Sorry to keep opening up this thread (due to auto-closure), but maybe someone is interested?
Ok, I have a minimal Arch install on the server. I did a Raid 5 BTRFS filesystem over 4 HDs. I changed the btrfs metadata to raid1. It took me (over Ethernet) 24-30 hours to copy 6 TB of media files via rsync/ssh. Idiot me initially launched it from my desktop (vs one of the always on server), second time I installed ‘screen’ on the old server and ran it from there (not requiring a constant on desktop)…though I ended up recopying 1-2 hours of files because I forgot the switch on rsync to not recopy when I restarted.
I got the services configured, learned a little bit more about unbound DNS caching and improved performance by forcing greater TTL on the caching.
It basically was really straight forward and fun (for me). Along with severe winter weather and icy roads, it was a good time to do this.
Things stream much better. Even the series that I haven’t transcoded manually that was pegging the old server for 30 minutes for a 50 minute show for Jellyfin, now transcodes with 30% cpu usage and about 2 minutes. I guess it WAS time to update the old server hardware.
I decided to simply use NFS v4 for sharing internally, sadly Android phones don’t do NFS apparently, but then sharing with the phone is very low priority and infrequent, I can live without it. I know I can install an ssh/sftp app on the phone if I find something I must.
Of course, with all that hardware, now I probably need to find more things for it to do.
I am hoping to investigate home automation tasks in the future (I do have some smart lightbulbs, thermostat, etc).
I thought it was only if a “solution” was provided…
not really what I got it for in the first place 
