Back in June I decided to move my Emby media server off my Synology NAS and onto a dedicated box. The Synology is getting a little long in the tooth, and I wasn’t doing it any favors by loading it up with Emby running inside Docker.

I ended up buying a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC for the grand total of $150, installed Debian on it, mounted a network share drive so it could see my media files on the Synology, installed Emby, and called it good.

End result: Emby is much (much) faster and more responsive running off the mini PC. And the Synology is faster for doing its basic file serve stuff without the load of a Docker install also running on its limited compute resources. And Debian is so stable that I’m getting bored not needing to do any upgrades or maintenance to keep it running! It just sits there and does its thing reliably. I’ll take it.