Arch Linux

tzhuang

Member

Registered: 2017-05-23

Posts: 45

Advice on setting up a media server

My main machine has been running Arch for some time now. Love it. I Have a bunch of services running on my machine (photoprism, jellyfin, dnsmasq) that I all lose when I boot into my OS hdd. I'd like to build a dedicated media server and run Arch on it to provide these services, so I don't have to keep my main workstation logged into my linux OS all the time. I currently have a 12TB HDD (formatted to ext4) attached to my workstation. My plan is to move this drive over to the media server. The thing is I'd like to avoid buying more storage if I can avoid it for the media server. Is it possible to install Arch to a USB to boot from and then just mount the 12TB drive? Or would it be preferable to install into the 12TB drive directly (although I'm not sure this would be possible since I can't back up the data on this drive to somewhere else to repartition it since I don't have another drive of equivalent size.)

Sorry if this doesn't make a lot of sense, please let me know if there's anything I can clarify wrt to the problem I'm trying to solve.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,231

Re: Advice on setting up a media server

Of course you can install boot and mount from a stick: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … ble_medium

There are some stipulations for running from a stick however because they have rather small write cycles you're strongly suggested to minimize writes to it, which is likely the case for a media center install that has the majority of it's media on a distinct drive. But most of these stipulations and some strategies for mitigation are mentioned in that wiki article however.

That being said, you could also install on the already existing ext4 partition of the drive. The only thing that "needs to happen" for a linux install on a compatible file system is that a root folder/filesystem structure can be created. You can do that without data loss, just don't follow the formatting and partitioning advice and go straight to pacstrapping the base system. as long as your media is not masking a standard path then pacman or pacstrap don't care what might already be on that drive. The most tricky thing you'd ask yourself is whether you need to add an ESP if it's going to be an UEFI boot.

dnim

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 8

Re: Advice on setting up a media server

You can run Arch off a USB drive and mount the 12TB HDD for your media services. However, keep in mind that USB drives have a limited lifespan in terms of write cycles, and since Arch is a rolling release distro, frequent updates might wear out the USB sooner than you'd like.

If you're set on using Arch, consider some tweaks to reduce write operations to the USB stick. Also, look into other ways to minimize writes to preserve the lifespan of your USB drive.

- Edit your /etc/fstab file to include the noatime option.
- Redirect log files to a RAM disk by configuring /etc/fstab to mount /var/log to tmpfs. This will save write operations to the USB stick but remember that logs will not persist across reboots.
- Avoid using a swap partition.
- Minimize package updates.

These are general optimizations for running an appliance off of USB flash. Consider searching for running on removable media, the wiki contains more information on the subject.