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€

  • AtemuEnglish
    6•10 months ago

    I bought myself a second hand Intel Celeron J4105 SBC in a super cheapo mATX case with time bomb power supply and 16GB RAM for ~70-80€ IIRC. I haven’t had a serious use for transcoding yet but that thing has an skylake-era iGPU, so it should be capable of that.

    I Added a SATA HBA with Marvell chip (or SIL, don’t get Asmedia) for ~20-30€ and had myself a NAS for like 100€.

    10-20W at idle, so that’s about 30€/Year at 0.3€/kWh.

    Last year, a new generation of Intel’s ATX SBCs finally released in form of the N100, so look out for those maybe. You could probably achieve basically the same using socketed low-end second hand chips from previous generations; I’d take a look at second hand prebuilts.

    I didn’t know about them when I specced mine but “Wolfgang’s channel” on Youtube makes great content about this sort of thing: https://youtube.com/channel/UCsnGwSIHyoYN0kiINAGUKxg