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
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.
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
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/channel/UCsnGwSIHyoYN0kiINAGUKxg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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!
