I didn’t move shit haha. Dumped OneDrive onto the Nas and mounted it for next cloud, I didn’t even clean out the photos, which I copied into immich. I did move some ebooks, but that was very few things that I have

I used to. I once turned a laptop into a Windows media server just to host movies and music for the house. That was fun

Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket.

Wtf!?

Anything that fits the socket and has the IO and form factor that you need is fine

You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it’ll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it’ll be fine.

What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family’s files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.

I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.

I thought that was gone for good, ty!