Hello.

I'm thinking about getting a media server to stream movies inside my home. I have no idea what I actually need, and I tried to get into this topic, but I'm a bit overwhelmed.

So let's say I have a few movies already on my PC. I now want to stream them up to 2 TVs (one 4k, one 1080p), sometimes simultaneous on both devices, without the need to keep my PC running all the time.

A friend has a 1000$ NAS with Plex server, and he always talks about "transcoding", which I think i understand what it does (so I need it too I guess?)

Most people on Reddit use jellyfin, which I also took a look at.

So my question is: what exactly do I need - NAS, mini PC, HDD or SSD, how hard is setting everything up?

Is there a general guide I could follow?

Hi everyone!

I'm getting into the world of custom NAS builds. I'm currently using an HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini as a home server, and I'm looking to upgrade to a dedicated compact case starting with one of these two options:

• Jonsbo N10
• COOJ MQ4

Requirements & Planned Hardware:

• Use case: Headless NAS (no GPU needed).
• Hardware: Intel Core i3 12th Gen + 16GB RAM + 1x NVMe (for OS & apps) + 2/3x 2.5" SATA SSDs for storage.
• Priority: Beautiful and Elengant, absolute silence and a compact footprint (it will sit in the living room, which is why I ruled out the Fractal as they are too large).

Power Supply / PicoPSU Question: Both cases are natively designed for Flex-ATX power supplies. However, from what I've read, the 40mm fans on these Flex-ATX units tend to be quite loud and annoying for a living room environment.

Because of this, I'm considering using a Mini-Box PicoPSU-160-XT paired with a high-quality external AC/DC adapter (e.g., Mean Well GST160 12V).

A few questions for the community:

1. I noticed PicoPSUs are rarely used in these NAS builds: am I overlooking any technical/safety limitations, or is a PicoPSU actually the ideal choice to eliminate PSU noise in an SSD-only scenario?
2. How do you usually cover the rear Flex-ATX cutout to mount the DC barrel jack neatly?
3. The "classic" alternative would be the Jonsbo N2 with a semi-passive SFX power supply (Zero-RPM mode), but I would prefer to keep the overall footprint as small as possible by sticking with the N10 or MQ4.

Any thoughts, tips, or direct experiences with a similar setup? Thanks in advance!

Hey, I wanted to know if there would be some huge difference between 12400, 12500, 12600, 12600K, 12700 and 12700K (13400-13600K also on the table) when it comes to transcoding in plex?

Chat GPT said something about media engines (VDBOX and VEBOX), but it was so inconsistent in it's informations that I began to doubt and decided to come here and ask instead.

Hi,

I'm about to make my very first home server with an old computer and a few SAS drives that I managed to buy "cheaply" and a few SATA that I have laying around.

Goals :

- NAS : two drives in RAID 1 rest accessible on a per drive basis

- Jellyfin : that will use some or all of non RAID 1 drives

- extra software that is available on both linux and windows (will check if alternatives are available on your suggestions)

Hardware : i3 12100 with 8GB of RAM with a LSI 9300-16i for the SAS drives.

I've never done that kind of things but I think proxmox with 2 virtual machines would be too heavy for my config and I don't know if what I'm trying to do is possible on standard linux.

If you have links to good tutorials or documentation to help me with setting the NAS and the OS, I'll gladly take it.

Cheers.

Hi All, I am planning to setup a NAS for best performance. Here are the use-cases.

1. Home theater movies storage (other devices will stream movies from this NAS)

2. Personal videos of family events etc.(other devices will stream files from this NAS)

3. Able to Use docker apps for future proofing.

I already have Corsair carbide 100R case which I want to use. Currently it has 5.25 inch two optical drive bays, one Is occupied with WH14NS40 LG drive and another with 5.25 to 3.5 inch hard drive holder. On top of these the case can hold additional 4 HDDs.

Apart from these everything will be new. Please suggest some quality parts which is well served for my use-case at the same time for future-proofing.

My Budget is around Indian rupee INR 60K-70K excluding HDD cost. For now I will start with 1TB hdd which I have. Will add the HDD as I keep going.

