I’m looking for some recommendations to improve my homelab. But first a bit of history to explain where I’m at and where I’m going. I currently have a super old Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 4B. Everything is working great, but I’m missing two things in this setup: -The ability to transcode -A NAS Now a little bit about me, I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade, so I know how to do stuff, but when it comes to hardware, I have close to zero knowledge… So I was a bit surprised when I plugged 2 external HDDs on my rpi and it shutdown them after a few minutes. I found out that it was a power supply issue, so I did the first thing that came to my mind at this time: I bought another HDD with external power supply, to then find out that having a self powered and an external powered HDD would still fail (although it took longer).
So now I know my mistakes, I should have gone with a NAS instead. I checked the Synology NAS and found out NAS are actually quite expensive. I’m looking for at least 4 bays. I’ve been looking at some DIY NAS, but I’m a bit lost. I found some builds using a Jonsbo N2 that seems cool but at the same time I’m reading the fans are always running at full speed and I’m afraid that the power consumption will skyrocket.
So to sum up, I would like to have a NAS, ideally that can transcode and is low power. In the beginning, I wanted to have a NAS and a mini-PC that can transcode to replace my Odroid C2. But it seems the NAS are far more expensive than the mini PC. What are the recommendations here?
-Synology (Can it transcode?)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board that can transcode)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board just powerful enough for a NAS) + a mini PC
-Something else?
My budget was 500€, but it seems I won’t be able to do much below 700€
Regardless if you use a NUC or NAS, I would recommend focusing on the processor. Make sure it can can handle the type of codec that you’re wanting to transcode to and from (hevc, avc) on the transcoder device. Intel QSV is also pretty nice if your chip supports it and you don’t care too much about quality.
Here’s my (semi) educated opinion: Get a NAS just for storage and retrieval. Get a NUC with a modern chip and run your apps and transcoding on it. I have this in my lab and it allows me to upgrade in the future depending on what my needs are. If I need more processor power, I get a new NUC. If I need more storage, I can add an expansion device and/or replace the NAS completely.
If you combine the storage and transcoding into a single device on the NAS, you’re locked in if your needs change and you will need to start looking at more expensive HCI options.
and you don’t care too much about quality.
QuickSync isn’t too bad these days, and the UHD 770 can easily handle 5+ concurrent 4K transcodes.
This thread on the Emby forum says it can do 18 concurrent transcodes but I’m not so sure about that 🤔. This Reddit thread says 8-10 concurrent 4K transcodes.
I would vote for running jellyfish off the NAS with powerful hardware Intel 8th Gen and up you should be fine. I personally don’t transcode video on my server only audio.
If I’m not sure about a video format working, I’ll manually re-encode the video with handbrake to h265 or av1. I also have used handbrake to create lower resolution copies of the same movies to reduce bandwidth needs when roaming on LTE.
Thanks, I didn’t know about handbrake, maybe it can solve my issues if I transcode before playing the media
Yeah, you can re-encode on your PC to a compatible codec and that should solve your issues
Thanks
If I have a NAS and a NUC, do I need to have a 10Gb network? I don’t have this right now, that’s why I was trying to build everything in one case.
Also do you know the power consumption of a NUC when idling?
I don’t think you really need a 10gb network, unless you’re pulling down 4k and 8k video files or if you have over 10 users connecting at a time.
At idle, power consumption of the NUC is very low–about 5 watts. At load, it’s about 100 watts.
At idle, power consumption of the NUC is very low–about 5 watts. At load, it’s about 100 watts.
100W? What kind of monster NUC are you running? O.o
How often do you need to transcode? If you’re streaming on your local network, you shouldn’t need to transcode. It’s only needed if you’re streaming while away from home.
Oh? This is weird, I have disabled transcoding on my rpi and I have some files that won’t play or the subtitles won’t load. I’m playing from my local network on an AndroidTV. I thought this was a file format issue and that transcoding would solve the issue
It’s possible it’s a file format issue. A video using a common format like H264 or H265 should work fine though. What format is the file and what codecs does it use?
The need to transcode has nothing to do with location. It has everything to do with the codec support on the client.
Modern clients support most of the modern codecs, so codec support isn’t as bad as in the old days when we had to use sketchy codec packs.
I mentioned the location because the primary reason to transcode is that you don’t have enough bandwidth to stream the original file. That’s not an issue over a LAN.
I bought myself a second hand Intel Celeron J4105 SBC in a super cheapo mATX case with time bomb power supply and 16GB RAM for ~70-80€ IIRC. I haven’t had a serious use for transcoding yet but that thing has an skylake-era iGPU, so it should be capable of that.
I Added a SATA HBA with Marvell chip (or SIL, don’t get Asmedia) for ~20-30€ and had myself a NAS for like 100€.
10-20W at idle, so that’s about 30€/Year at 0.3€/kWh.
