I currently have 90Tb of libraries shared via a Windows server. I’ve been using Mediasonic hard drive enclosures with 8 or 16Tb drives and Windows/Intel storage spaces for 4 drives for the “Movies” library, 8 drives for the “TV” library, and another 4 drives for “Photos” and other random NAS. I literally only share with family, but, that’s still about 12 users across the US due to school. I have a stable 1000/1000Mb fiber connection that has been working perfectly for the past few years. So, my issue now is, I want to host my own Lemmy, Matrix, and NextCloud servers, but they all seem to need a Linux-based server. I’ve read in the past that Linux Plex servers run into a lot of issues since it was designed to run on Windows. I’m not averse to buying yet another computer, but, before I do that I thought I would seek some advice if I should combine everything into one Linux server, or leave Plex as its own Windows server and put everything else on a new device.
I’ve got Plex running on 2 non-Windows systems: Raspberry Pi (Linux Docker container) and TrueNAS (FreeBSD jail). No issues.
If I could suggest something…
Try setting up a Linux VM on Windows. I’m not a Windows guy, so you might need to research how to do this. My go-to would be VirtualBox; I don’t know if Hyper-V supports non-Windows VMs, and I’m not intimately familiar with setting up WSL.
Going the VM route will let you kick the Linux tires without committing to more hardware. Or, you could get a Raspberry Pi. External USB drive optional, since you should be able to configure Windows to share your library over the network and just have your Pi mount it.
Hyper-V is absolutely the way to go here. Linux is quite well supported.