Name: Jean Helou
Title/Job Description: Staff engineer
Company: Malt
Location/Country: France
First AArch64 device: I have a PI around somewhere that I think is arm
Other Social Media: Mastodon @jhelou@mamot.fr
Favorite Book/Movie/Song/TV Show: Olympos + Illium by Dan Simmons
Hello everyone, I ended up here after reading @nmasse-itix blog post about his home build. I have a 15U rack that hosts the house networking gear and an aging synology NAS that I want to replace which leaves quite a bit of free space where I could put a 2 to 4U case.
I want to host a Jellyfin server, some kind of photoprism or other alternative to google photos, have some spare capacity for a home assistant as I start integrating the house’s connected devices, and of course replace the NAS features (ftp+tls, internal samba/afp shares, …)
Maybe host more services as I get ideas but for a very limited number of users.
When looking for energy efficient setups in that form factor, I stumbled on Nicolas’ blog post and discovered ampere builds.
I haven’t ordered an ampere yet as I wonder if its not completely overkill for my needs and i am quite overwhelmed by all the terminology in the blog post !
I also wonder how low I can get the power consumption on idle. I know would definitely not go for 128Gb of RAM as I saw the post saying that that much ram was using more power than the CPU
I saw several of you got GPUs working (hopefully there is one that has ffmpeg hwaccel support for transcoding, I haven´t done that homework just yet), I also saw at least one of you managing to put nixos on the beast which is of particular interest to me
Anyways I’ll continue lurking around to try and decide if this is for me or not. I saw the thread going for a EU group buy and I will keep tabs on it
Hello Jean, welcome to the community, it sounds like you have a few interesting use cases for your home build. The Altra/AltraMax platforms are very capable at video transcoding work. Spinning up a Jellyfin server alongside a few of the other services you’ve mentioned on one of the ASRock Altra kits would likely result in having compute leftover for video transcoding, and this would be before you even need a GPU, just food for thought.
We have a workload brief published on our site that showcases on-CPU video transcoding performance with libx264 and ffmpeg across various input video resolutions/framerates from the vBench benchmark, check it out: X264 Workload Brief
I also have a Raspberry Pi Model 4B at home that runs Jellyfin and a few other services. Speaking from experience: I’ve attempted to transcode while serving media at the same time and I have hit the limits of what the Pi hardware is capable of. I thought about maybe trying to optimize this by transcoding ahead of time and caching, but haven’t gotten that far yet. It’s fun to experiment and try to workaround the constraints, but for now I stick to direct-play and try to avoid transcoding on my Pi.
Welcome @jeantil! BTW you mentioned NixOS, @TheComputerGuy is one of the maintainers of Nix. Just thought that I would connect you two.
For some of your questions that @zmeyers didn’t answer (thanks for the great answers), you might want to post them on the Q&A or Genernal topics, they will probably get more views.
Once again welcome and I hope that you keep asking great questions.
Yes, that might have been me on Twitter or one of the NixOS spaces. I actually recently upgraded my system from an Ampere Altra Q64-22 to Ampere Altra Max M128-26. NixOS is actually quite easy to load on, I recommend going with the bare installer to get started.
Thank you for your answers !
I have looked into the video transcoding workload brief provided by zach and its very interesting.
I am definitely sold on nixos already and would definitely have tried setting it up on the beast.
I’m still quite hesitant to jump the gun, It looks amazing but also probably way overpowered for my needs.
It explains the cost both in money and in power :
While I do realize it is extremely efficient for a server, my understanding is that in good conditions it idles at ~100W. By comparison my whole rack currently idles at 70w ! (current NAS + USG (router) + internet box (to be removed) +fiber transceiver). this contributes to the overpowered feeling I have
At the same time the raspberies are too small they might make it on compute but would be lacking in RAM and more importantly in IO connections.
