ThinkCentre M70q Gen 5 Tiny Desktop

Definitely do not go for Aoostar or lesser quality brands. If your main worry is 24/7 reliability, I’d stop thinking in terms of “which one box is perfect?” and start thinking in terms of nodes in a cluster. The Beelink SER5 Max gives you a stronger iGPU and more RAM out of the box (6800H + 32 GB DD

Your bottleneck isn't network or storage — it's transcoding. The Pi 4 doesn't have hardware video acceleration that Plex can use, so when a mobile client can't direct-play (mismatched codec, screen size, bandwidth limit), the Pi software-transcodes and 4 cores aren't enough. That's why "optimize for

For this size of storage I would not think more than a few seconds and buy a young used Lenovo m70q tiny with intel cpu and add a bigger ssd for storage. With your arr setup no need to fill dozens of spinning rust harddrives. Just have the media in place you will watch on next time, clean up old stu