Budget Jellyfin Server Build: My £230 Parts List

A budget Jellyfin server build comes down to two purchases: a small Intel N100 mini PC and one decent CMR hard drive. That’s it. It’s the exact setup I run at home in Liverpool, the whole thing cost me about £230, and it has streamed films and telly to every screen in the house without drama. You don’t need a NAS, a rack, or a second-hand Xeon tower somebody on a forum swears by.

This is the build log version of my full Jellyfin server guide — the parts I bought, the choices I made, the things I deliberately skipped, and the folder-naming rules that save you an evening of head scratching. You can copy it line for line.

The complete parts list

Here’s everything I paid for. Prices are what I paid, rounded — they wobble week to week, but the shape of the budget holds.

One practical note on the drive: many N100 mini PCs have a spare 2.5″ SATA bay inside, but a 3.5″ drive like the Red Plus won’t fit in one — I run mine in a powered USB 3 enclosure sat next to the box. For streaming media that’s completely fine; you’re reading one file sequentially, not hammering a database.

Why an N100 and one drive — not a NAS or an old tower

The cheap-server conversation usually offers you three doors: a purpose-built NAS, a free-or-nearly-free old desktop tower, or a mini PC. The NAS loses on price — a two-bay unit from the usual brands costs more than this entire build before you’ve put a single drive in it, and the low-end models ship with weaker transcoding hardware than the N100’s iGPU.

The old tower loses on running cost, and this is the bit people skip. My N100 box measures 6 W idle at the wall and about 11 W while streaming a 1080p film as direct play. A ten-year-old desktop doing the same job typically idles somewhere between 40 and 80 W depending on age and parts — and a media server idles for most of its life.

At my tariff of 27p/kWh, 6 W running around the clock works out to roughly £15 a year. A tower idling at 50 W on the same tariff is about £118 a year — so the “free” PC costs you more than £100 extra annually, every year, forever. You can run your own numbers with my home server power calculator — plug in your wattage and tariff and the maths does itself. If you want to compare specific N100 boxes and their step-up options, I’ve covered that in the best mini PC for Jellyfin guide.

The drive: why CMR matters

The classic mistake in a budget build is grabbing whichever 4TB drive is cheapest that week, which is very often an SMR (shingled) drive. SMR drives overlap their data tracks to cram in capacity, and they slow to a crawl under sustained writes — so your initial library copy of a few terabytes can take dramatically longer, and rebuilds or big re-organisations later are painful. CMR (conventional) drives like the WD Red Plus don’t have that problem. The £10–20 you save on an SMR drive is the worst-value saving in the whole build; check the spec sheet for “CMR” before you buy, because manufacturers don’t exactly shout about shingling.

One drive, no RAID. I’ll come back to why that’s fine in a moment — the short version is that RAID is not a backup, and at this budget your money is better spent elsewhere.

Choosing an OS without the forum wars

You’ll find people online ready to die on hills about TrueNAS versus Unraid versus Proxmox. For a one-box Jellyfin server you can ignore all of it. There are two sensible answers:

• Debian (or Ubuntu Server) with Docker — my pick, and what I run. It’s free, stable for years at a time, and running Jellyfin in a container makes updates and backups boring in the best way. If you’ve never touched Linux, expect an evening of learning; it’s genuinely worth it, but it’s not nothing.
• Plain Windows — honestly fine. If the mini PC came with Windows and that’s what you know, install Jellyfin like any other program and get on with your life. You give up a little idle efficiency and you’ll want to disable automatic restarts after updates, but “the server I understand” beats “the server I copied from a forum” every single time.

The wrong answer is spending a weekend building a hypervisor cluster to serve one telly. You can always migrate later; your media library is just files on a drive.

Installing Jellyfin: the short version

I’m not going to walk you through forty screenshots, because the official Jellyfin installation docs are genuinely good and stay current in a way an article can’t. The shape of it:

1. Install Jellyfin — the Docker image on Linux, or the installer on Windows.
2. Open a browser on any machine in the house and go to the server’s address on port 8096.
3. Run the setup wizard: create your admin account and point Jellyfin at your media folders.

That’s a fifteen-minute job on a good day. The part that actually determines whether your library looks brilliant or broken is the next bit.

Folder names: the rules that save you pain

Jellyfin identifies your media by matching folder and file names against online databases. Get the naming right and every film arrives with the correct poster, synopsis, and cast; get it wrong and you’ll be untangling mismatches for weeks. The rules that matter:

• One folder per film, named with the year: Movies/Film Name (Year)/Film Name (Year).mkv
• TV gets a show folder, then season folders: Shows/Show Name (Year)/Season 01/Show Name S01E01.mkv
• Keep Movies and Shows as separate libraries in Jellyfin — don’t mix them in one folder.
• The year in brackets is the single highest-value habit. It’s what stops a remake matching against the original.

Spend ten minutes renaming as you add files rather than dumping a thousand badly named ones in and hoping. Future you will be grateful.

Hardware transcoding in one paragraph

Most of the time Jellyfin direct plays — the file goes to your telly untouched and the CPU barely notices. Transcoding only kicks in when a device can’t handle the format, and this is where the N100 earns its keep: its Quick Sync video engine converts 1080p streams (and 4K HEVC) without breaking a sweat. Turn it on under Dashboard → Playback, enable Intel Quick Sync (QSV), and you’re done. If you want the why, the codec details, and the Linux device-permissions gotcha, I’ve written the whole thing up in the Jellyfin hardware transcoding guide.

What I deliberately skipped — and when you’d revisit

A budget build is defined as much by what you leave out. Here’s what didn’t make the cut, and the honest trigger for changing your mind:

• RAID — RAID protects uptime, not data; a deleted file is deleted on every mirror. For a media library, a single drive plus an offline copy of anything irreplaceable beats a RAID pair at the same cost. Revisit if downtime would genuinely hurt — for one household, it won’t.
• ECC memory — lovely for a business file server, irrelevant for streaming films. The platforms that support it cost multiples of this build.
• 10GbE networking — a 1080p stream is well under 10 Mbps and even heavy 4K remuxes sit around 80–100 Mbps. Gigabit Ethernet has headroom for several simultaneous streams. Revisit only if you’re editing video off the server, which is a different hobby.
• Rack gear and used enterprise servers — cheap to buy, loud to live with, expensive to run. The power maths above is the whole argument.

Total cost, running cost, and what I’d do differently

The damage: about £228 in hardware, roughly £15 a year in electricity at 27p/kWh, and no subscriptions ever. For context, that yearly running cost is less than two months of a single streaming service. The build has needed precisely no maintenance beyond occasional updates, and it sits on a shelf making no noise at all.

On the watching end, I use Fire TV sticks — I actually maintain my own custom build of the official Jellyfin Android TV client for them, a personal fork of v0.19.7 with a start-on-library tweak, though the stock app from the store is what I’d point anyone else at. If that’s your telly setup too, the Jellyfin on Fire TV Stick guide covers installation and the settings worth changing.

What would I do differently? Honestly, very little. If your library is already past 3TB, buy the bigger drive now — the per-terabyte price improves and you’ll fill it faster than you think. Everything else about this build I’d repeat tomorrow: one efficient little box, one proper CMR drive, free software, and about £230 all in.