[bhairavp]

Originally Posted by raksrules

Actually 99% downloads are using public trackers. I only have one private tracker membership and I have very good ratio there so I download only on need basis from there. I guess when it comes to public trackers, I need to be selfish now and pause torrents whenever downloads are done.

Seedbox is something I used for a month to boost my ratio on the private tracker. But I don't know if I should get one by paying monthly. Also I don't think there are cheap unmetered seedboxes especially the ones which allow installation of softwares like Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and torrent client and let me stream from jellyfin server to my iPad or firestick or so and not count towards data.
If you have some, please do direct me for something cheap, I don't need SSD, HDD is ok and 1TB should also do.


My RPi here is used as a 24x7 torrent box with Jellyfin as media server (similar to plex) and sonarr, radarr, prowlarr to automatically download media via qbittorrent. This is my use case, nothing else I do.

Any suggestion invited.

Usenet. Get a cheap account (Astraweb etc) + SABNZBD and all the automation tools you've mentioned - much better privacy options than torrents.

[raksrules]

Originally Posted by Mumbgamer

Got a full metal heatsink case and can run it fanless now

I will 1000% agree to this. I am someone who bought the whole "kit". Let me tell you, most stuff is something you would never ever use. If you are planning to run it headless, just get the Pi, a good case (avoid plastic), Power supply, MicroSD Card for the OS, External HDD if you don't have already if you wish to store media for streaming and so.
The "heatsinks" are useless and do nothing. I too strongly recommend the full metal heatsink case. When I first got my Pi setup, it would run at 65-85 degrees. Yes that high and that will mess up everything. Keeping Pi fully open too didn't help.

Then I got the case which is linked below and now even in Mumbai heat, Pi's temperature almost never goes beyond 52 celcius.

https://www.thingbits.in/products/al...raspberry-pi-4

[dipdawiz]

Originally Posted by raksrules

...
If you are planning to run it headless, just get the Pi, a good case (avoid plastic), Power supply, MicroSD Card for the OS, External HDD if you don't have already if you wish to store media for streaming and so.
The "heatsinks" are useless and do nothing. I too strongly recommend the full metal heatsink case.
...

+1

Though Raspberry Pi4 in my setup is not primary NAS at this moment, it would be my choice of NAS if I have to move from my dedicated entry level NAS. Use Pi4 for its dedicated USB3 controller - faster read/write performance, enough for decent Home NAS. Runs cool, noiseless and power efficient. Use a proper NAS OS, it would perform better. I currently use DietPi OS - runs PiHole (ad blocking), deluge, tasmoadmin, node-red and many more software. Still can stream video without an issue.

This is my setup now - keep documents and photos primary backup on WD My cloud NAS (along with Google Drive 100gb subscription). Thanks to all streaming services, only some video's on Rpi's 1TB WD passport external HDD (USB3). When used for streaming (not transcoding) Kodi can play, without any hiccup, 4k DTS videos. Connected the Pi with wire with router for faster data transfer.


(ignore the power supply in back, that's not for NAS. Also the small fans on Pi can be removed, its noiseless but reduce only a degree or two max of heat.)

Originally Posted by Dry Ice

Following this with interest.

Guys recommending Pi4, where do you get one? It seems to be out of stock everywhere? Looks like everyone was busy completing a Pi4 project in the lockdowns

Try Robu.in. Join their wait list, they gets stock almost every month but finishes within a day or two. Keep checking. They are reliable and good customer service. Using them for long for all my IoT needs.

[tilt]

Originally Posted by NaXal

Here is the list from Amazon. Buy local, prices are at-least 15% lower
RAM
Name :- 8GB DDR4 Desktop (anything between 2666 MHz to 3200 MHz)
Amazon Link :- Crucial Brand 8Gb DDR4

Thank you once again for this list.

Purely out of curiosity is DDR4 required? Would I lose anything by using the 8GB DDR3 I already have lying around?

Cheers

[NaXal]

Hello,

Originally Posted by tilt

Purely out of curiosity is DDR4 required?

Yes, DDR4 is mandatory with the selected processor. DDR3 is no longer supported by any new processor or related motherboards.



