Hardware recommendations for *arr suite

Raspberry Pi 4b, runs everything except torrent client and jackett (another raspberry pi) and Plex itself (Windows PC). Couldn't be happier.

So it depends what you want to do, if it's just playback(as in you get your media via another device) any device will do just fine like a Pi4 with an external HDD(especially with them dropping in price after Pi5 announcement). However this will limit your expansion so the question becomes how much storage you think you will need. As the TV can nativley handle all those formats you don't need to do any transcoding, however personally I would say get something with a little more buffer room for if you ever do wanna play from a device that can't nativley display those things, or for if you ever want to expand your storage.

I have a MINISFORUM NPB5 Mini PC with 32GB DDR5 and an Intel Core i5-13500H which hosts all of my *arr docker containers + plex Media server (and a few other stuff). You can get one for less than 500$. I also have a NAS with a bunch of HDDs that gives me a ton of storage space. If you must know, its a Terramaster F5-422 and tbh I wouldn't recommend it.

Direct playback doesn't require much compute power. Just run Ubuntu server on the pi, spin up the containers, and get a fairly large HDD. An external HDD should be fine.

Any transcoding will be a issue tho. Like, if you use Jellyfin, and it wants to transcode your subtitles (even tho it shouldn't), you won't be able to stream anything 😂. I had this exact issue, and it was kinda pathetic that couldn't get subtitles to stop transcoding. It isn't transcoding now, but I also have a way more powerful server.

If you want to go more powerful. I'd recommend the build on Wolfgang's channel, with a N5105 NAS board, the N5105 is strong enough for 4k transcoding. It has 2x nvme, 6x sata, and up to 64gb of ram. Throw it in a decent case. I'd run Proxmox and Ubuntu server on Proxmox, this just makes it easy to backup your VM, in case something breaks and you want to rollback. At which point you can just throw HDDs in, or make them a ZFS pool, or a raid pool. Up to you.

I use a Synology DS220+ to run the full *arr suite, qBittorrent/PIA, Plex, Navidrome, AudioBookShelf, and various other apps - all as Docker containers. The NAS is a few years old now, but it still runs great. The current version of their two-bay Intel box is the DS224+. I added 4gb of additional RAM and two 8tb Ironwolf drives - all easey-peasey.