I’ve always used Raspberry pi’s at home, to have always online systems to do small jobs.

Then I discovered Immich, it blew my mind, but my Pi 4 was really struggling to smoothly host it, so I purchased an n100 NUC with 16GB and a 512gb M.2 drive (I assume, I’ve not actually opened the machine, but I don’t think it works with NVME drives).

This worked great, then I discovered Tailscale, and now I also host a paperless.ngx and Trillium instance, to access anywhere.

I’ve finally realised that I think I want to host some kind of media server, Jellyfin looks great. It’d also like to be able to stream music with it – this looks simple enough.

I’m running Ubuntu on the NUC, with everything containerised via Docker. The OS probably should change, Ubuntu annoys me, but that’s another topic altogether.

Here lies the problem, the disk is now half full, and last time I checked I had about 1TB combined of music and movies to put on it.

So, what are my best options?

In my mind, I could do the following.

Buy a 2tb M.2 drive, that should be enough space and still have fast access time, and also uses a lower amount of electricity? 1.

Connect a spinning disk via a USB adapter, either A or C 1.

Connect a purpose built external hard drive, again via USB C or A, depending on device 1.

Use an external storage system, which would require its own power supply?

Am I correct in my thinking here. What is the suggested scheme to use? It’d like to try to spend as little money as possible and use as little electricity as possible.

I own devices and adapters to undertake option 2 or 3 immediately, option 1 would be a single Amazon order away, option 4 would require much more research.