Refer here -> https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-4-10-ghz.html

In case you do want to utilize your unused DDR3, start looking for a 2nd hand PC. Purchasing it from market doesn't make much sense due to the high prices so look for anything within friends and family. If anyone has anything unused gathering dust.

Thanks.

[sandeepmdas]

Originally Posted by warp_10

Btw, not everyone uses chrome, I use Duckduckgo and works like a charm.

OT:
https://www.spokenbyyou.com/duckduck...ith-microsoft/

[PearlJam]

Hi @tilt, I don't know whether you proceeded with this. Wanted to give my 2 cents.

I have the Synology DS220j setup at home. While this might overshoot your budget requirements by a bit, I really think this is worth it in the larger scheme of things. Dedicated NAS devices hardly take 5W of power when not being accessed. Note that there's a DS120j too, but that's a single disk setup only, with no RAID.

An added advantage here is the large number of apps (large enough to meet most of a home user's requirements) that this device supports - at the firmware/package manager level, as opposed to using a much more heavyweight set of applications if you use a "PC" instead. I'm sure the power consumption of a PC kind of setup will also be much more, however efficient you tune it to be - mainly because a PC is designed for a 100 other things, whereas a dedicated NAS setup is heavily optimized for all that it's supposed to do.

You also don't need to worry about the fan being quiet, or worry about overheating, etc - dedicated NAS devices will handle all this with aplomb.

[tilt]

I want to thank all of you here and give you an update on my situation. I am postponing the move to a NAS and have decided to currently continue with a normal external drive attached to the home computer for the moment.

I shall be building one anyway since I need to backup said external drive, but it shall not be immediate.

Cheers

[mayukh42]

I want to build a home server with one of my old PCs that are laying around idle.

My home server requirements:
1. Media Server
2. PiHole
3. Media Metadata Servers like Radarr/ Sonarr
4. Hardware Transcoding for videos
5. (Good to have) various app server projects

Build 1:
Core 2 Duo E7400/ 2 cores/ 2.8GHz
G31 Chipset MB/ 4x SATA2/ 4GB DDR2/ USB2.0/ 2x PCIE
IDE port

Build 2:
Skylake i5 6400/ 4 cores/ 2.7-3.2GHz
H170 Pro MB/ 6x SATA3/ 8GB DDR4/ USB3.0/ 3x PCIE
M.2 slot

Common components
GTX 1050 2GB
550W PSU

Yet to be purchased:
NAS drives

Obviously build #2 is overkill, but has more SATA ports and USB/ SATA are faster. And I can put the OS in a 128 GB M.2 SSD that I have. In build #1, this will block one SATA port. Build #1 might be limited in cores, but still way better than entry level NAS servers like Synology DS120j e.g. Though, I am not looking for only a NAS, but other things too as mentioned above (which may or may not be possible in a commercial NAS) and would rather spend that budget on HDDs instead.

1. I have just begun some R&D on this, and find Proxmox with containers for all of the above to be appealing. However, I am open to suggestions on the alternatives.

2. For media server, I like Jellyfin. Plex seems to be past its prime and becoming more commercial with Plex Pass. Is there any other options to consider?

3. Does anybody have experience with hardware transcoding? The GTX 1050 has NVENC chip and as per this page can do at least 2 4k-1080p and 7 1080p-720p streams.

4. For NAS server I am looking at TrueNAS Scale. I see RAID-Z of ZFS as typical with TrueNAS, that needs at least 3 disks. Is this to go for?

5. Should I only go for NAS category of drives? Or any HDD would do as long as warranty is 3+ years? If I go for 2-4TB ones now, can I add higher capacity ones later without disturbing the RAID above?

6. RAID-Z is software implemented, by the file system. If it fails, would my data be lost? I read somewhere that it maintains a metadata table.

IMO, I'd rather use a variant of the 3-2-1 backup model than putting all chips (HDDs) in one basket. This means not using RAID at all, but having a parallel backup occasionally of the disks into another set that is not part of the NAS.

Gurus, let me know your thoughts and answers to the above questions, and what else I should consider.

[tilt]

Originally Posted by tilt

I want to thank all of you here and give you an update on my situation. I am postponing the move to a NAS and have decided to currently continue with a normal external drive attached to the home computer for the moment.

I shall be building one anyway since I need to backup said external drive, but it shall not be immediate.

