Fractal Design, definitely. The model I’m using is no longer made but they have very good ones today too. Look into the Define and Meshify lines. They have models that can utilize the full height of the case for HDD/SSD slots with openings on both sides for maximum ease of cable routing.
The Define 7 or Meshify 2 is most likely what you want. They only come with 6 HDD brackets included but you can buy more and they have slots for up to 11.
The R5 is another good choice, I like those brackets more, but it’s not so flexible as the others I mentioned, and the 5.25" bays will most likely go unused and just take up space.
Don’t get the Node 804, it’s much larger than it seems (check out yt videos) and is cramped and hard to work in.
I’ve currently got the Meshify C (not the 2) for my main gaming rig and I’ve dug it the whole time I’ve had it; looking at the drive mounting for the Meshify 2 makes me really want it for sure as that looks really convenient
The more I looked at the Node 804 since I made this post the less I liked it
NGL I wish their North line of cases had more slots for HDDs
Yeah I expect acting as SSD bays could become popular in the future if SSD prices drop low enough. Although they might be M.2 bays by then.
I have a bunch of old 60 GB 2.5" SSDs around but they’re so small it’s not worth bothering to set up an array of them. Plus they’re more useful individually for stuff like upgrading an old laptop, portable USB storage or installing Windows the one time in three years I need it.
In the meantime I’ve liberated the 2x HDD cage from a Define C Mini’s shroud and mounted it on the floor in a fan slot.
Also, how important is having one do-it-all server vs. a few separate servers? Sounds like you’re ok with at least two servers (Pi turns into HA OS, and you get a new one for everything else).
I wouldn’t say energy usage/efficiency is super high on my list, but I am also not opposed to being somewhat conscious about that. Basically, a little bit extra on my electric bill won’t kill me.
Separate servers is also something I would be fine with. The Pi has been great, and I figured I could keep utilizing it the way I have been with some other services. It is currently running some form of Ubuntu server (can’t remember off the top of my head), and everything is containerized.
Cool! I just got an Orange Pi 5 Plus, 16GB RAM**, but haven’t set it up yet so can’t give any recommendations. On paper though it looks great — significantly beefier than a RPi 4 (my current server), and supports M.2 NVME as well. Might be worth looking into for your use too, but the emphasis here is kinda on computing with a very low power budget, so I’m sure you could get more horsepower with e.g. an x64 NUC or similar.
Here’s a review, and note that this is without extra heatsink so it was probably thermally throttling (as was the RPi?): www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-5
**I first ordered the 32GB version but it got seized for counterfeit postage, and then some shenanigans ensued. If buying from Amazon I would suggest only buying units in stock and shipped from Amazon. May only apply to US though…
Wouldn’t this tunnel everything? I just want 10.10.10.0/24 and 10.0.0.0/24 (VPN and LAN IP range to get tunneled). I also don’t know how this would mitigate this issue
Thanks for the pointer, it seems it’s an DNS issue after all (IT’S ALWAYS DNS). Routing all traffic through the tunnel forces the Clients to use the DNS server of the LAN. Without, my internal websites (which use a public domain namespace) are sometimes resolved with a public DNS. So the browser doesn’t request test.home.network (10.0.0.100) but test.home.network (1.19.72.59).
I use tdarr on my gaming machine and use the higher end GPU to do the work. I also use the trash guide for getting the audio profile I want in my downloads. Then in tdarr, I strip away audio and subtitle languages I don’t want and use the highest quality audio source to add a simple 2 channel audio to make it more compatible for more devices. That way I’m not needlessly transcoding 5.1 Dolby for people who are just watching on TV audio.
Yep, this is a good option for reducing file size at the expense of compatibility and CPU time. Every time OP downloads a file they’ll then have to reencode the file, which can take significant time, depending on the CPU of their NAS box, the file size, etc. It’s also worth noting that reencodes are lossy, so some amount of quality will be lost (although the quality difference may be imperceptible).
If disk space is the only variable we’re optimizing for, then you’re 100% correct, but I think it’s worth calling out that this definitely isn’t without tradeoffs.
It might also be worth considering how they’re consuming this media. If the client isn’t capable of playing back h265 then this will need to be transcoded again to play it back. Many media servers (like Plex) handle this automatically, but it’s definitely worth testing this out with your setup on a couple of files before doing this on your whole media collection.