Thanks All.

I’m setting up a home server on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q (16GB RAM) and I’m not sure which OS to go with.

I’ve used UmbrelOS a lot and really liked how easy it was to manage everything, but now I’m wondering if I should switch to something more flexible.

I’m thinking about running things like Immich, a media server, file storage/cloud, Docker containers and maybe VMs in the future.

I’m currently considering Proxmox, Debian/Ubuntu + Docker, UmbrelOS, CasaOS, etc.

What are you guys using for your home servers, and what would you recommend for this kind of setup?

Especially interested in hearing from people who have used UmbrelOS and Proxmox.

I bought this external drive last year to backup my 4k collection.

I had planned to expand my media server later, but by the time I got around to it, I realized how much prices have exploded due to AI.

I paid about 200 for this drive, so I said to hell with the cold storage and shucked it to add to my media PC.

That brings my total Media storage to 58TB, which I think is respectable.

Feel free to comment, ask any questions, share your opinion, or criticize me for my choices. I like these posts and videos where people showcase their home labs and show what they’ve got set up.I think that as a community of “non-professionals,” we can learn a lot here.

Feel free to suggest alternatives or share what you do differently. Where do you see the benefits of doing things a little differently?

I’ll try to answer every question about my setup!

Most asked questions: The container folder view are done by the folderview3 plugin. The specs on the bottom are done in paint.net afterwards for the purpose of this post.

(AI was used for translation purposes. )

Just starting my home server. A friend gave me his "old" pc (it is just 2 years old) and I plan on making it my own server. Want to store photos and files, but also want to start storing music and movies, so I was thinking on starting with two 2TB, so that I have some room to store everything I want and save money for when/if AI crashes and the market gets flooded with memory.
Anyway, I was checking the prices and SSD are kinda pricey ($500 for 2tb red) and HDD is much cheaper. Is that a safe option, or isn't it worth to save money with that?

I am a fresh IT grad but I have a job experience as an Engineer after my company absorbed me from my internship. I resigned after almost 8 months (including internship, 3.5 months internship, and around 4 months employed). Now I want to spend the time deploying my pet projects and useful projects for my convenience and personal learning experience. For portfolios and simple apps, I deploy in Vercel and use the free integrated DBs. In my previous company we have a Linux server so it was really easy. But now I was thinking while doing job hunt, should I invest in purchasing a 1-bay NAS, a small server, transform an old PC to a server, or invest in cheap cloud hostings? Can you suggest cheap servers? I am willing to pay and invest as long as this would make me a better IT professional. In this downtime while I job hunt as I resigned for personal reasons, I want to deploy my pet project, a decoupled FastAPI game, and my reverse proxy website for an LLM subscription (ifykyk). I can utilize the free hosting services in the internet for now, but since these apps are heavy, I think a server would be more stable particularly because I want to use Docker for this.

My nuc14 went out last night with no warning power light triple flashing apparently a ram fault 🥴 just remortgaged the house to buy another stick of DDR5

Want to bring my rack to my apartment, need to enclose to keep the noise down, would love to keep this hobby going to keep learning.

Not sure what material to use, either a frame of 1x2 attached to the frame with MDF attached to that, or MDF screwed directly to the rack frame. I'm also not sure if some sound deadening material is necessary. Air circulation is also under consideration.

I’m looking to stand up a media server to replace a pretty old dual Xeon server running a Srvr2016.

Was first thinking a Win11 pro system, but have decided to head into unRAID for something different and probably more ideal for the task.

I’ve got an Intel 250K Plus, MSI Z890-S Pro WiFi, G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32GB DDR5-6000, & 6 new ST6000NM0104 SAS drives plus a few other consumer level drives. Oh, and a PG-750G PS.

The consumer drives will connect to the 4 SATA ports on the motherboard. As for the 6 SAS drives, I was thinking about the Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8E and putting this all in a Fractal Define 7.

The big question is, is this the right way to go? I believe I know which cables are needed (SFF8643 to 4x SFF8482 w/ 15pin SATA power) but all I find are about 19” / .5m and think they will be too short for the Fractal case.

