Hi all,

Quite excited for my first post here and for being able to join the club :)

I recently bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro and put Debian on it. I did use yunohost for over a year and I experimented with basic nginx, fail2ban etc. on a vps but I can’t call myself an expert around these things. For this reason I installed casa-os to ease my way into docker (maybe in the future I will do everything DIY, I do like the idea). I put everything behind tailscale to be able to access the server outside my home.

My idea is to have a media server (radarr and sonarr for movies and tv shows, plus navidrome for my music collection) and some other niceties like audiobookshelf and maybe immich. I still need to learn most things about the arr stack, transcoding and such, so I don’t have any rush.

However, for all these things, I definitely need a larger drive, since the mini pc comes with a 512gb internal ssd.

The S12 also has a 2.5" drive bay (SATA3), but should I go for an internal drive or an external one connected via USB?

Things I am worried about the internal solution is mostly temperatures, everything is so clumped in there and I read some stories about faulty hardware basically heating the sata ssd to death after a while. On the other hand, usb connection is maybe less “stable”? I don’t know. Also, if I go with SATA drive, should I go for ssd or hdd? I don’t have too much budget to invest right now, so cost is somewhat a limit at the moment.

Seeking any advice here and happy to hear more expert people opinion on this, thanks! :)