Be sure to avoid “remux” quality. I didn’t know what this meant at first - it’s a file with no compression an uncompressed 1:1 copy of the source, so even “low-resolution” video files can be truly massive. A 1080p movie should be between 2GB-10GB or so; I’ve found that remuxes are typically 15GB-50GB, or even larger.
So, what you said - it’s a 1:1 copy of the source. With no compression. Which is what I said, as far as I can tell?
What I don’t understand is why the article says it allows for smaller file sizes, when I’ve found without fail that remuxes are the largest variety by far. It made sense to me that a file produced without compression would be larger than the same file, compressed.
It can save data by excluding data streams that you don’t need. For instance, I don’t need French, Italian, Japanese, German 5.1 audio streams that each have 700Mbps bitrates or higher, nor do I need an English 1.5Gbps master audio stream, a 700 Mbps English stream, a 500 Mbps descriptive audio for the blind, and 5 different special edition commentary tracks for a film I’ll watch once or twice. All those tracks can really add up, and torrent sites are often country or language specific, so remuxes might have original language and/or native language audio only.
Ah, it looks like we have a small misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about uncompressed video, which is enormous. This is only used in HDMI cables for example. A 1080p60 uncompressed video is 2.98Gbit/s, or about 1.22 terabytes per hour.
A remux is “uncompressed” in the sense that it isn’t recompressed, or in this case transcoded. A remux is still compressed, just to a lesser degree than a transcode. This means the files are indeed larger, but the quality is also better than transcodes.
To clarify the article’s confusing statement: they claim that remuxes can reduce size by throwing away some audio streams, while keeping the original video. This is true, but the video itself hasn’t gotten any smaller: you are simply throwing away other information.
I put it all under a spoiler tag because it’s a lot. Let me know if you’re interested!
inventory/specs# UPS Eaton 5SC 1000 full sine-wave inverter # Rack 13U enclosed rack w/casters and magnetic front door # Networking ## TP-Link EAP225 Wifi AP ## Aruba Networks S2500-24P-US Switch - 24 Port Gigabit Switch - PoE - 4x SFP+ 10Gbit ports # Servers ## Dell R720xd ### Components - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 @ 3.3GHz (8-core CPUs) - 14x 8GB Samsung ECC 2Rx4 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (112 GB) - Intel 4P X520 NIC (2x SFP+ 10Gbit, 2x 1Gbit) - 2x 750W PSU - IDSDM 6YFN5 dual SD module - 2x Sandisk 16GB UHS-1 Extreme SDHC SD cards - PERC H710P Mini Host Bus Adapter - PERC H310 Host Bus Adapter - Dual 2.5" Hotswap Drive Backplane 0JDG3 - 2x Crucial MX500 500GB SSD - 2x 2.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - Front Hotswap HDD Backplane - 12x HGST Ultrastar KP06 6TB 7200RPM HDDs - 12x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - Rack Rails (They hold the server in place, but they’re missing some bearings. If the server is pulled out on the rails it may not go back. Replacing these should be less than $50) - Locking front panel - iDRAC Module ### Notes - Runs ~235W at idle - Can handle many VMs and multiple simultaneous 4k Plex transcodes - This is basically the best set of parts for the xx20 series Dell servers and is more capable than a lot of the xx30 units ## Dell R710 ### Components - Rack Rails - Locking front panel - CD Drive to 2.5" Drive Adapter - Samsung 860 Evo 250GB SSD - Front Hotswap HDD Backplane - 6x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - 2x 870W PSU - PERC H216 Host Bus Adapter - 2x Intel Xeon L5640 @2.26GHz (6-core CPUs) - 18x 4GB Samsung ECC 2Rx8 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (72GB) - Dell 0KJYDB 2xSFP+ 10Gbit NIC ### Notes - Set up to be an ideal backup server - Just add hard drives and it will be ready to go - iDRAC modules are available on eBay if you would like out of band management
I’m still using the self hosted docker image, the all in one is too bloated for me and my computing resources are quite limited. Why would I like an antivirus? Or a backup solution different than the one I use to backup the rest of my containers?
Cool initiative anyway for other kind of users though.
Will check it out. Setting up postfix + dovecot with dmarc and postgres was a funny experience but it’s starting to slip out of my memory how I did it and I don’t want to be through it again.