Last year, a new generation of Intel’s ATX SBCs finally released in form of the N100, so look out for those maybe. You could probably achieve basically the same using socketed low-end second hand chips from previous generations; I’d take a look at second hand prebuilts.
I didn’t know about them when I specced mine but “Wolfgang’s channel” on Youtube makes great content about this sort of thing: https://youtube.com/channel/UCsnGwSIHyoYN0kiINAGUKxg
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Thanks I’ll look into this!
Why don’t you get a server? You can pickup a old desktop for a fairly reasonable price and then install proxmox. From there you will need a pcie sata card and some drives. Create a new TrueNAS VM and pass though the sata card with virtio. You will have a virtual NAS and then you can install whatever you want in other VMs
Alternatively you could do just TrueNAS but if you are to the point you are worrying about transcoding you should go ahead and get going with virtualization.
I would have, but this is all about the power consumption. Getting an old PC, I’m afraid to be at least around 100W…
I use an Intel NUC with a recent(ish) Intel CPU that’s good for transcoding and not bad on power. Then a 4 bay DAS. You can either get something with hardware RAID or without and do it in software. I run Debian but another OS might be better for you.
Got any recommendations for a good DAS with a fair price, either new or used?
I’m looking for something to place three 22 TB drives in, eventually to be expanded in the future, so I’m looking for a DAS with at least three 3.5" bays.
I bought a used QNAP TR-004. Seems to do the job but I didn’t realise it doesn’t support migration or expansion which is a bummer. Expansion in particular, I bought 3 8tb drives so got an empty bay that will be awkward to fill when needed.
Not really unless you are buying a monster. For instance, the i7-6700k has a TDP of 91W. If you go with a Intel i5-6500 it was a TDP of 60W.
If you want really efficiency you could go with a Intel N100 as it has a TDP of 8W and is much newer.
The 4 HDDs alone will do at least 60W, no matter what you connect them to.
CPUs have excellent idling capabilities, and you can control and customize fans.
You may save like 10-20W with a low power PC but you also give up a lot of features — HDDs in a cramped enclosure with one 50-80mm fan going crazy vs having 2x 120mm fans spinning slowly for example.
You also have to figure out offsetting the initial costs — how soon will the money you spend on hardware will be recovered from the power bill savings? If it takes 10 years to break even it may not be worth it to you.
Indeed, this is something I need to take into account
Look at mini-PCs like the Lenovo Tiny series. These can be had for very little on the used market, and don’t use much power (<10W typically, although I don’t have any mechanical HDDs in mine).EDIT: Obviously missed that you meant just a single device for everything. SFF PCs usually have a few SATA slots, and their power usage and price on the used market isn’t too bad.
Actually I wanted to have a NAS and another more powerful server. But this is because I thought NAS were some cheap basic servers… When I saw the price I thought I might as well have a single more powerful server doing NAS + transcoding. I haven’t made my mind up, I’ll check the Lenovo Tiny, thanks
The answer to your prayers. Basically, get a 7th gen Intel CPU. I’m trying myself, waiting on ebay.
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Indeed, this looks really good! The only issue is that there are slots for only two HDDs. But looking at the cheap price I may go with something like this and look for a NAS once my disks are full!
Actually 2 3.5" and one 2.5", with 3 SATA ports, if you actually go for the the Elite Desk instead of Pro. Anyway, Look at it more like a concept. Get a mid tower of your goal is more flexibility. The key is the CPU for transcoding.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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I’d still use a nas for storage and another system for VMs. Unless you want to make your VM server have an array itself, but then you have to mange that on the same server.
Do I need a 10Gb network if separate the two systems?
No
DIY NAS all the way. I had a QNAP that had a known manufacturing defect in the Intel CPU and QNAP refused to provide any support or repair options despite knowing about the issue for a long time. I will never again bow down to silly corporate shenanigans when it comes to my data.
My DIY NAS is a bit…unconventional and definitely doesn’t fit in your budget requirement, but I’ll leave the parts list as an interesting thought experiment: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Lm92Kp
…okay, look, I know its a bit crazy. No, its A LOT crazy. But I genuinely feel like it isn’t worth dealing with HDDs anymore when it comes to building a NAS. Back when I was using the QNAP, I had to replace each HDD at least twice and I spent $90-$100 bucks per drive. A NVMe SSD can easily outlast two or 3 HDD drives and you can get the MSI Spatiums on sale for $180, so in the long-term the costs even out. But the speed at which an NVMe array performs during scrubs and rebuilds blows a regular HDD array out of the water. Yes, its a higher up front cost, but an immensely better experience and the costs even out in the long run. Plus, a PCIe bifurcation expansion card is a hell of a lot smaller than 4 HDD drives, so it opens up your case selection for more compact builds.
I got the NZXT H1 because it was easy to build, came with cooler and PSU and just made things simple. It also goes on sale for around $180. You can definitely go with something else entirely. My thought process was that if I ever wanted a compact PC, I could possibly repurpose this case. This is just for me, it is not a hard recommendation.
