[Official] serverbuilds.net CARE PACKAGE GIVEAWAY (pfSense + more) - ends 1/1/21

[piranger]

ENTRY

I learned about ServerBuilds by listening to SelfHosted and 2.5 Admins podcasts with JDM, Alex, Chris, Joe, Jim Salters, and Allen Jude.

Google Podcasts is no longer available

This led me to ZFS, Sanoid and Allen’s wonderful two “ZFS Mastery” books which I devoured and constantly refer to.

Seeing the bitdeals.tech group-buy got me started as it introduced me to inexpensive used enterprise drives and LSI SAS HBA cards.

[CLOSED] Array Starter Kit - 4TB SATA

[image] [Overview] I’ve been working together with BitDeals to put together some unique combos. This one is basically the ultimate NAS storage starter kit! I’ve been doing some thinking about what the average Unraid user needs to start out with. Obviously, this combo is useful for others too, but most of the community runs Unraid. This combo will include: LSI SAS HBA Flashable to IT mode 2-8 x 3.5" HDDs Ideally 1 parity drive, rest for data 1 x 2.5" 10K SAS HDD Great for write cac…

The NAS Killer series has been a gold mine of information on hardware and software options:

[Guide] NAS Killer 4.0 - fast, quiet, power efficient, and flexible - starting at $125

[NAS KILLER 4.0 BUILD GUIDE] [JOIN THE DISCORD] [image] Objective Update the NAS Killer line of builds to iteration 4.0. Moving on to socket 1155, we should be able to see much better performance and power usage, while maintaining the expected low price targets. This guide will feature not only Xeon processors, but also consumer Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors. Market pricing for 1155 CPUs has dropped significantly in the past year, bringing it in line with where 1156 was a year ago.…

And the other eye opening guide was Hardware Transcoding with QuickSync:

[Guide] Hardware Transcoding: The JDM way! QuickSync and NVENC

Introduction The purpose of this guide is to give an overview of hardware transcoding with Plex. The guide will also provide recommendations for adding hardware transcoding to your existing setup. Ultimately, the recommendation will be to add a dedicated transcoding box that uses Intel QuickSync. The hardware portion of this guide assumes: You have an existing NAS with all of your media on it (this guide will use Unraid as an example) You run Plex Media Server You’re looking for more transcod…

Utilizing these tools, I built a primary Plex/NAS server based on a G5400 processor,
https://www.newegg.com/intel-pentium-gold-g5400/p/N82E16819117875
4x3TB Toshiba SAS drives set up in ZFS mirror pool (2x2x3TB) running Ubuntu in an ATX case with 8 drive bays for expandability.
https://bitdeals.tech/collections/sas-hard-drives/products/toshiba-3tb-mg03sca300
An existing Ivybridge system (also with 8drive bays) was repurposed with the same 2x2x3TB hard drive config as a backup (because raid is NOT a backup).
https://www.newegg.com/black-antec-performance-series-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811129242

Sanoid and Syncoid are then used to manage rolling snapshots and remote backup, respectively.

GitHub - jimsalterjrs/sanoid: These are policy-driven snapshot management and...

My new years resolution will be to make the backup system truly remote and relocate to my mom’s house about 30minutes away. I love wireguard and will use it to securely connect the two computers without opening ports in the firewalls.

WireGuard: fast, modern, secure VPN tunnel

Thanks for all the great resources and teaching me fish.