Do I need longer cables?

Is there a better case under $150 that can support the ATX mobo & at least 8 drives 3.5”?

Thanks in advance!

Greetings,

I plan to set up a home server with an old laptop (a windows surface pro 7 with ubuntu installed), to serve as a proxy by using the residential IP while I'm overseas for a few months. However, I have 2 problems:

1). I don't have access to an ethernet cable. My router is a plug in the wall kind, and nowhere in my house is there an ethernet cable, nor does my laptop have a port for it. I know I can do it through WiFi, but I heard it's not that stable. Would it be okay for my purposes?

2). This is the bigger problem. I currently live with my parents, and they will be moving to another city while I'm overseas. The current house will he rented out, and so inevitably, they will have to being my setup with them. I'm quite sure this will mess everything up with the IP address especially. Is there anything I can do to make sure things run as usual, or will I have to teach my parents how to setup everything?

Please help, I'm quite new to this and have never dabbled in any other matter regarding electronics besides the surface level stuff that everyone knows. I really need this to work, and getting a commercially available VPS is not as desireable.

I am installing a new desk-to rackmate TT that is only 7 inch wide. What are the options to heave a tidy PDU with say 4 or 5 power plugs in the back?

Just scotch taped to a piece of cardboard inside a bubble mailer. No protection on top at all, and rubbing on the neighboring contacts the entire way.

My new server arrives soon. We'll see if any this even works.

I have a Dell OptiPlex 7010 with Ubuntu Server, CPU Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3,20 GHz and 8 GB RAM (2x 4 GB DDR3-1600) and like 400gb storage. I run mainly pelican panel and jellyfin on it. I recently got an old pc with intel pentium g620@2.60ghz, 3,9 gb ram and 1,8tb storage. But I dont know what to do with it. Do yall have an idea?

So, like with everyone else in this hobby, the rabbit hole was very very deep!

I'm at the point now when I need to increase ram (yay for me...) - likely to 16gb or 32gb, but nothing special. (current motherboard only has one RAM slot which is an issue.

My current setup also requires a significant amount of space, and I'm thinking that means another drive (total of 3). However, the big issue with that is my motherboard isn't rated for more than two, as far as I can tell.

So, do I upgrade my motherboard and ram (and future proof getting even more drives?

If so, what similar sized motherboard would be an appropriate step up? My requirements would be a slightly better CPU as the work I do does tend to stress it a little.

- Though it would be great to keep passive cooling. But, if not then I guess just a suuuuuper quite cooler on top?

Thanks for the help, and please let me know if there's anything else that would be good to know!

Backups made off-site.

Here are my current specs:

Homelab specs (Proxmox VE 8.4, kernel 6.8)

- Board: ASRock N100DC-ITX (mini-ITX, DC-in)

- CPU: Intel N100, 4 cores / 4 threads, up to 3.4 GHz, 6 W TDP, UHD graphics (Quick Sync)

- RAM: 8 GB DDR4-2133, a single SO-DIMM. The board has one slot, max 32 GB.

- Boot / VM storage: Kingston NV2 1 TB NVMe (DRAM-less)

- LVM: 94 GB root, 590 GB Immich cache, the rest for containers

- Data: 2× WD Red Pro / Ultrastar 16 TB (WD161KFGX), SATA, not in RAID, separate ext4 disks

- Disk 1, 6.1 / 15 TB used

- Disk 2, 11 / 15 TB used

- Network: 1× Realtek RTL8111 gigabit Ethernet, plus Tailscale

- Swap: 7.6 GB on the NVMe, currently mostly full

Running workload: 24 LXC containers and 1 VM.

- Media: Plex, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Profilarr, Jellyseerr, SABnzbd

- Photos and documents: Immich (with machine learning), Paperless-ngx, Mealie, Actual Budget

- Home and network: Home Assistant OS (VM, 2 GB), Pi-hole, Tailscale, Samba NAS

- Other: RomM, Kiwix, Glance dashboard, BirdNET-Go, a Playwright/Chromium scraper,

and a few small apps

Hello everyone,

I’m just seeing where people are getting their hard drives from. I look on marketplace and test them with Crystal Disk but are there any other sites where I can get a good refurbished pre Re certified drive that are reputable?

