It kind of reminds me of the whole Rust situation in a way. The evangelists were so heavy-handed that an active counter-movement developed, and with the adoption being wider the fanatics are heard less and what remains is their counterpart. We certainly aren’t quite there yet with the Linux discussion, but it seems to be what we’re heading towards.

Oh they have a lot to do with the decisions of politicians. But more on topics of economy and how they can profit as much as possible, rather than the supply of arms. Still I swear every second politician here is getting bribes “funds” from the car lobby.

I think part of it is that they can actually do anything long-term. Even the most altruistic president in for example the US will get four, at most eight years to do what they’re planning. That’s not enough time to do anything meaningful, all the while they’re dealing with flak from the consequences of the last presidency, and their successor will at best take credit for their achievements, at worst destroy them before they succeed. And that’s assuming the citizens didn’t elect a self-serving megalomaniac.

Winnie the pooh, I’m pretty sure, actually cares about his country. He’s by no means benevolent, but he has the power, resources, and time to build proper infrastructure and reshape the country as he sees fit.

Socially they’re way behind from what I, as an outsider, can tell. Women’s rights at least seem somewhat acceptable with definite room for improvement, but queer rights are even worse. Oh and there’s a literal genocide of Uyghurs so that’s pretty fucking bad.

But the benefits of China’s dictatorship lie in the fact that they can actually think in the long-term and not just until the next election (the politician’s equivalent of the next financial quarter) so they can wield their powers and resources to achieve these goals. The glorious leader must be praised for centuries to come, that can’t happen if the earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change or the country crumbles in on itself due to failing education and a failing economy.

Now if only that applied to citizen’s rights…

may require command line and config files to do it

I’m comfortable enough with those, that shouldn’t be an issue then. Thanks for the info!

Oh I didn’t even consider the fact that I might need to pass through the iGPU. Thanks for pointing that out, will double check. Although it’d be very odd if TrueNAS struggled to do that, considering how many people use it and how many of those have some kind of self-hosted streaming service. But of course, always best to check anyways!

Very helpful, thank you! The CPU choice has had to be remade anyways as I have mentioned in other places in this thread.

Looking at the 5750GE it seems to be OEM-only, so I’m not sure where to reputably get my hands on that.

The 5700G looks very intriguing, it’s only barely more expensive compared to the last price of the 4650G I saw. If I find nothing else, I’ll probably go with that one then.

I am still concerned about wattage though, I struggled to find any regular CPUs with a notably lower TDP than 65W - although I’d honestly be most intrigued by what it draws at idle-ish, because if it’s like a <5W difference there I wouldn’t bother… but of course idle changes depending on the system so not like that can be properly listed anywhere.

Do you potentially also have any Intel suggestions? Other people here mentioned an AMD iGPU might cause problems with Jellyfin.

I run EXOS drives in the under-stair cupboard. They’re noisy but they’re not that bad.

I think anything described as “noisy” would be too much, especially considering the savings are decent but not huge.

I’ve not heard of AMD CPUs handling this under Linux at least.

I’ll double check that then, just to be sure. Although I have noticed that, between me writing it down and now, the CPU is no longer available where I live, so I have to find a replacement either way.

You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box.

I see, I chose that one based on a recommendation from I believe the channel was called “Wolfgang’s Channel”. They make a lot of home lab content and showed the iGPU working fine for Plex, so I assumed it wasn’t an issue.

Are you intent on building your own box?

Yeah pretty much, I think it sounds fun

Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.

As I mentioned in my post, apparently they’re way louder since they’re made for datacenters where noise is crazy anyways, and since I am planning to have the NAS in my hallway I’d like to avoid the datacenter vibe, even if a handful of drives won’t cause quite that level of cacophony

I sadly can not. The old PC I’m scavenging from is incomplete and my current PC has a DDR5 motherboard. So the earliest point I can check them is once I’ve built the NAS since then I’d have a functioning PC here with DDR4 support.

Got it, thank you

Is noise the most important prio? Would you spend money for this goal?

