I've been back in pirating for almost 2 years now yet my setup is really basic, just qbittorrent, 1337x and a VPN (not really necessary, but may become in the near future because.... National politics) Ive just bought a server and think of upping my game with the -arr "suite" and jellyfin (which I've set up, but I didn't host anything) I'm just too lazy and it's too easy to just open 1337x and search for a torrent.
If nothing else, use Sonarr! Once you add a tv series to the monitored list, it'll automatically search/find/send the latest episode to your torrent client. There's something special about not having to think about it.
Movies are pretty hit-or-miss, I've had Back To The Future on deck for a while now, but all it's finding are Blu-ray files too big for my zimaboard to transcode.
I'm thinking about getting a Zimaboard as well (for full *arr suite with media streaming to my TV) - how do you like it so far? How is your experience with media streaming (Pley or jellyfin) with files other than big blu-ray files?
I'm using the full *arr suite, a vpn container, transmission, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Kavita, pihole, nginx, and a few others.
The only problem I'm having is memory. There are times when pihole, Jellyfin and BitTorrent are all fighting for resources, and the network stalls. I picked up the formerly mid-range with 4/32GB of RAM/Storage, and i should have picked up the 8/whatever GB. They have a new one called the Zimablade, it uses a desktop RAM stock, and I've got a few of those knocking around. It's cheaper than the Zimaboard, so I might pick that one up as a supplement, and split the load so that my pihole/nginx/vpn don't all go down because Jellyfin just had to transcode something.
If you're just doing the arr suite and Jellyfin (I haven't used Plex since they started the mandatory sign-in bullshit), the 4GM RAM version is adequate. If you're trying to run 20+ containers (raises hand) you'll find you have to stop the containers you're not currently using.
Thanks for your detailed answer! RAM use is what I was wondering about mostly, I will probably go for the 8 GB version to be on the save side. Zimablade looks very interesting, but I couldn't find anything about when it will be actually available.
One last question: do you use stock casaos or some other OS?
Another thing I've done is you can find used thin-client types of machine on eBay for like $25. I got one when I was looking for something to run Home Assistant on, throw in a $20 SSD, and off to the races. That's with 8gb of ram. The only thing I'd be careful about here is if you have a lot of plex transcode from host/client.
Strong recommendation for yams.media. It's essentially a shell script that installs all of the *arr products, qbittorrent, plex/emby/jellyfin and helps keep them up to date via docker. Also has easy support for VPN.