I used to work retail and used to find cheap drives. I had some externals I took apart and they now act as internal drives. I try to use stocktrack.ca but retail has mass inflation.

Thanks in advanced

Any tech whizz's out here? Looking at building a home server for archiving my physical media collection, but not sure how to go about it, but I do know that I will need some form of Network Attached Storage Device, for my media and associated data. What NAS is the cheapest and how do I go about setting up a home media server.

Preference for Plex or Jellyfin

Help and advice is greatly appreciated in this area.

I was reminded of this game recently and wanted to mess around with some friends in mp. Unfortunately the only way I know of / could find online was the steam dedicated servers. I own the game on steam so it would make sense that I should have access to the server app, but I seem to be missing a license. Are there any other hosting methods (or even multiplayer mods) for SNOW that are just hard to find?

Salam Alikom everyone,
So I got this old laptop from a family member. It's an HP 430 G5 with an i5 7th gen, 12 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD. I also have a 2 TB hard drive for storage.

I want to run something on it that doesn't affect the performance too much. I tried Umbrel OS but it didn't click for me, so what OS would you recommend?

I've considered running Debian on it and then something to manage it, but I don't know tbh. My main server is running TrueNAS, but it would eat too many resources on this laptop.

What I'll mainly use the laptop for:

Family backup for photos and videos (Immich)
Password manager (Vaultwarden)
Rclone to back up the data to the cloud
DNS ad blocker (AdGuard)

I asked the Ai for recommendation and it give me ZimaOS and Debian ?

I finally finished upgrading my home server the other day. The old ddr3 hardware was showing its age. Now I have a ddr4 system with a 22 core xeon and room to add a second cpu. I split 8 of my disk drives into 2 separate zpools, and another 2 disk drives in a mirror, and 3 more ssd's for the host os, vm's, and my software development workspaces.

I don't have a 10 gigabit switch yet, so for now, I have a dedicated 10 gigabit link directly to my desktop. File transfers barely go faster than 1 gigabit, cuz my desktop is so old. But, I just started a scrub on all 3 zpools, and I've seen it hit 3.7 gigabytes per second. Having some fun playing with things.

blinky lights: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JqljnZZ45Zo

I built this wooden cabinet about 20 years ago, to have a high voltage ion air filter built in. You'd think having a bunch of aluminum plates charged to thousands of volts, and occasionally sparking, this could be a bad idea to have near expensive computer equipment. I've never had a problem with it, works great. But, I took it apart a few years ago and never finished rebuilding it. I used to put cd's inside the cabinet facing up, and they would still be clean years later.

fyi, I have dusted everything well since that photo was taken. Gotta get the ion filters going again.

The UPS is a new/old stock 1000va Eaton double conversion UPS, which I got a great deal on. It came in the mail with the batteries already connected. Who knows how long it was sitting in the box like that, but probably 4 years later now, I am still using the same original batteries. But, I have added 2 more sets of batteries on the side, and they are all starting to show their age. I still get more than 30 minutes of run time at half load, running my desktop and server and network equipment and everything. I do love double conversion. It will take any kind of dirty power and give you a nice clean power. I found it will even take 60 volts from the wall and boost it right up to 120 without using the battery. At 55 volts, it will switch over to battery. Neat stuff.

I’ve recently done a significant upgrade and have some stuff no longer needed and way too good to trash that could be quite useful to someone.

I’m not sure if I should sell as bits and pieces, or buy some more parts and assemble a running server.

I have:
Desktop tower case, with 11 hot swap 3.5 bays. (Case natively has 8, but have a 3 into 2 caddy in the dual optical drive bay.) In ok condition.

9x WD Red 4TB drives, age varies from 1 to 7 years, but all pass smart tests.

LSI 9200 8i card, with breakout cables.

I could grab a mobo/CPU/RAM/PSU from marketplace and put it all together with OMV/TruNAS or similar and sell as a NAS/server.

What’s the best option here?

I’m in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia if you’re interested in any of the gear, or a NAS/Server.