Not the most important, but it is an important factor. If I am not losing much otherwise, I’d like to keep it not louder than say, an idling fridge. I would spend some more for quieter drives and fans, since those are the biggest noise concerns.

How about power usage?

Absolutely important, power prices here are some of the highest globally.

How about price limitations?

I’d very much like to stay below 2000€, preferably below 1750€. Currently it’s coming out at around 1600€.

When looking at harddisks, there is that performance issue called “CMR or SMR” (google it). Your ST8000NT001 seem fine performance-wise as the use CMR.

Yup, took that into account, but nonetheless thanks for mentioning it!

If you need really quiet ones, then maybe you want “desktop” harddisks. But many of them use SMR which limits their performance.

Doesn’t need to be super quiet, just not disruptive, I’m planning on having the NAS in the hallway.

Most guides recommend Raidz2 currently. Do you use backups?

Raidz2 means there are two entire “unused” drives which would be quite painful for my budget. I am planning on renting around 1TB of rsync storage and throwing things like Immich’s data on there. This is fine to me since I’d prefer one backup off-site anyways. Any of my jellyfin stuff can always be redownloaded as long as I keep a list of what I got somewhere else. Oh also I’m planning on getting all four drives at different stores and/or different times (at least a week or two in between) to reduce the chance of them failing all at once.

When buying SSDs, check for the “TBW” spec.

Noted

Prices fluctuate but last I checked it was around 1600€. Also, after posting this thread I re-checked the CPU and noticed that isn’t even available in my region anymore apparently, so I’ll have to find a suitable replacement there anyways.

A friend of mine had an unRAID NAS and moved that over to TrueNAS later after being bothered by the licensing costs, that’s why I was looking into the latter more. I do know how to RTFM, so I think I should be fine on that? But maybe there’s gonna be a huge negative surprise, I suppose I don’t know that yet

How come? I’ve seen those recommended quite often.

Yeah, I thought about the RAM, but since I already have two 8GB sticks I decided not to bother. Couldn’t even buy two more since I have no idea what those are exactly, there are no stickers on them, so I’d have to buy 32GB entirely which is like 80-120€.

And as you said, that can always be done later if I run into trouble :)

Ah, sorry, I should’ve specified this further. Whether this can run what I need it to isn’t the primary concern, I believe it can do so, I primarily attached my decision making basis just in case it changes anything.

I’m more concerned about things like picking the correct drives, or if limiting my motherboard selection through an ITX case was a bad idea, or if my choice of not going with ECC was a poor one, those kinds of things.

Over the last one or two years I feel like Rust haters have gotten even louder than the Rust evangelists. For every person who declares “Rewrite it in Rust!” I see two or three people saying how they hate Rust or how pointless it is and so on.

Loverslab exists, they probably have what you’re looking for

There is, yes, but it’s pointless. I think some people are missing the point of Alyx being a VR game, the game would suck pretty bad in pancake mode. It’s the intricate interactions with the world you simply can’t get with a mouse and keyboard that make it special compared to other Half Life games. They didn’t just make a regular Half Life game and said “well we’re just gonna force this to be in VR now”, they made a VR game and set it in the Half Life universe.

Somewhat hot take… I’d argue Boneworks (not Bonelab) was “better”, at least if you’re used to VR and if you judge by freedom and replay value. Don’t get me wrong, playing through Half Life Alyx was fun and engaging, but to me it had little to no replay value, since for all it did great in visuals, audio, accessibility, and especially story, it failed dramatically in physics. Since I played Alyx right after Boneworks, I kept trying to pick stuff up which I ended up not being able to for larger objects, and the first time I tried to knock a Combine over the head with a pipe I was so sorely disappointed. Alyx has absolutely everything Boneworks is missing, yet that physics core is what kept me coming back to the latter. It really clicked for me when I noticed how many things in Boneworks one can solve in alternate ways by “abusing” physics. Climbing is a learned skill and combat can be as much shooting as it can be using knives, fists, shoving someone off a ledge, or grabbing an enemy and throwing it at others. It’s what truly made me realize how much potential VR had, being able to interact with a full physics simulation, where even your own body is a physics object, with your physical hands is amazing.