Cheers

I just realised that i have been f\guilty of the same thing i have been accusing others of - that of not providing any updates after asking for help. My apologies for being remiss.

Well, it is an anti-climax actually - after all the speechifying I still chose the lazy way out and just bought myself a Synology DS220+ with 2x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives.

i have had this setup for a while now and am not unhappy with it.

My heartfelt thanks and apologies to everyone here who responded.

Cheers

[atulsian]

Originally Posted by mayukh42

I want to build a home server with one of my old PCs that are laying around idle.

My home server requirements:
1. Media Server
2. PiHole
3. Media Metadata Servers like Radarr/ Sonarr
4. Hardware Transcoding for videos
5. (Good to have) various app server projects

Build 1:
Core 2 Duo E7400/ 2 cores/ 2.8GHz
G31 Chipset MB/ 4x SATA2/ 4GB DDR2/ USB2.0/ 2x PCIE
IDE port

Build 2:
Skylake i5 6400/ 4 cores/ 2.7-3.2GHz
H170 Pro MB/ 6x SATA3/ 8GB DDR4/ USB3.0/ 3x PCIE
M.2 slot

Common components
GTX 1050 2GB
550W PSU

Yet to be purchased:
NAS drives

Obviously build #2 is overkill, but has more SATA ports and USB/ SATA are faster. And I can put the OS in a 128 GB M.2 SSD that I have. In build #1, this will block one SATA port. Build #1 might be limited in cores, but still way better than entry level NAS servers like Synology DS120j e.g. Though, I am not looking for only a NAS, but other things too as mentioned above (which may or may not be possible in a commercial NAS) and would rather spend that budget on HDDs instead.

1. I have just begun some R&D on this, and find Proxmox with containers for all of the above to be appealing. However, I am open to suggestions on the alternatives.

2. For media server, I like Jellyfin. Plex seems to be past its prime and becoming more commercial with Plex Pass. Is there any other options to consider?

3. Does anybody have experience with hardware transcoding? The GTX 1050 has NVENC chip and as per this page can do at least 2 4k-1080p and 7 1080p-720p streams.

4. For NAS server I am looking at TrueNAS Scale. I see RAID-Z of ZFS as typical with TrueNAS, that needs at least 3 disks. Is this to go for?

5. Should I only go for NAS category of drives? Or any HDD would do as long as warranty is 3+ years? If I go for 2-4TB ones now, can I add higher capacity ones later without disturbing the RAID above?

6. RAID-Z is software implemented, by the file system. If it fails, would my data be lost? I read somewhere that it maintains a metadata table.

IMO, I'd rather use a variant of the 3-2-1 backup model than putting all chips (HDDs) in one basket. This means not using RAID at all, but having a parallel backup occasionally of the disks into another set that is not part of the NAS.

Gurus, let me know your thoughts and answers to the above questions, and what else I should consider.

I would suggest go with build 2 as it has Intel quick sync tech which helps in video transcoding. For adblock, you can look at nextdns.

1) Go with truenas scale, it has an option to create vms like proxmox. Best of both worlds.

2) You can try emby or next best option is Jellyfin.

3) It depends on how much data is being read/write. For better protection and continuous read/write go with Nas drives.

4) Go with RAID-Z, this helps in recovering data if one disk fails. However, with multiple disk failure, data recovery will be impossible. Just make sure you are backing up important data on cloud or other sources on a regular basis.

[NaXal]

Hello,

Originally Posted by mayukh42

I want to build a home server with one of my old PCs that are laying around idle.

I am no expert, just sharing out of my personal experience of running self hosted home cloud server.

Unlike General purpose computing, servers are purpose built to serve specific needs. One of the greatest need of any server is the ability to troubleshoot and restore from worst of the failures.

In case of open-source world, we have several options for any particular tasks. Some may have better community support and tutorials over others.

So rule no.1 for me is to select software, which has best community support for easy troubleshooting and has the easiest restoration methods. Even if the entire hardware box is dead.

For NAS server I am looking at TrueNAS Scale. I see RAID-Z of ZFS as typical with TrueNAS, that needs at least 3 disks. Is this to go for?

OS in these cases are basically a hypervisor and storage container.

