A simple Unraid build for my vacation home

[Hoopster]

I can't spend a significant amount of time somewhere without an Unraid server, right?

 

No need to break the bank so, here is the build I am putting together now for the vacation home, primarily for hosting Plex and as a backup:

 

• Fractal Node 304 case ($100)
• Asrock H510M-ITX/ac motherboard ($138)
• Intel i5-11600 CPU ($164 on eBay - CPU is new)
• Noctua NH-U9S CPU cooler borrowed from another server and replaced there with a Noctua NH-D12L cooler
• Silverstone ST45ST 450W SFX PSU ($82)
• 32GB Kingston DDR 4 RAM (2x16GB) ($78)
• Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD for appdata and other stuff ($40)
• Crucial MX200 250GB SATA SSD I have laying around (some kind off Unassigned Devices use)
• Geekworm PiKVM-A8 internal PiKVM with RPi 4 model B for remote access and management ($99 + cost of RPi)
• 8TB, 4TB and 3TB HDDs I have laying around
• No parity disk.  I will just backup from time to time to a 16TB external USB drive.

 

Could I just access Plex server at primary residence remotely?  Sure, but what is the fun in that?

 

Should all be up and running tomorrow.

Edited April 29, 2023 by Hoopster

[Vr2Io]

1 hour ago, Hoopster said:

I can't spend a significant amount of time somewhere without an Unraid server, right?

Conjoined twins with Unraid 😁

[Hoopster]

I got the system assembled and data transferred to the array.  All is working well.

 

This week I have been playing with the PiKVM. It is the internal model that installs inside the case.  It is installed and hooked up to HDMI video, power, LAN, OTG keyboard/mouse, OLED display and ATX power control.  Everything is working great. 

 

I installed Tailscale on the PiKVM this morning for remote access and tested it from my phone over the 5G network (WiFi off).  All is well.

 

I have tested powering the server on and off several times via the PiKVM.  I even entered the BIOS a couple of time while booting to make sure that would work.

 

The Unraid Server as seen via PiKVM in a browser:

 

The PiKVM installed in the Fractal Node 304 case (yes, I have a little cable management to do):

 

Should be a decent setup for the vacation home with non-IPMI remote management via the PiKVM/Tailscale.

[ConnerVT]

I really like my PiKVM.  It has worked flawlessly since I got my IGPU and Unraid to play nice with one another (not the PiKVM's fault).

 

I've been wanting to add Cloudflared locally on it, so I can use CF Tunnel and Zero Trust to further isolate it from the mean, cold world.  Unfortunately, there isn't a pre-built version of Cloudflared that runs on Arch with the Pi4 ARM processor (it is a special flavor, from what I understand).  I went to build it myself, but Go had been updated a week before I tried, and another dependency now needs to get updated before I can proceed.  I have CF Tunnel running through NPM, but that does me no good if I need to power on the server, now would it? 

 

I've been trying to avoid going with Tailscale, only because of the funky DNS blocking scheme here at work.  CF Tunnel pumping everything through port 443 and my unknown domain goes right through.  Can't even connect to my server with Unraid Connect from work.

 

Like the choice of case as well.  As you read in my backup server thread, it is in the Silverstone SG11 Sugo cube.  I bought this case because it can fit both a standard ATX power supply and mATX motherboard.  I wasn't happy with the cooling, when trying to have it be a quiet PC.  Replaced it with the Fractal Core 500, which only fits an iTX motherboard, an added expense when I changed cases.  Fast forward a few years, now the old case and motherboard are reunited.  Guess it was meant to be.

[Hoopster]

Just got Handbrake setup for Quick Sync Video (QSV) encoding on this system. 

 

Encode kept failing with the QSV encoders even though /dev/dri was passed through to the Handbrake container and QSV options appeared in the encoder list.  I discovered that Rocket Lake/11th gen. Intel CPU/iGPUs have problems with low power QSV encoding which is the Handbrake default.

 

I needed to add "lowpower=0" to the More Setting box in the Video tab for all QSV presets.  They all worked great after that.

 

 

The highest CPU temp I saw on a 2.5 hour H.265 QSV encode was 46C.  Even with QSV, CPU utilization climbs high as QSV does not decode (CPU process) in Handbrake and subtitles are also handled by the CPU.

 

 

For comparison, here is what the same encode of the same file looked like on my main system with E-2288G CPU (9th generation) - amost 20C hotter (its a 95W TDP CPU and a little lighter on CPU usage due to higher base clock and more cores:

 

The CPU for the first chart is a 2.8GHz base i5-11600 (65W TDP) and I did see it "turbo" up to 3.3 GHz for most of the encode; however, in the BIOS I have it limited to Intel recommended speeds per CPU temp and I do not allow it to run at sustained turbo speeds for a longer time overriding the defaults.

 

I did the same movie with an H.264 QSV encode and it was done in less than 30 minutes compared to 2.5 hours for H.265.  Both were 1080p30.

 

I am happy with the performance.

 

 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Hoopster