first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

any mods around? what’s this bullshit have to do with programming?

I have acknowledged that they’re that, but that’s not what OP asked for - they asked for a cheap setup (which the minis ain’t) and they intend to run a servarr instance, which implies large storage and those are both difficult and not cheap to cram into said minis.

I don’t understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.

any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you’ll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that’s useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.

yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don’t come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.

maybe there’s some way to filter out the stepmothers with the stepfathers on the stepladders…?

what they said but don’t go below T480; the performance jump is huge (quad vs dual-core) and the price difference is negligible while almost everything is interchangeable (screens, keyboards, cards, plastic parts, dock stations, etc.).

T480 should be attainable around the $/€ 200 mark nowadays as they’re 5-6 gens behind and upgrading 'em to like 16 or 32 GB and 1TB NVMe or more is stupid cheap.

noticed the green dot as well and panicked - first few search results said that’s an indicator someone’s recording, either via mic or camera; checked the permissions log, no help there. haven’t seen it after that.

install something debian-like and then try jellyfin-mpv-shim and then add macast. you’re creating a sink that plays whatever you send it via your mobile device. so, no interface on the tv to navigate, you browse your jellyfin library from your phone and just send it to the player. you control the playback from the mobile app (play, stop, volume, change subs, etc). behind the scene it uses mpv to play the video.

macast does the same for online videos e.g youtube, vimeo, etc. you send it a youtube video and it plays it in fullscreen. behind the scenes it uses yt-dl with mpv.

mergerfs combines all those drives/mounts/etc into one. so if you have e.g. “Movies” folders on two drives, the new one has one “Movies” folder with the combined contents of those two drives. when writing to this array, the files are stored where there’s (more) space. so searching stuff recursively is simple.

needless to say, there is no redundancy so if a drive dies, its conent is gone from the array.

I’m really sorry for reiterating this, but what you wrote also implies that movies that weren’t on any list will also be deleted (don’t want that), along with the movies that were on a list and now aren’t (do want that). do you have first-hand experience with this?

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QOwnNotes (had to look up the exact name as it’s the stupidest app name ever). but compared to joplin it’s lighter, faster, simpler (no database but individual .md files and folders) and works well enough with syncthing.

sshfs and mount the remote fs locally. then you can use any editor/IDE you like.

enpass for password vault, it has integrated nextcloud sync. for me, adding another selfhosted app wasn’t worth it.