Currently I’m thinking again about setting up a home server. But I am unsure about the scaling. In the hope to get some input from experienced users I’m coming here.
Services that I intend on running:
- TrueNAS SCALE
- Jellyfin
- *arr stack
- Immich
- Nextcloud
- Bitwarden (maybe)
I’ve read the Jellyfin documentation which states i5-11500 (because the toolkit for 7-10th gen is deprecated, even though you could encode H.264/H.265) or newer for CPU based encoding or at least a GTX 1660. Because electricity is quite expensive here, I’d prefer CPU encoding. On the other side, office systems with 11th or newer gen are far more expensive. I’ve found a i5-6500, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1660 system for 180 Euro incl. shipping. There are a few 7th-9th gen systems with 16 GB RAM available that use on board graphics and are 80-120 Euro excl. shipping but I’m not sure if they suffice running the mentioned services and maybe a few more I don’t know about yet.
I have two WD Red and a WD Green lying around, I’d like to use. From what I’ve heard so far, it’s necessary to use a separate drive to run TrueNAS off of, which I’d need to buy separately.
Maybe you can give me some insights. Thanks.
What about using Intel ARC GPUs for encoding as they are all kinda made specifically for it, I don’t use jellyfin but I got an Intel ARC B310 Eco used for like $45.
Looking at current prices it seems like it’s around $120 now, was cheaper last year, but I still recommend looking into Intel GPUs.
I looked into it before but this will get a lot more expensive here. I’m currently mostly looking used HP, Dell or other office PCs.
The Jellyfin doc states that
Intel ARC B series cards require ReBar to be enabled. This means you must use it on a platform with Intel 10th gen, AMD Ryzen 3000 series or newer.
A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that’s not a big deal.
My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed… System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,
If you want a lot of 4k content, then I’d definitely go with the GTX 1660.
It’ll most likely be 1-2 users most of the time I guess. For streaming on the TV I’d prefer 4k though. Might look into the N100 systems, thanks.
For video encoding, I run an 8th gen Intel i5 8500t. The quicksync is good enough for nearly anything 1080p.
Not sure what you mean by the “scaling”.
I feel like by “scaling” they mean upgradability. So either vertical (adding more drives, ram, cpu) or horizontal (adding more boxes that loadbalance an increase of multiple parallel tasks/users)
Makes sense. Your 2nd definition is what I take from the term scaling. Let’s see if op comes back with any notes.
Jup, just responded on the other comment.
More like would a i5-8500 or i3-9100 be sufficient to run the mentioned services and encode up to 4k, no HDR though.
It states here that the 9300 is quicksync enabled, so should have no problem with nvec @4k. How many streams? I don’t know that one.