TrueNAS / FreeNAS / Promox and their ZFS file system is feature rich and gives your tremendous flexibility. Specially, when you are having 10Gig+ network with multiple number of active users pulling large amount of data. Most of the Pro or simple home server builds are on these but personally I am avoiding these options for my base OS.

For me, troubleshooting these OS in long term, or in case of me screwing up something, are a nightmare. Specially, when recovering or restoring from any catastrophic software or hardware failures.

I prefer, and I am on Windows 11 Pro as my base OS and using Hyper-V as for my hyper-visor to run VMs. Neither I have 10Gig or such super-fast network, nor my home server's NAS ability is accessed by 10/20 people for video editing of the network. Windows build in file share is sufficient for me. And Windows is by far the easiest to troubleshoot or restore from any catastrophic system failure.

2. For media server, I like Jellyfin. Plex seems to be past its prime and becoming more commercial with Plex Pass. Is there any other options to consider?

I am using Jellyfin. I vote for Jellyfin. I feel it is much faster and better than Plex. It has clients for Direct Stream (very important) for most of the TV, devices and OS.

3. Does anybody have experience with hardware transcoding? The GTX 1050 has NVENC chip and as per this page can do at least 2 4k-1080p and 7 1080p-720p streams.

I am using a nVidia 730 for this job. Jellyfin is configured to use GPU for x264 and CPU for x265 jobs. But rarely you would need that. Especially when you are within your home network, Jellyfin client will direct stream and use your devices native playback capabilities (codec support) to play the file without any transcoding load in the server. For me, it's the HDD which becomes bottleneck when streaming those 80gb+ true 4K media files !! Apart from that, Jellyfin just fly within with home network. No matter the number of simultaneous streams.



Transcoding needs come when or rather, if I need to stream via internet from my home server using a very slow client connection. If that outside client connection is very slow, like unable to play 1080p youtube, then only one may need to reduce the quality and force Jellyfin to transcode.

6. RAID-Z is software implemented, by the file system. If it fails, would my data be lost? I read somewhere that it maintains a metadata table.

I am on a simple RAID1 1:1 parity mirror.

Windows also gives you the option via storage sense.

Both are pretty easy to restore.

5. Should I only go for NAS category of drives? Or any HDD would do as long as warranty is 3+ years? If I go for 2-4TB ones now, can I add higher capacity ones later without disturbing the RAID above?

Windows storage sense would allow such but I preferred the simple 1:1 RAID1 strategy. It's costly to start with, since I always need 2 identical drives but I feel it is the easiest in long term.

I don't backup my jellyfin related media files. No point. But my cloud server (Nextcloud) vDisk has RAID1 parity and both vDisks are located on two separate physical HDDs. That data (personal docs, media, pictures) is important and needs both active and passive backups.

Thanks.

[PearlJam]

Originally Posted by tilt

Well, it is an anti-climax actually - after all the speechifying I still chose the lazy way out and just bought myself a Synology DS220+.
...
...
i have had this setup for a while now and am not unhappy with it.

Glad that you came around to my view . A dedicated setup from a well known provider means that most of the usecases will be supported, and not annoy you for silly missing functionality.

Curious about why you're "not unhappy" as opposed to "happy"?!

[tilt]

Originally Posted by PearlJam

*SNIP*

Curious about why you're "not unhappy" as opposed to "happy"?!

Merely a figure of speech

Cheers

[alphamike_1612]

Is it possible to "bypass" the dynamic IP of ISPs, other than asking for a static IP, which in my limited reading on the internet, brings a risk of data breach. (Especially if like me, you don't know exactly what you're doing)
I'm planning on setting up a PiNAS that is accessible over the internet so that I can upload my data from my devices without actually being in my home. I've decided on a RPi 3/4 with a WD purple HDD(since it's going to be constantly running). (My primary concern is being able to store data and I believe a Pi NAS is more than sufficient for my concern, although if better budget options do exist, please do share)

Any help would be appreciated.

I'm not very familiar with the terms used in networking, infact my understanding stops with public/private/dynamic/static IPs, so please handle me with kid gloves. (I'm willing to learn new stuff though)

Thanks in advance.

My ISP is ACT fibernet and my public facing IP is 49.xxx .