I looked at this, it looks pretty rudimentary compared to something like Mailcow-dockerized which has a full docker stack with clamAV, sieve, etc that you can add Roundcube on to, and has worked very well for me for years. There are precious few jmap clients out there so that’s not much of a consideration really. I’d rather have rspamd itself rather than their fork of it because then I can depend on the original’s documentation, because their documentation doesn’t seem very comprehensive comparatively.
Plus, I’d rather have a stack of separate docker containers rather than a single container that munges it all together, but maybe that’s not a big deal. I like to let Postgres manage the postgres container image and not put another layer in there.
I don’t think it’s you, it generally is a bad practice to have multiple processes inside a container. It usually defeats most of the isolation, introduces problems with handling zombie processes (therefore you need an init) and restarting tools when they crash (then you need something like supervisord, which I guess this image might use - I didn’t check). Each software adds dependencies, which can conflict (again defeating the idea of containers), and of course CVEs. Then you have a problem with users etc.
So yeah, containers are generally not meant to be used this way. The project might be cool but I would be very uncomfortable running it like this, especially if that’s going to be my primary email, with all the password resetting capabilities etc.
Reading the Dockerfile in their repo, it’s simply a clean debian:slim with four compiled rust binaries placed into it. There’s no services, no supervisord, nothing except the mail server binaries themselves.
You may want to consider a mini PC. That was my upgrade after torturing my raspberry pi for many years. I landed here after agonizing over building the perfect NAS media server. Still very low on power consumption, but the compute power per dollar is great these days. All this in only a slightly larger form factor over the pi. I brought over the drives from the pi setup and was up and running for a very low cost. The workload transferred from the pi (plex, NAS, backups, many microservices/containers) leaves my system extremely bored where the pi would be begging for mercy.
I don’t do a lot of transcoding, so I’m no expert here, but looking at the documentation I believe you would want a passmark score of 2000 per each 1080p transcode, so 8000+ for your 4+ streams, not including overhead for other processes.
Thanks for the great info! What mini PC did you end up going with? I’ve heard Beelink and a few others thrown around here and there, and most seem to be impressed with what they can do. Do you mind elaborating some on how you handle your drives with this type of setup? Do you just have some sort of NAS connected directly to the pc?
No worries. I got a beelink S12, non-pro model with 8G RAM and 256G SSD. It was on sale for about $150 USD. Fit my use case, but maybe not yours, although you might be surprised. Perhaps those extra plex share users won’t be concurrently transcoding?
The drives are all USB, the portable type that requires no power source. Like you, I don’t need much. I have ~12T across 3, with a small hub that could provide more ports in a pinch. This model I believe also provides a SATA slot for a 2.5” drive, but I haven’t used it. All of these drives were previously connected to a rpi 3B+, haha!
The drive shares are done via samba and also syncthing. I have no need for a unified share via mergerfs, but I did take a look at this site for some ideas. I’m the type that rolls all their own services rather than using an NAS based distro. Everything is in an ansible playbook that pushes out my configs and containers.
Edit: I should make it clear the NAS is for other systems to access the drives. Drives are directly connected via USB. All my services are contained in this single host (media/backup/microservices/etc). My Pi’s are now clustered for a k3s lab for non critical exploration.
I’m a bit of a minimalist who designs for my current use with a little room to grow. I don’t find much value in “future proofing” as I’ve never had much success in accomplishing that.
I’ll probably start out with just letting my parents access Plex to see how it performs. They would be remotely streaming off an Apple TV, so I’m not entirely sure how much, if any, transcoding will be needed. My other issue is that transcoding is uncharted territory for me, so I should probably work on getting a better understanding of how/when it might come into play in my situation.
Everything else you described sounds like it would fulfill what I’m looking for. I don’t plan on solely hosting “mission critical” aspects of my life on this (at least for now while I continue to learn and possibly break things), but it would help me take the training wheels off my bike.
Happy to help. As I have it configured, my local network is set to prefer direct play, so any transcoding gets done from connections that traverse the boundary of my network. If you don’t live with your parents this would likely apply.
Transcoding may also occur when you have subtitled content and I believe for certain audio formats, but the transcoding would be limited to the audio track.
It states that it’s strava like. The difference of strava compared to nextcloud, fitotrack, osmdashboard is that it’s a social running app. It is mastodon where people only post about their tracks.
I haven’t read anything about social on the website?
I have a beefed up Intel NUC running Proxmox (and my self hosted services within those VMs) and a stand alone NAS that I mount on the necessary VMs via fstab.
I really like this approach, as it decouples my storage and compute servers.
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