I just recently started my journey setting up Plex with *Arr and have had a blast. I have the setup running on a raspberry Pi. Before I start buying a bunch of external hard drives, I went searching for some dedicated server hardware to comparison shop. Am I crazy to consider buying an old tower server for this, or will a raspberry Pi work just fine for this purpose? I don’t have that much experience but I do enjoy a good challenge.
You could always setup a Tdarr instance on another, powerful server (that you don’t have on all the time) that can crunch through everything to make sure it’s the right file type.