27
Hardware requirements
(lemmy.zip)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
27 points (93.5% liked)
Selfhosted
59955 readers
302 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam.
-
Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Figure I can work out stuff like quick sync easy enough. Main concern was spending $100 or so on the USB enclosure and hours setting it up just to have to go back to the more powerful PC.
If you’re going to run the drives as individual drives in the enclosure, you should be fine but if you set them up as a RAID array, USB won’t work well. The connection is too unreliable and will cause issues. I’ve tried with a 10-bay USB-C enclosure using unRAID, Fedora, and Debian. I tried multiple cables. It just kept dropping the connection during large transfers.
Good to know. Storage space is expensive though and anything that's using the big drives can be downloaded again if needed. So plan was to use online backup for the stuff I can't lose like immich photos, actual budget etc and if a media drive crashes, I'll just redownload.
I wonder if it was just a shitty chipset, or if it was overheating.
Nah, I looked into it and USB is just super unreliable for any sort of array. The drives all worked just fine if I ran them as individual drives.
Yeah but like... where is the weak link? Is there some deficiency in the protocol itself? Or the implementation in the chipset on one or both sides? Or bandwidth, or overheating?
In my case, it wasn’t overheating. Drives rarely got above 75-80F. There were two large fans and plenty of ventilation to pull air through the enclosure. From what I’ve read, mostly on unRAID forums, it is USB that is the issue.
I don't run the 'arr stack, but for comparison, one of my servers is a Optiplex 7020 SFF / i7-4790 / 32GB RAM. It's running around 45 containers now with ease from automatons with n8n to streaming audio with Navidrome. In fact, it spends most of it's life in an idle state with load averages looking like .20/.27/.32. I don't do any transcoding tho, so I can't speak to that as far as resources. I see others have made suggestions in that dept. As far as the 4 bay USB HDD, you're going to need some storage space at some point or another so it's not like it would be wasted effort.