I’m wanting to set up my external Seagate drive with all my media on it to run a jellyfin server but I’m not sure which device to use. I’m thinking a raspberry pi but I’m not sure which one. From what I can tell from running the server on my laptop it is fairly CPU intensive for lower end systems
Edit: so general consensus seems to be, don’t use a pi, it’s not powerful enough
A Raspberry Pi will work as a Jellyfin server, but it will really struggle if it has to transcode any media.
If you want your Jellyfin server to be up and accessible at all times, I would suggest getting a second hand PC. I’m personally a fan of small form factor mini PCs. Anything with a 7th gen Intel processor or newer, with integrated graphics, will be able to hardware transcode anything but AV1.
Low-end AMD APU will blow any Intel away for this purpose and also have hardware transcoding capabilities.
Per Jellyfin’s hardware guide, that’s only for recent AMD CPUs. If we’re looking at budget options (as OP seems to be heading), then we can go with older, used Intel CPUs.