What I want to see is this thing fit 7 Nvidia Tesla T4 16GB cards in it. HP says it is possible in the data sheet.

This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.

1. Does the app need more than one person to access it?

2. Does the app need constant up time?

3. Does it make sense to host it?

Really this boils down to how you feel about each of these questions. So your example, the budget software. Yes I can have a single instance of that app on my computer. However I need my wife to have access to it, as she handles the finances.

Another example however is Jellyfin. This is something that is accessed from multiple locations and by multiple people. So today I might be watching a movie while I work. Tomorrow my wife might be doing that. Friday we might have family night. So that needs a server hosted out to actually make sense.

Game servers are another example here. They need constant up time and to be on hardware that is not the machine I am playing the game on.

It is also important to remember that many of us host all of this in a single location that we back up, and also have redundant drives. So we can easily make sure we have copies of our data at any given point. So while yea I can keep all my D&D data and PDF management on my computer, it is easier and more secure to keep and host that on my server where I have a backup and parity running. There plenty of other examples here too like my phone pictures of my daughter or other various bits of data.

Finally, there are things I just want to tinker and play with. I have no reason to host specific things other than to look at what the tech is like. Stable Diffusion is an example here. But my own ChatGPT instance would be useful if only every now and then. Just have to figure out what exactly makes the most sense to you.

Projects are fun. Do it if you don’t mind failing. Just keep failing until you get it right.

The setup is not ideal, I won’t lie to you. It could be better. But honestly, if it works for you, do it. There are so many things you can do to improve it and generally it will serve as a stepping stone to the next upgrade you see yourself making.

I will also note, since you have two of them, you could take the proxmox route and make them redundant. I am sure there is a way with Unraid to make them redundant too. I really wish I had the knowledge to run things in RAM.

I thought for a moment this was in the wrong sub. At this point I think your friends mom needs some taking care of around the house.

For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post,

Shut up! This is always worth a post! We do this because we enjoy it. Not because we seek fame. Good on you for getting the job. Just keep learning and growing.

A word of advice for any one else and any future endeavors. Put your lab at the bottom of your resume. 10 year or 20 years in the game, I don’t care. Put it on there. Give the highlights and you are good. So far it has gotten me two jobs.

If they have DDR3 RAM, I personally wouldn’t use them Strictly for performance understandings. This being they would struggle to keep up with any more modern chip you can get that does support DDR4/DDR5 for a decent price.

That being said, if you need a server to run some basic tasks. You could do worse, but I wouldn’t say I suggest it.

If I were using that site personally and looking I would look more towards the HP DL380 G9 for about $500. But anything from that site is going to SUCK when it comes to sound. Not something you want in a room where you want it to be quiet. Mine is in my office and makes a decent but not unbearable sound.

So this is one of those “You have $5 build a XXXXX” situations. You can build a monster for the full budget and put work into it and it work forever with plenty of power. You can spend a smaller portion of the budget and it requires less setup but maybe is lighter on power. You get the idea.

My thought process here is to understand what exactly you do need. You said you like the form factor of the mini PC. But then also the DIY PC ? So what are the requirements here? The Synology would be near identical to this in form factor so I am confused.

I am going to give two types of advice. The build I went with and its cost, and the honest truth.

1. My build is an HP DL380 G9 rack mounted server. It has dual Xeon CPUs and 100+ GB of RAM. I then also have a Tesla M40 GPU in the system. All together with 2 brand new 2TB SSDs it cost me about $800. The server was about $300 on ebay shipped. The GPU was about $100 including the cable for power. The extra RAM was about $100 for 64+ GB DDR 3 ECC. The SSDs were $260. Granted, you would have to use 2.5 inch drives in this setup, it is very much a powerful machine that can handle most anything.

2. For your setup. You are the only person who can determine what is best for you. I can tell you specs, I can tell you my experience, I can tell you about features of systems and OSes. What I can’t tell you is what is going to fill your needs the most both in terms of hardware and its design in the space you have chosen.

The only piece of advice I will give you is this: If you plan on running a plex server, you will want a CPU that can use quick sync. Intel’s new ARC GPU should be able to as well if you went with a GPU option but I cannot speak to this as I have not tested.

Unraid, and TrueNAS are both solid options. You also have Proxmox you can run. It is important to understand though that Unraid and Proxmox are more than just a NAS. They also host VMs and Docker containers. You do have to pay for a license for Unraid though. It is a one time purchase.

The big thing with Unraid compared to the others is that you don’t really have to worry about the size of disks to get the protection of a parity drive. As long as your largest drive in the array is the parity drive you are good.

TrueNAS also has paid options but they do have the free version.

Proxmox is also open source. Which may be something that you like.

Personally I use Unraid. It is solid and I have had zero issues.

The Ryzen CPU is the best in terms of raw performance. Not by a ton, but it does perform better. I also don’t think those Intel CPUs support quick sync so no reason to even consider them really.

The Ryzen also boosts, while the Intel ones don’t.

It is only as risky as it is attackable.

If you use it internally and segment things so that only your server can reach it, then it is essentially impossible to attack.

Then on the other hand, is your network secure? How easy would it be to get in? Where is the weak point? You have to remember that this is a home. It is not likely to be a large target and generally as long as you have any kind of intelligence you will be fine.

So realistically, you will be fine as long as you don’t host it out to the internet in any ways.

I mean, the entire point of VPN like that is all time online. The better solution is likely a port forward for syncing.

I don’t think that really solves the problem here. That will still use the VPN all the time when mobile. So the battery will still drain quickly. Zero Tier I admit is quite heavy compared to Tailscale but the battery issue remains.

You know, honestly… If you want to get into self hosting your stuff. The better option is to get one of those mini desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo. They are cheap and powerful. It will likely server you until the hardware dies depending on what you want to do. It also costs only the cost of the machine and the TINY amount of power it will consume per year.

Once we get a good, well priced E-ink tablet. I think e-readers are going to become much more common. But sadly every company wants to stuff them full of things that the display just isn’t really good for. Like the Huawei MatePad should have 2 weeks of battery life easily. But instead they put an OS on it that eats battery and it barely lasts a full day.

What I think would be a good thing to start looking into as you progress, is the ability to take these scans and other items and turning them into actual text. This can give you more freedom and make the user experience much better. Like the ability to take a book and turn the bright white pages into a much friendlier dark mode for night reading. This could also mean, when E-ink tablets do start becoming easier to own. You will be able to easily adapt to them.

What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can’t benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.

There are a TON of ways you can do this. Since you have a NAS already it makes it super easy. You just need a tiny desktop for about $100 and you are golden.

Look on ebay for one of those mini desktops from HP/Dell/Lenovo. The one thing though is you will need to find one that has a CPU that supports quicksync. So 7th gen or newer. So you want to find as far up the chain as you can.

They are:

1. HP Prodesk
2. Dell Optiplex
3. Lenovo Thinkcenter

This is the cheapest way to get away with it.

There may also be an option to use one of the Intel Arc cards with a cheaply built desktop for quicksync support. But I have not seen anything related to comparing them to on die quicksync. I would be especially curious on the cheaper option from Arc and how well it works for video encoding.

Then you goto homelab and homeserver and they tell you X and Y things and bitch and moan about power usage. Or they suggest things that logically don’t line up with what OP wants/needs. Or they will say lines like “for just a little more” about 10 times until a build is $1000 or more.

Lets try to be helpful instead of just pushing people other places…hmm?

New tools get released every single day.