u/Ok_Philosopher_8973

I made an impulse decision at a thrift store and bought a Glyph 4tb hard drive to start a homelab with. I paid $75 which I thought was a good deal at the time because my quick on-site googling seemed to show me Glyph was a good brand and that 4tb external hard drives usually ran $100+. Now that I'm home and able to look things up a bit more, it seems this thing is ancient. The cardboard box seemed like it's never been opened so I feel reasonably confident it's never been used (will still ShredOS it) but I really don't know what I'm doing here.

A quick google search tells me I'll want to invest in a eSATA to USB C cable to get the best speeds out of it. I will probably only ever be streaming one thing at a time on my local network so I don't think I have a very strenuous job for any of my hardware to manage.

But after some time on reddit, I'm really worried about the age of it. Can I tell if this one is going bad? For a budget homelab, does it really matter? Everything on it will have been free to start with so it's just my time I'll lose if it goes bad on me. Should I just turn around and try to sell it to some other person who's ignorant enough to buy it for what I paid for it and buy something newer? Advice please but please keep in mind I'm on a huge budget here and really don't need anything that's state of the arc/fancy.

Link to their website for the full spec list: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/739629-REG/Glyph_Technologies_GT062E2F_4000_4TB_GT062E_Triple_Interface.html/overview

I somehow got lucky with my first torrent ever that the file format was able to drag and drop directly into my AppleTV folder on my Mac so I could watch it on my Apple TV. Everything I've downloaded since has not been able to upload into the AppleTV library. I downloaded Handbrake and was able to convert the files into MP4 with their Fast 1080p30 preset but that extra step takes forever and makes everything so difficult. I went back and tried to look at all the torrent file names and descriptions and whatnot but Idk what exactly I'm looking for and everything else I've tried is not working. It seems most are coming as mkv which I understand is essentially the same thing except it's not because I can't play it with quicktime on my mac and it fails to import into AppleTV. I'm sure this is such a newb question and I know that VLC and Plex whatnot are a bunch of solutions to this problem but I really just want the native home sharing on my apple products to work.

I still want to see my Home Movies but I don't want to have any of my music accessible from my AppleTV. I don't see anywhere where you can disable home sharing for just music while leaving the TV/Home Movies alone. Can someone let me know if that's correct or not?