 32G would be plenty for a home setup. I think my home file server has 24 or 32G of RAM and ZFS. If it’s important data then stick to what you know; there’s nothing wrong with mdadm.
The BTRFS thing is cutting the power or losing the disks in the middle of a write which corrupts your data. If you don’t think that will be a problem then BTRFS is fine. I recommend ZFS personally, but it sounds like you want to use mdadm instead so basically anything will work.
If you might need to shrink your filesystem later then avoid XFS. EXT4 is relatively featureless but ol’ reliable. ZFS is good for long term data integrity and protection. BTRFS is similar to ZFS. BcacheFS is new but like a swirl of EXT4 and BTRFS. Just pick the one with the features you want.
Give webtop a try? Granted I haven’t tried anything heavy on it, but it’s been performant enough for me. Here’s a compose file if it stays formatted correctly:
services:
webtop:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest # alpine - xfce
# other tags with different bases and desktops: https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop
container_name: webtop
#security_opt:
# - seccomp:unconfined #optional
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=America/Los_Angeles
- TITLE=my_desktop #optional
volumes:
- config:/config
#- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
ports:
- 3000:3000
- 3001:3001
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
config: {}
networks: {}
Proxmox is sort of the gold standard for homelab server operating systems. Runs containers and VMs.
If you’re not into Proxmox, look into Fedora Server with Cockpit. Web UI for server management. Fedora CoreOS is an immutable variant of Server that would make more sense for a hypervisor, IMO.
First and foremost, backups. Back up everything and back up often. Immutability can’t do anything for critical hardware failure.
Issues happening on something only running container workloads isn’t common but I think it’s worth the extra little effort to reduce the risk even further. Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar is ideal since its declarative nature makes it easily reproducible. Fedora IOT can get you there too, but it doesn’t use ignition so you’ll be setting the server up manually.
Immutability is good. Declarative configuration is good. Manage cattle, not a pet.
Traditional RAID isn’t very flexible and is meant/easiest for fresh disks without data. Since you’ve already got data in place, look into something like SnapRAID.
Intel Arc A310. They’re $100, support AV1 and powered completely by the PCIe bus. Combine it with Tdarr and you can compress your media library down to half the size easily while still being able to easily stream to any device you have.
Nearly any SBC you’d buy would beat the pants off it. If you’re shopping by price then check out a Libre Computer Sweet Potato or Renegade, or a Friendly Elec NanoPi R2S+. They’re <=$40 and should be able to run at least the services you mentioned. If you have more budget, there are $100 mini PCs on Amazon that are great for self hosting tons of stuff, like a Bmax B1 Pro.
Something headless for just running containers? Alpine.
It’s small, boots fast, simple, can run from RAM and Docker is available in its software repository.
An HP Elitedesk mini PC would be small enough to tuck away somewhere and have hardware accelerated transcoding support. Jellyfin recently enabled hardware acceleration for the latest Rockchip boards like the Orange Pi 5 so that’s an option too. If you pre-encode your media into a format compatible with everything you want to stream to then it doesn’t matter, just pick any hardware than can get on your network and run Linux.
How much data do you plan on storing? If you’re going to stay under a couple terabytes then you could get away with one of the Bmax or GMKtek mini PCs for under a couple hundred bucks. They’re silent, decent amount of RAM, often have a slot for a second SSD and they’re tiny enough to throw anywhere.
I myself have one being delivered today, but on Amazon there’s a GMKtek mini PC with an Intel N150, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD on sale for $195. Plex and Jellyfin support the Intel Quicksync engine for transcoding and you can fit several containers/apps in 16GB
If you grow out if it down the road then you’ll have a good idea by then what hardware you need to upgrade to.