aaronjb

Hi all, I was originally an unRAID user back in 2009 or so until I succumbed and bought a QNAP, which was eventually joined by a second QNAP. I've finally grown tired of the power consumption (not inconsiderable from two 8 bay QNAPs - an 859 and 869) and being locked to same-size drives so I'm looking to come back, but I don't think my circa 2009 unRAID hardware is going to cut it! I'm mostly just hoarding data with a small side of Plex transcoding, but I would also like to roll-in my current virtualisation solution (another similarly old 7th gen i7 powered Dell) for some home-lab fun. My requirements are: 8 bays (3.5" drives) 2x cache (ideally NVMe but SSD would probably be enough) for the VM/dockers & speed of writes 2.5Gbit NIC is ideal, 10Gbit would be even better but overkill Cheap(ish!) I've been looking at various 8 bay cases which all take ATX or mATX (and, technically, I have a perfectly fine LianLi in the loft which is also ATX) and then I got stuck.. I was originally looking at Intel (Core i5 13th gen) but a little put off by the possibility of CPU failure so started watching more videos where I happened upon an excellent build video using a Gigabyte MC12-LE0 motherboard which looks great, 6x SATA, lights-out management etc, but is now nearly £300 from China and only has one M.2 slot, and I'm stuck on the fence between: The MC12-LE0 w/ a Ryzen 4650G, Intel Arc A310, LSI 9207-8i or M.2 to SATA adapter and SSDs for cache and live with 1Gb networking An MSI Pro B650-A w/ Ryzen 7600, Intel Arc A310, LSI 9207-8i and 2x NVMe for cache w/ 2.5Gbit networking and lose the BMC Go Intel i5 13500 or similar on a board supporting Intel AMT, I could probably lose the Arc A310 and there are no-name boards with all the other features (6-8x SATA, 2-3x M.2, 2.5Gb NICs etc) I really like the idea of remote management of a headless system so the MC12's BMC or Intel AMT appeals, going Intel does mean I can shrink the other component cost down and likely power consumption (HBAs seem costly in terms of draw and I've seen reports of them eliminating higher C-states) but there's that 13/14th gen 'curse' to think about.. Writing it all out it does feel like the best compromise, at the expense of cost, is probably something like the CWWK W680 NAS motherboard NasCompares covered recently - though C-state capability and power consumption is a bit unknown. Thoughts appreciated! I think I've been stuck in analysis paralysis so long I was originally looking at Jonsbo cases and Intel N300 solutions so I could really do with breaking this internal deadlock soon ;)

No problem at all, and thanks for the extra information I'll build a new SVN version soon, as the more recent versions support DTS-passthrough as well as AC3, which makes for easier transcoding of anything where you want to preserve a DTS track - I'll update here when I've done it

Aha - thanks I've not used the Windows version - only the Mac GUI & CLI versions, so I wasn't aware of that (maybe that feature exists in the Mac GUI too - I'll have to go hunting)

The best resource is really the HandBrake website - http://handbrake.fr - the forums and the Wiki. Start with the Wiki, though, as they don't suffer fools gladly on the forums It's fairly easy to figure out what CLI options you need based on what GUI options you're picking - the main thing is to remember to look at what x264 options are being set in the GUI (the long text string) and use those at the CLI with the '-x' parameter, but the GUI can't generate a script unfortunately (would be nice if it could, actually). Aaron (who really should get around to writing that Wiki page

