Works from db0, congrats

Oh I didn’t mean larger like that, I meant width wise. Standard rack width is 19 inches so if it’s one of those specialty racks that’s narrower that thing I said about repurposing an old 1u/2u is pointless because it won’t fit. Doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use this rack, just that that idea is no good.

4u is fine unless you want to expand down the line. Networking gear and stuff. However if it’s a narrow rack I don’t think there will be much to put in it for those purposes? Depends on your goals. I have a larger rack but I also have my whole networking stack in it, switch, poe switch, ups, router, nas, etc.

I would consider posting on the unraid forums. There may be someone who has used similar hardware and can give guidance on how they approached the setup. The benefit of unraid is ultimately that the support community is very solid

How do you connect the drives? Looking at specs there’s only one sata port (which I don’t actually see anywhere, but it says it is there, although using it slows the second nvme lane)

USB connected drives in a raid array are not ideal. USB connectivity is not as solid as a direct sata connection and a drive suddenly disappearing from your area, especially parity, is quite a headache

No pci slot so you can’t add an hba for more sata lanes either. You could do one of those nvme to sata things but I’ve heard bad things about the reliability of those.

If it’s free though I def think it’s worth finding a way to make it work. The specs are more than enough for unraid and usually those tiny pcs are pretty power efficient, which is nice. But that’s the issue to work around, connecting the hard drives reliably.

WRT what to put them in it could be anything really. You could get a cheap broken 1 or 2u server case where someone’s pulled the motherboard and powersupply, rig something in there to hold them all. Should be more than enough space for 5 drives and will probably have cages for at least 2-3, maybe all 5 if you get lucky. Might even have hot swap ones. Dunno if this would fit though, that rack looks small and I couldn’t get the specs to load, is it full sized or a tiny one?

Could also see if there’s some kind of 3d print thing. There’s probably a 3d print thing to rack mount that mini pc.

Is the windows side up to date? Most likely culprit would be a db mismatch if one side or the other is on a different version. Similarly, do you by chance have either side running a beta release? If you have plex pass you potentially have access to these

Shameless moment to plug the idea that you could consider migrating to Jellyfin if you can’t solve the issue

On device isn’t always ideal. I don’t use immich because i don’t have a large photo library. But I do use komga. Nextcloud can sort and manage epub/pdf like komga but as poVoq said, the specialized solution is superior

This point is where on device app is not the ideal situation, for me at least. These apps exist. Tachiyomi and the resultant forks can import a local library. And frankly even a somewhat massive local library can fit on a cheap SD card

The point of the server is portability. With this I have portability across my devices. My library, reading status, metadata, etc is available on all devices. I can read a book on my ereader, close it, the status is synced. I can pick up from my laptop and the same thing occurs. I can pick up from my phone, download the book to my device, and keep reading while I’m away from home. If I wanted to I could open remote access to my server and avoid the need for downloading the books but that’s a whole thing

I don’t think it would make sense to run a server solely for this but it’s a service that doesn’t take much in terms of resources and I read a lot.

oh duh

https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft/blob/main/docker-compose.yaml - this is the 12ft.io replacement i use. there are a few clones but this is the one I like, it’s real barebones and uses very little overhead

https://komga.org/ - komga library https://github.com/Snd-R/komf - komf - this isn’t strictly necessary but it fetches metadata for your komga library from sites like manga updates. can be a bit of a pain to configure https://github.com/Snd-R/komf-userscript - this is a tampermonkey script that makes komf MUCH easier to use https://github.com/dazedcat19/FMD2 - this is an app that rips manga from most of the “free manga” indexer sites like mangadex, bato, etc. docker and kubernetes version at https://github.com/ElryGH/docker-FMD2

you can read directly via komga web but frankly it kind of sucks for that. i prefer using an app. tachiyomi was the gold standard but companies threatened it and they stopped development. there are several forks now that are all good in various ways. i prefer mihon https://mihon.app/ but there are alternatives that have different feature sets

A clone of 12ft.io but the old version before they got into beef with the New York Times and kneecapped it. It doesn’t work on every single article with a paywall but it works on the overwhelming majority (including New York Times articles)

And it doesn’t really count because I knew I’d use it but komga+komf+fmd2. I list it though because I didn’t realize I’d use this stack so much. I can now read with my phone, my laptop, my ereader, etc. tachiyomi/mihon works, reading progress is synced, and I never have to visit one of those garbage manga aggregation sites ever again