Seefra 1

This sounds really cool. Does that actually work, did you do a comparison? I would have expected that most RAM usage comes from rendering the frame and not sending it, or does waypipe somehow outsource that as well?

I haven’t tested yet, it’s something I plan to do this or next week.

From what I understand, waypipe should use minimal ram, all it basically does is forwarding an image, sound and inputs, all the heavy lifting is done on the server side where the application actually runs.

“I have a hammer and I hate it’s not hammering, any cool ideas involving nails?”

You see, I have the exact same problem as you, I just can’t stand seeing hardware going unused. Specially computer hardware that deprecates. But I think before thinking “what can I do with this hardware” you should think “do I have a need or a problem that can be solved with this hardware?” And if the awnser is “no” then maybe consider selling the GPU or giving it to some friend who needs it.

My Jellyfin works without a GPU, just my old 2nd generation i3 is enough to realtime transcode video to my phone, maybe I would need upgrade of I had more users, but I’m it’s only user.

Do you have multiple users on your server where you require GPU acceleration, if not there’s no much reason to use GPU accell anyway (which is usually trickier to setup)?

Still reporposing the computer to use as a server seems to be a good idea, because I at least can’t stand the nightmare of using USB hard drives, I’ve hard really bad experiences with those lousy cables and connection. But if you do that. That leaves you with another problem. What to do with the raspberry pi?

Also, I just recently also built a new PC had the same problem of not knowing what to do with my laptop, I came to conclusion that the best thing I can do with it is to run background chat applications on it and maybe web browser via waypipe. So it just looks like a window on my main PC and this way I have ram on my new PC that I may need for some heavy workloads like blender rendering.

I have never build a machine like that, so I guess I can’t help you much, but like another comment said, it seems like a pain to maintain, I usually have trouble with sata cables losing contact, with that setup there are many cables keen to lose contact.

As for ram I wouldn’t worry about it at all, unless you use zfs 4GB should be more than enough, even 2 or less. Ram is expensive now, so you may want to consider using as little as possible unless you already have it laying around. Does truenas use zfs? If so you may want to use other fs like btrfs or test how well zfs works with the ram you have. I’m not sure zfs is worth the trouble. I wouldn’t buy extra ram.

As for CPU I don’t think it matters much, but like I said, I have never tried your setup. But even an ancient sandy bridge should work fine if it’s just a personal has, with HDDs even with encryption. Works fine on my nas.

Also, if you have access to free old computers you can try a ghetto setup where each each computer only handles 4 drives and then you join them together on a master computer either via nbd or nvme other Ethernet (works on sata too). But that seems like an even bigger pain to maintain and increases your power consumption by a lot.

Well, first while raid is great, it’s not a replacement for backups. Raid is mostly useful if uptime is imperative, but does not protect against user errors, software errors, fs corruption, ransomware or a power surge killing the entire array.

Since uptime isn’t an issue on my home nas, instead of parity I simply have cold backups which (supposedly) I plug in from time to time to scrub the filesystems.

If a online drive dies I can simply restore it from backup and accept the downtime. For my anime I have simply one single backup, but or my most important files I have 2 backups just in case one fails. (Unfornately both onsite)

On the other hand, for a client of mine’s server where uptime is imperative, in addiction to raid I have 2 automatic daily backups (which ideally one should be offsite but isn’t, at least they are in different floors of the same building).

The point is that 8TB are too small, and not enough for my anime.