Comment on "Recommended System Requirements" for buying a used PC for selfhosting
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 6 days ago
Two requirements stand out: Media streaming (jellyfin) and multiple hard drives.
In the video front, Jellyfin has documented what you want to look for if you’re building “new” (that is, not just using what you have lying about). Discrete video card is very much recommended for tranacoding (which will invariably happen). Check their docs here.
Let’s consider drives now: what’s the reasoning for multiple drives? I had this requirement too, then had a Dell OptiPlex SFF (Small Form Factor) fall in my lap. Because it can only handle 2 drives (in addition to the M2 OS drive), it made me rethink things. What I realized was my media server needed enough storage to hold my library, but it didn’t need internal redundancy. So currently it has an 8TB drive for my library, and an M2 drive for the OS. I duplicate that drive to a NAS and two other drives on different machines (to protect against drive failure).
I run a monthly host OS backup to my NAS, just in case (but it’s a simple rebuild as my services/tools run in VM’s).
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
I could get by with 2 HD bays – it is more because I would like to use RAID if possible, and have an easier time to upgrade to larger capabilities as time goes on.
I’ve also just appreciated larger cases with more room – with small cases sometimes it’s hard to work in there.
Internal redundancy would be nice to have with a file server, but probably not necessary if I can have redundancy with regular backups instead.
Thanks for the ideas!
kevincox@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
IMHO for 2 drives you don’t want redundancy. (I assume that is what you want RAID for, mirroring?). The per-drive failure rate is so low that you are unlikely to encounter it and nothing you are running seems particularly availability sensitive. Having a bit of downtime to rebuild in the very rare case of a drive failure is fine. The extra storage space is way more valuable.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 6 days ago
Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there’s almost no space in this SFF, but I like it’s form factor so I’m willing to compromise.
Anymore I don’t find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it’s used as one of my replicators as it’s too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don’t need all it’s capability.
These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won’t be filling it anytime soon.
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 5 days ago
transitioning away from raid but I do love zfs for flexibility. A lot of the data I have is important for someone or somebody, so zfs and a decent backup solution is in use just to make sure. I went bananas and picked up a used Supermicro 4-node server that takes dual E5 Zeons (V1 or V2) with 2xE5-2620s and 49 gig ram in each node for £80 (I’m in the UK). Plenty of power and next is to upgrade the cpus to slightly better cpus to reduce power as it currently uses 2 nodes and I am pulling around 300 watts most of the time. Backup solution is an old Ryzen 3200G with 32 gig ram that runs truenas and has 5x3tb spinny drives in it
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
All that power was a huge driver for me - my old desktop that I used as a server was pulling 120w constantly.
Now between the SFF and NAS it’s about 35w. That’s a significant difference, plus the office doesn’t get as hot.