So I did all this because VMWare only allows you to access two cores in any VM, even on a quad core box - and since I specifically spent the extra on a quad core processor for my unRAID box with transcoding my DVDs in mind, I wanted to make use of them So without further ado: If you want to compile HandBrake yourself then follow the instructions below - you'll be checking out a development tree of HandBrake and compiling that on your unRAID development box, then installing a package you build yourself. If you'd rather just download the last one I built (which could be out of date and/or have bugs, just as any SVN build can) then skip to step 1a at the foot of this post. 1) Prepare your unRAID Development machine per here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2937.0 N.B. The version of slackware your development machine uses will change the minimum version of libstdc you need later in these instructions - pay attention there! 2) Install yasm & jam: wget http://repository.slacky.eu/slackware-12.1/development/yasm/0.7.2/yasm-0.7.2-i486-1sl.tgz wget http://repository.slacky.eu/slackware-12.1/development/jam/2.5/jam-2.5-i486-2gal.tgz installpkg yasm-0.7.2-i486-1sl.tgz installpkg jam-2.5-i486-2gal.tgz 2) Check out a copy of the HandBrake source. I like to keep everything in a 'dev' directory in my home, so for me it's: cd dev svn co svn://svn.handbrake.fr/HandBrake/trunk HandBrake After a couple of minutes the checkout should complete, and drop you back at the shell prompt, so pop into the checked-out directory and let's get started: A HandBrake/make/config.guess Checked out revision 2353. root@slacky:~/dev$ cd HandBrake **N.B.** As of right now, HandBrake refuses to build on Slackware because they require a later version of libtool than is installed by default due to a patch to pass '-i' to libtoolize when building xvidcore. A dirty hack to fix this is to remove the patch file - you should test a build first to see if it completes, since the SVN version is always in-flux, this could easily be fixed by the time you're reading this. If it doesn't build, come back to this step and start from here again. 3) If you need to, remove the xvidcore patch: cd contrib/xvidcore rm -f A00-libtool.patch cd ~/dev/HandBrake rm -rf build Otherwise, run configure and then we can build: cd ~/dev/HandBrake ./configure cd build make Now sit back and watch as the build process runs through, downloading the required libraries and compiling everything up. The build should stop with an error relating to gtk, but that's OK - we don't actually care about the GTK GUI anyway: ../gtk/src/values.h:69: error: expected ')' before '*' token make: *** [gtk/src/create_resources-native.o] Error 1 As long as the build directory now contains a binary called 'HandBrakeCLI', we're good to go. 4) If you want to save the HandBrake binary on your USB key then you can now simply copy it (via whatever method you prefer) to somewhere in /boot (I keep packages in /boot/packages, for example), otherwise if you'd rather store it in the RAMfs, you can make an installation package now: mkdir -p /handBrakeREALTIME/usr/local/bin cp HandBrakeCLI /handBrakeREALTIME/usr/local/bin cd /handBrakeREALTIME makepkg HandBrakeREALTIME.tgz Then copy the package to somewhere on your unRAID /boot - I use /boot/packages personally. 5) From this point on, all steps are performed on your unRAID server directly Edit /config/go to include a line which reads: installpkg /boot/packages/HandBrakeREALTIME.tgz (Naturally change the path if you store your packages elsewhere) 5) HandBrake also requires cxxlibs, and depending on the version of Slackware you built on will dictate the version of cxxlibs you need to install. If your development box is 12.0, you'll need cxxlibs 6.0.8 or newer, 12.1 or newer will require 6.0.9 or newer. Download them on your main unRAID box thusly if you don't already have them: wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-12.1/slackware/a/cxxlibs-6.0.9-i486-1.tgz And add a line to your 'go' script to load the pacakge: installpkg /boot/packages/cxxlibs-6.0.9-i486-1.tgz And now you're all done! Congratulations! If you just want to use the package I've pre-built then start here: 1a) Telnet to your unRAID box and run the following commands - note I keep all my packages in /boot/packages, so that's where I'm assuming you do, too: wget http://zion.mind-design.co.uk/unRAID/HandBrakeCLI-svn2354-i686-1ajb.tgz wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-12.1/slackware/a/cxxlibs-6.0.9-i486-1.tgz 2a) Add the following lines to your /boot/config/go script: installpkg /boot/packages/cxxlibs-6.0.9-i486-1.tgz installpkg /boot/packages/HandBrakeCLI-svn2354-i686-1ajb.tgz Note that my package installs to /usr/local/bin Enjoy! Any corrections or problems then post up and I'll adjust the instructions accordingly Aaron

My wiring is nowhere near as neat as Rob's up top - but then I haven't finished tying everything down just yet as I'll need to swap the nice modular PSU back in once it comes back from DOA RMA, but here goes. I wanted a system that was built to take the full 15 drives long-term, even though right now I only need two plus a cache, and I wanted it to be quiet. But more than that, I wanted it to be powerful enough to run VMWare with a full Ubuntu distribution running in it to transcode my DVDs to H.264. What I've ended up with is something plenty powerful and even quieter than my current fileserver (An Athlon Barton 3000+ based system, quite old now). Case: Lian-Li PCA17A case. Tons of room inside, 9x5.25" drive bays to take the full compliment of hard disc docks, and a motherboard tray - first time I've bought a case expensive enough to be easy to build with and quality enough not to shred my hands in the process! I really wanted the black one, but this one was in stock for Saturday delivery.. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P31-ES3G. I did some reading around and similar boards were being used successfully. Only four onboard SATA ports but three PCI slots, three PCI-E x1 slots and one PCI-E x16 slot means I can still spread the ports around extra cards to minimize bandwidth contention - technically I could use six 2 port cards, if my maths is correct. Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, Yorkfield die. Not the most powerful quad core out there, but very cheap at £130! CPU Cooling: ASUS V60 Quiet - huge heatsink, pretty quiet (not silent) and keeps the CPU almost at room temperature when idle! Power Supply: 850W NorthQ Black Magic Flex Modular PSU. I found a review of this PSU online - here, in fact - it's nice and quiet when un-loaded, and has three 12v rails - one for the CPU, and the other two join to make one giant 50A 12v rail. Read the review for more, it's pretty thorough RAM: 2x2GB matched pair of Corsair TwinX DDR2 5-5-5-15 1066Mhz RAM. This gave me some problems with my Gigabyte motherboard. The motherboard insisted on running the RAM at 1110MHz on any automatically detected settings, which the RAM did not appreciate. Backing it off to 1000MHz results in a stable system, at the expense of a tiny bit of speed.. Drive Docks: Icy Dock MB-455SPF, just like the prebuilt systems. Drives: So far just two Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B 1TB drives - cheap at £70 a pop. USB Key: I started off with a tiny 128Mb no-name drive that's branded by the people I work for (they were promo items) - no GUID meant it was useless for registering, but let me prove the system. I invested in a couple of sticks at PC World as my other 1Gb Maxell sticks refused to boot. One of them was a tiny 2Gb PNY stick - honestly it's miniscule, quick and boots nicely. Peekshures! The case arrived and was taken out of the box, ooh, shiny! It's so small! (Words every man is afraid of hearing) I thought the F5 one was small, but no.. Bit of a rats nest in here: Looks nice from the outside, though: