Starting a new homelab with an old JBOD (MSA 2040)

So my Synology NAS has expanded to it's final drive bay and I've had my eye on a home lab for a while. There's an old JBOD going for a couple hundred dollars, I'm wondering if anyone has any opinions on whether it's worth making the jump.

I've chosen a JBOD so that I can buy a cheap optiplex to serve the files up and transcode them as it seems to be the cheapest option for hardware transcoding on Jellyfin, via an intel quicksync capable chip.

Any thoughts?

 

Curious what you think JBOD stands for because an MSA 2040 is a full blown dual controller SAN?

 

Ah ok, the guy has advertised it as a JBOD, which I was under the assumption it was a bunch of HDD's with a simple controller to get the data on and off. What's the difference with this one, a beefier controller?

 

I’m guessing it’s the SAS controller version which can act as a JBOD shelf when used with an external SAS controller?

You’d need to set up the array and create disk groups…etc as it’s not a “dumb” device like most SAS disk shelves

 

looking at the back side of it from here

https://www.techbuyer.com/au/hp-msa-2040-energy-star-san-dual-controller-sff-storage-k2r80a-128300

i'm guessing it's the same as the EMC version (i'm using the KTN-STL3 which comes off a VNX SAN) - the disk trays can be used by themselves as they just expose a FC or SAS port on the back you can link to an HBA on your host, in which case it really is JBOD, or more accurately, just a disk shelf with in built expander. This is likely given the way the previous fella is advertising it. The full MSA will be a UPS plus duel controllers plus a collection of mix and match disk shelves (3.5", 2.5" etc) as needed for the users application. I reckon this bloke is just selling one of the shelves.

I should warn you that you may wish to hear it running before you commit to buying one. You're not going to want a jet engine under that optiplex while you're trying to watch a movie.

 

Oh are they noisy? I was going to have the lab in my share house office, which shares a wall with a bedroom. It's seeming more and more like if I want something that doesn't belong in a garage or warehouse I'm going to have to spend 5x the money and time building it custom

 

If you have to ask that question then it's not for you.

If you just want a DAS, MSA2040 is a waste of money, D2600/D2700 will do the same job more reliably and they're basically free (got heaps of the 2.5" ones that I just give away for free to anyone who'll take them).

 

I'm currently looking into this too. Definitely seems to be Intel in front for both transcode capabilities and quality on a budget.

AMD GPUs currently require at least a Vega based GPU for full "zero-copy" acceleration (i.e.: no data has to be piped out of the device and back in again via CPU copies, which are slow and cause the CPU to be partially used). I was looking at a cheap Radeon RX 400 series card, but am now considering instead a small mini PC from AliExpress with UHD600 iGPU on board for less than any other decent GPU.

People also suggest that actual transcode quality with Intel GPUs is slightly better quality than AMD or Nvidia hardware transcoding for the same bitrate, which is pretty interesting.

Jellyfin's guide here:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/intel/

Suggests you want at least 7th Gen Kaby Lake with HD / UHD 6xx GPU or better if you want a full round trip of something like x265/hevc/10bit/bt2020/4K/HDR decode and re-encode in realtime (which is the format I'm most interested in currently).

There are tiny Celeron N5095 machines on AliExpress for around AU$160 including shipping, and a TDP of 15W, Jasper Lake with UHD Graphics 6XX GPUs.

I'm unsure if they can do Vulkan based tonemapping (I don't think they can), but OpenCL is still there for hardware acceleration of that.

 

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/304827286158
HP OEM NVIDIA GeForce GT730 2GB Graphics

I got one of these, Nvidia says it will do HEVC 10-bit - Maxwell 2nd Gen (GM206) and newer as its a Kepler series, the fit inside my IBM x3250 I know blasphemy HP in IBM! low power server in a rack doing media duties.

 

Nice find! Looks like that will just scrape it in with yuv420p10le (which I'm fairly sure all my media is) including HDR and tonemapping via CUDA.

 

There are plenty on ebay at the moment. something HP got decommissioned an they all had 730GTs.

If it works I'll be getting 2 more for the other 2 x3250's.

 

Hrm, actually, I'm not sure currently.

Random website says it's GK208B :
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gt-730.c1988

And:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gk208b.g815
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo

VP5 (h264 decode only, no h265) and no NVENC on board.

There's only mobile variant 208 cards on here, but all of them are also capped out at h264 decode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC

It's really bloody difficult to get specs on Nvidia cards sometimes. Some of their mainline stuff is fine, but these late model budget cards have almost nothing written down on any of the usual Nvidia internal tables.

 

elvis DANG so the gk208b is a no go?
Need a no extra power card that is a genuine single slot half height to fit in the server case, guess I'll have a look at Quadro.

 

Well, I've pulled the trigger on an N5095 mini PC from AliExpress. I'll let you know how it goes in 6-8 weeks when it shows up.

[edit] Money already paid so it's too late, but maybe not a win after all:

https://github.com/intel/media-driver#video-processing-features

According to that link, full HDR decode isn't available on Jasper Lake hardware (which this N5095 I've bought is). I guess I'll find out more when it arrives.

[edit2] These still will support OpenCL tonemapping from what I understand? Just not Intel QSV VPP tonemapping. Maybe.

 

I'm currently using an old laptop with 6th gen with a jellyfin instance as it's only running task, and the performance was noticeably better than similar speeds without the tech. It seems able to transcode 4k like 80% of the time, so I imagine 9th gen + would be quite capable and much cheaper than NVENC with a quadro or something.

Ok these definitely look cheaper. I mean so long as there aren't any limitations in comparison with the MSA2040 then why not? The mean reason I chose the MSA was that it was the only second hand JBOD I could find in my area really. Not the most common sale item

 

Hardware showed up today. Intel N5095 mini PC, 15W TDP. AUD $166 delivered.

* QSV decode/encode working
* VA-API encode/decode working
* OpenCL tonemapping working

VPP tonemapping doesn't work, but that's fine. OpenCL works very well and is totally configurable.

The Jellyfin website says QSV should offer better performance, but benchmarking now shows that VA-API is faster (higher FPS encode), lower CPU utilisation and higher GPU utilisation, which is what I want. Was decoding 4K H.265 10bit HDR and live re-encoding that to HD H.264 8bit SDR at around 80FPS, so heaps of headroom for a few users simultaneously.

Very happy with this. Way cheaper than any dedicated GPU I could find with the same features/quality, which is pretty wild when it's a whole computer.

 

I have done the rounds for plex (same difference with jellyfin) as far as gpu etc goes.

I have a jbod unraid setup, in a dual cpu c.2012 xeon server for home use. Transcoding without a gpu/igpu is taxing but possible. I added a 5gb quadro card about a year or so ago, which made everything run a fair bit smoother.

If I were to do it again, I'd set up an usff dell or hp with an intel igpu (i5 7xxx or higher) as a seperate plex/streaming node on the network and spec down the nas requirements. I'd also put unraid on top of esxi on the usff just for the docker functionality.

I'd avoid AMD stuff for 4k, the transcoding can end up purple for some reason... Just easier to stick with intel.

 

For 15 watts that is crazy efficient