I picked Ryzen 5600G because it was relatively cheap, decently powerful, and has HW h265 and h264 decode and H264 encode, which is basically what you need for Jellyfin or Plex. Just be aware that it only supports up to x4x4x8 PCIe bifurcation, so if you do go with a NVMe expansion slot, you can only put 3 on there and will have to use a mobo slot for the 4th. That’s how mine is currently setup and it works great.
Yeah, its crazy, and I am sure some people here will scoff at the build, but after using it for 3 years, I just can’t go back to regular HDD performance. An NVMe array just makes all of the services you host fly.
What os did you go for?
I went with Arch Linux, mostly because I am the most familiar with it, how barebones I can make it, and how rolling updates are generally easier for me to deal with than large break-the-world distro upgrades. All my services are running in Podman containers so they’re completely isolated from any library versioning issues.
Thanks, as I said I’m bad with hardware, so I need to lookup what NVMe SSD actually are.
Can you tell me about the power consumption you get from your setup?
It idles anywhere from 28-33W, but when its doing heavy processing it spikes up to the full power consumption of the CPU (max I’ve seen is like 120W according to my UPS). I run it in Balanced performance profile so there’s essentially no limiter to the power consumption. I figured I spent all this money on a CPU, I might as well take advantage of its processing power when I need it.
Lately I’ve been running a 24/7 Palworld server, and that is constantly running at 65%-85% CPU (out of a possible 1200%). My UPS reports 45W.
If Palworld isn’t running and someone watches movies off of my Jellyfin, usage is around 40W-50W when doing transcoding, and 35W when doing direct play.
Thanks, 30W while idling and 40W~ while in use seems really fine!
Yep! I was surprised at how power efficient the build was myself. It really pays to go with an APU both because it doesn’t go ham with the core count and clocks and also because you don’t need an external GPU. As long as you’re just doing light to medium loads and not transcoding at maximum speed 24/7, your power usage will be fine.
Yeah, I also had issues with raspberry pi 4 and USB drives. Even with working USB drives I prefer SATA by a mile. Like others said, transcoding can be avoided most likely, but you still have to deal with USB…
I ended up recycling old desktop PC components and made all-in-one NAS/media/docker server, while rpi is just 2nd pihole DNS server now. I have ATX MBO with 6 SATA3 + M2 slot and old, cheap intel G3930. The CPU supports QuickSync and it can transcode at least 3 1080p streams at once. I didnt test 4K since I dont have any screen with that resolution. My setup is probably <100€ used without drives. It drains 5x more electricity compared to rpi4, but thats still low IMO ~30W (~30€/year where I live). CPU temp is usually 30-40 C so its super silent (case fans are not even running), only HDD is making noise. It was worth for me, Im super happy with upgrade
Indeed, this sounds nice! I think 30W to power the server + 6HDD is really fine. I didn’t understand what parts you used from your old laptops?
Indeed, this sounds nice! I think 30W to power the server + 6HDD is really fine.
I wasnt clear about that. I have only 2 SSDs and one HDD (thats ~30W), but motherboard supports up to 6 SATA disks. Im afraid power would increase with 6 HDDs. For example, I had it at 22W with 3 SSDs (before I bought that HDD)
what parts you used from your old laptops?
I used parts from desktop PCs, not from laptops. So I have:
- MSI Z270-A PRO
- G3930 with stock cooler
- 2x 8GB RAM (bought these)
- Forgot what PSU exactly, but 550W (would be better if its rated power is lower)
- Made a custom case with 2 fans
While it’s not re-using parts, there are PCIE M2 adapters that provide up to 4 M2 slots, so there are ways of increasing storage substantially within limited physical space.
M2 pricing isn’t terrible today, since pretty much all laptops use it now.
There are also cages for mounting 4 SSDs in a single 3.5 mount.
Why do you need to transcode video?
I have some files that won’t play on my AndroidTV, I thought transcoding is what I was missing
I’ve used this on a variety of boxes since it was called freenas back before a fork long ago. A NAS doesn’t need a whole lot of power in itself if the job is just to store and offer disk space. My current setup is in a full 2U rack server with 14 drives (12 spinning, 2 ssd) and it averages 169 watts. If you do the transcoding on whatever box is actually accessing the data it can save on the need for extra compute on the NAS.
Can you share what hardware you are using to run this?
Currently a R730XD, but it has been run on plenty of other things down to a 1.3Ghz/4GB IPX box at the beginning. It’s pretty stripped down to run as an embedded system rather than a full server OS.
The go-to 4-bay Synology NAS would be the DS920+, as the newer DS923+ doesn’t support hardware transcoding.
Okay thanks, this is good to know!
You could take a look here https://forums.serverbuilds.net/c/builds/18
I suggest LGA1151/1200 so it’s more power efficient in idle
Thanks! I didn’t know about this website.
Edit: After checking it out. This is exactly what I was looking for!
