Can confirm - I've been running a home server for just over a year now with my old college laptop, a 10-year old massive gaming Acer Aspire, and it's been great. I had started off with Miniflux...
Can confirm - I've been running a home server for just over a year now with my old college laptop, a 10-year old massive gaming Acer Aspire, and it's been great. I had started off with Miniflux and Samba on a Raspberry Pi 2 some time earlier, and the upgrade to the laptop was immediately noticeable. The only other major service I've added since is Jellyfin, but once I find some time, I'll be looking for more.
I wonder if there's anything that could make use of that Nvidia card it's got in there...
Transcoding in real time may already take advantage of that GPU, particularly high bitrate files and/or ones utilizing more modern codecs like h265 and AV1. I'm just assuming jellyfin supports it...
Transcoding in real time may already take advantage of that GPU, particularly high bitrate files and/or ones utilizing more modern codecs like h265 and AV1. I'm just assuming jellyfin supports it though, I use plex and it does.
Whisper is an AI tool for generating subtitles, it's particularly useful for dubbed anime since that rarely has native subs.
Depending on the rest of your gadgets and home setup this may be less useful but you could also set it up to stream games/emulators through Steam link.
Just to chime in, Jellyfin does indeed support hardware transcoding. I moved from Plex and it's one of the best decisions I made on the home hosting front.
Just to chime in, Jellyfin does indeed support hardware transcoding.
I moved from Plex and it's one of the best decisions I made on the home hosting front.
If you've got a laptop with at least USB3, you can get a pretty nice USB3 enclosure if your needs include multiple TB of data. I'm using this thing, though I'm sure there's better options. I only...
If you've got a laptop with at least USB3, you can get a pretty nice USB3 enclosure if your needs include multiple TB of data. I'm using this thing, though I'm sure there's better options. I only ever use single-drive with software RAID, I'd never trust a consumer RAID card (and barely trust enterprise ones TBH). It can actually do a BTRFS scrub on my main laptop at around 450 MB/s, which is surprisingly good.
I'm currently booting a Pi off an SSD in said enclosure as well to avoid the typical Pi-related SD card woes, and my next plan of attack is to migrate it onto another drive with a full EFI partition so that the enclosure can boot off of x86 or ARM. The downside is that the pi's USB doesn't have quite enough oomph, it can barely handle a 15 MB/s BTRFS scrub. A 2014+ laptop sits nicely in the middle ground, I was using a Thinkpad x320 before and it was quite awesome at it.
Been doing this for 5+ years with an old laptop I got from a customer due to a broken screen. It’s been running along great with Debian and a couple of external USB 3 hard drives for storage. I’ve...
Been doing this for 5+ years with an old laptop I got from a customer due to a broken screen. It’s been running along great with Debian and a couple of external USB 3 hard drives for storage. I’ve been wanting to build an upgraded system but this guy just keeps humming along with minimal power usage. The article has a lot of great tips on getting started.
Can confirm - I've been running a home server for just over a year now with my old college laptop, a 10-year old massive gaming Acer Aspire, and it's been great. I had started off with Miniflux and Samba on a Raspberry Pi 2 some time earlier, and the upgrade to the laptop was immediately noticeable. The only other major service I've added since is Jellyfin, but once I find some time, I'll be looking for more.
I wonder if there's anything that could make use of that Nvidia card it's got in there...
Transcoding in real time may already take advantage of that GPU, particularly high bitrate files and/or ones utilizing more modern codecs like h265 and AV1. I'm just assuming jellyfin supports it though, I use plex and it does.
Whisper is an AI tool for generating subtitles, it's particularly useful for dubbed anime since that rarely has native subs.
Depending on the rest of your gadgets and home setup this may be less useful but you could also set it up to stream games/emulators through Steam link.
Just to chime in, Jellyfin does indeed support hardware transcoding.
I moved from Plex and it's one of the best decisions I made on the home hosting front.
If you've got a laptop with at least USB3, you can get a pretty nice USB3 enclosure if your needs include multiple TB of data. I'm using this thing, though I'm sure there's better options. I only ever use single-drive with software RAID, I'd never trust a consumer RAID card (and barely trust enterprise ones TBH). It can actually do a BTRFS scrub on my main laptop at around 450 MB/s, which is surprisingly good.
I'm currently booting a Pi off an SSD in said enclosure as well to avoid the typical Pi-related SD card woes, and my next plan of attack is to migrate it onto another drive with a full EFI partition so that the enclosure can boot off of x86 or ARM. The downside is that the pi's USB doesn't have quite enough oomph, it can barely handle a 15 MB/s BTRFS scrub. A 2014+ laptop sits nicely in the middle ground, I was using a Thinkpad x320 before and it was quite awesome at it.
Been doing this for 5+ years with an old laptop I got from a customer due to a broken screen. It’s been running along great with Debian and a couple of external USB 3 hard drives for storage. I’ve been wanting to build an upgraded system but this guy just keeps humming along with minimal power usage. The article has a lot of great tips on getting started.
It could be better to turn off the screen entirely, not only the backlight, after a successful boot.