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.
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
Yeah, you can re-encode on your PC to a compatible codec and that should solve your issues