My small low power self built NAS has HDDs for Jellyfin and no problems at all. Just a simple straight forward RAID1 created from countless online tutorials. Feel free to ask or contact me if you wanna know more of the software setup things.

First, apologies for the late reply, I forget to check notifications here. On a tangent, it’s a lovely UI since it’s not pestering me to do this or that, but I do miss an occassional reply or two.

Now, to recap: I have asked you in my post, what software do you have right now? You said the family doesn’t want to sort the library twice - how do they sort this now? You said you host your photo collections on home servers, something something proxmox - the question is how do you get the photos there now? Because you might already have a solution.

If yes, tell us what your process looks like at the moment, and someone might have an advice. If no, if you have nothing right now, that’s okay too.

That really depends on the software you use. Some software might have a way to do it, but it may be indirect.

E.g. digikam is a photo library management software. It can move albums between “libraries”, and is designed that some of those libraries can be offline occasionally (more in the sense of SD cards, but also e.g. USB storage). So how you could do it is you map one, mountable, library to one disk, another to your “network storage” (however you attach your home server). That includes the metadata (depending on where and how you store it). And the digikam database itself is just a file as well (sqlite database), so you can also back that up at the same time. I’m not sure how to automate this process. Even a manual “cheat” - moving the files to network drive, then symlinking it back, per month or something, might work. It’s a bit of a manual process, but digikam is designed to be storage-based. And a lot of other software is, as well.

But again, I don’t know if you’re using digiikam or something else, and how you set it up. So, what software do you have? How do your users sync their photos and albums? That might help planning.

I went a bit more then a couple hundred, but if you buy some parts used, you can probably get something close to this. It’s super quiet, very low energy use, just works up there on the cabinet in my home office.

Edit: the case is a bit bigger, not exactly sff, but still small enough. The important thing is that it fits 6 big drives and could fit a few more ssds (currently it has 4 + an ssd), and even more important, low power = low electricity bill, low noise = I forget about it.

It runs jelly, hosts my photography hobby, has a few play services I rarely use.