Mint as a media server

I'm terribly ignorant of Linux. I had a machine dual boot to Linux Mint 15+ years ago to test some failing hardware, and I have a Steam Deck, but outside that I haven't touched it.

I have an old gaming PC running Windows 10 with a CPU that isn't supported by Windows 11. For a few years I've been using it primarily as a PLEX server for video files, and my girlfriend occasionally uses it to play Steam games. With Windows 10 about to lose support and PLEX now requiring a paid subscription to stream outside the local network I'm looking to shift things around a bit.

I have a ton of media stored on several internal HDDs and an SSD that holds the OS. If I format the SSD that holds Windows 10 and boot it with Mint will I still be able to access those files on the other drives? I see there's a decent deal going on a 24TB external HDD I was thinking of picking up to consolidate the media files. If I go that route, what format would be best to pull the files from Windows and use them going forward on Mint?

I recently messed around with Jellyfin as an alternative to PLEX, and it seems okay. It definitely doesn't do as good a job at pulling metadata for TV shows, but it's serviceable. Does anybody have better suggestions of what to use?

My VPN is supported on mint, and qbittorrent looks like it'll work. Is there anything else I ignorantly haven't thought of to consider in this switch? Any tips or good tutorials you know of that would help? Thanks!