Help planning new homeserver

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Hello, I’m new here. Located in Denmark.
I’m trying to plan out a new server build.

Server will be for Storage (Media, Backups, Databases(?)), Home Assistant, Jellyfin + *arr stack, DNS, containers, (small) databases, probably some VMs (Still debating if I should run Home Assistant as a VM or container)
I would like it to be quiet and power efficient at idle if possible.

My current machine has 40-ish containers, some redundant and should be merged. This server will replace that machine.

Ideas I’ve had so far:

  • Getting 6 10TB white label drives from datablocks.dev
  • Putting said drives in a 6-Wide Z2 ZFS RAID
  • Reusing the Fractal Design Define R6 from current shit box

Here comes the things I’m unsure about.

Buying this AliExpress ‘Cloud Star’ mobo with 4x16GB and E5-2680 v4 that has 10 SATA ports, no need for HBA.
But I don’t know how it would handle my tasks or if the idle power draw is too bad.
I have no idea if this is actually good, thus why I’m here.

Will likely need to buy a cheap GPU for Jellyfin transcoding, I have no idea of which one. At max 4 streams, I have only used 1080p to try and save some space. But could go to 1440p for some media. I am a little confused about encodings, just know H264 is used most but H265 saves more space.

Costs here would be (taxes included):
Mobo combo: ~1455 DKK + ~138 DKK (shipping) = ~1539 DKK (≈239.21 USD)

Drives: 6*1066 DKK + 157 DKK (shipping) = 6559 DKK (≈1019.47 USD)

Planning to run Proxmox on host and pass drives down to a TrueNAS VM, then somehow use the storage on other VMs.
No experience with TrueNAS, a bit with Proxmox. And been wanting to use them both.

I definitely need some help as I believe people here are more experienced.
I will go to bed now, hopefully there will be responses when I’m back.
TIA for advice.

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Good morning pandax,

IMHO starting with Broadwell now isn’t a good idea. Performance per watt is terrible and because you are going to use only spinning rust as storage your idle power can’t go really down because those HDDs can never slow down or go to sleep.

I would add two SSDs (preferably NVMe, but SATA is still good) in a mirror for OS and the docker volumes (excluding mounts for your media etc).

CPU wise I would start at least with Kaby Lake (E3 v6, with which I had a great time) or a later platform. There exist G models with an iGPU, should be enough for h264, I’m not sure when Intel added h264.

3

We recommend the Proxmox VE virtualization platform paired with the AMD Ryzen 9 7900 processor and ECC UDIMM memory, utilizing ZFS mirroring to ensure data security.

4

for Jellyfin transcoding Intel Ark card is apparently the best cuz of the Quicksync, which has the best quality and should be able to do multiple streams (I think Nvidia has some limit of sort of how many streams it can do at a time). I will probably be gettin one myself at some point for my Jellyfin server.

As suggested above, id get some SSD / NVMe storage for VMs / Containers.

I used to have SSD+HDD setup, where even VMs would have 2 virtual drives, one with system on SSD and one with “big” data on HDDs - nextcloud for example.

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So, the setup you are looking at is pretty much the setup I currently have, sans the choice around Proxmox and TrueNAS, I just used Ubuntu for my server and containerized all the services.

Couple of quick thoughts:

  • If you are only planning on ~4 concurrent streams max, and you have some power efficiency goals, I would recommend just using the integrated graphics from an Intel CPU, anything 11th Gen or higher will cover basically all of the decoding you need. You can find a list of exactly what UHD graphics encode/decode what here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/onevpl/developer-reference-media-intel-hardware/1-0/overview.html
    • Also, if you are looking at the link above, HEVC is H.265 and nearly everything you come across online will use 10-bit.
    • For reference I have a Intel Core i5-10400 with UHD Graphics 630 and I can run 4 1080 streams concurrently without any problems, I just tested and I got to 3 4k HEVC streams before I was seeing stuttering, and I’m not sure it if it was just my internet giving out or the server, but the CPU usage was only around 10% all core
    • If you have more questions about encoding, I am happy to answer them if I can!