Working on a Homelab
Introduction
Did you know that 1050ti’s are free? You can just take them, it’s like ducks at the park
No but like, seriously they are dirt cheap second hand. And a lot of the cards barely need any work or touch up, at most a thermal paste reapply. And for a small homelab transcoding? Ideal. I am genuinely shocked these old beasts are that cheap. But I guess mining and crypto, or what’s left of it is all the new-fangled cards now. A pleasant surprise and a nice introduction to this topic, which if you’ve read the title is, you guessed it, about putting together a homelab.
Why a homelab?
This whole thing started because I realized that I have a lot of old computer parts lying around, and my family is moving to somewhere with better internet. So I decided to turn some of this into a homelab! I decided that I wanted to get rid of a few service subscriptions (the prices are getting a lot), so my old parts will get some use… (Also I genuinely recommend selling as soon as you are done with old parts, or recycling into a budget homelab.) The most important part is saving on Netflix for me and my family, so I am of course talking about putting up my own legally owned videos onto Jellyfin for distribution. Among my family only obviously, who all have a license for the content.
There are other things I’d like to use the homelab for, like serving a few static content sites (I might even move this site to it in the future). And moving some services that aren’t downtime sensetive too (I don’t expect home internet to be as reliable as online internet). With the caveat that my homelab will not be running RAID due to the price of storage so I need to make sure to have backups of content I care about.
That being said, if you have figured out from my ramblings I was missing two key parts to put this together.
Missing pieces…
I needed a GPU and Storage.
And storage is… Expensive.
I checked Amazon and… yeah…
This made my plan quite straightforward, an M.2 SSD for databases, boot and content needed to be served fast (like the static pages). And a hard drive for legal copies, home videos, and so on for Jellyfin. As well as other files that are large and not needed on the SSD. This plan is honestly quite solid for my needs, but if building your own homelab you should definitely try and evaluate how much storage you need and of what types. HDDs still have their place, especially in homelabs. In my case since the HDD will be data that can be reobtained fairly easily, the plan is to have it be a refurbished NAS drive, but this may not be suitable for you!
So far, for initial setup my plan is a 500GB SSD + 20TB HDD, but this is subject to change based on my initial testing.
That just leaves one left over component.
I neeeded a GPU, and luckily, old GPUs are quite numerous. I did have to check what supports h265 at mininmum for transcoding. And the most cost efficient in my case with linux support for the encoding was a gtx 1050ti, even on Linux for video purposes, I really recommend Nvidia OR Intel Only the newest AMD cards have started to catch up in quality, and Intel newer cards would cost more than this second hand card for my personal situation. If your CPU has an integrated GPU (sadly, mine is an AMD Ryzen not an Intel) then you probably can manage a couple streams with good quality just through QuickSync! This 1050ti in my case will allow around 3-4 transcoding streams depending on settings and that sure as hell is enough for me!
Honestly, I am just thankful I didn’t need to buy RAM…
Should you build a homelab?
As I sit here at nearly 2am, starting to put the pieces of my old PC’s together with this 1050ti and storage, I do wonder is it worth it for the average user?
Probably not, not with prices being so high. However if you can get your hands on RAM or have old RAM laying about, I would recommend seeing if it’s viable and if so. Build away! A homelab is a good investment and you can do things to save on money like cancelling Netflix, and just have fun tinkering so…
All in all, 10/10 homelab away! (And don’t get distracted by Tomodachi Life…)