[happymellon]

I've found that a cheap Dell Wyse 5070 is more than sufficient at less than £50.

Pentium J5005, only quad core and no hyper threading, but it is Gemini Lake refresh so can do QuickSync without actually using the CPU. I believe it is something like 10 realtime 1080p re-encoding streams simultaneously. 2-4 4k re-encodes but I've not tested it that much.

Multiple USB 3.1 for hooking D4-400s to for ZFS, and two ram slots that claim a max of 8 GB but mines doing fine with 32GB.

[tentacleuno]

> Multiple USB 3.1 for hooking D4-400s to for ZFS, and two ram slots that claim a max of 8 GB but mines doing fine with 32GB.

FYI: running ZFS (or any server storage) on eHDDs isn't a recommended practice[0]. A lot of things can go wrong and, if mine are anything to go by, they don't pass SMART data back to the host.

[0]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance%20and%20T...

If you're running multiple HDDs, a decent HBA may be a good investment. They slot into a PCiE slot, and allow you to connect HDDs to them. From memory, I believe the LSI cards are considered the most reliable.

[pdimitar]

I heard that a number of times but I am using a professional external HDD and my ZFS pool with it is quite stable for ~2.5 years now.

I'd wager much more people are doing ZFS + external drives than many people think -- it's very convenient and that trumps recommendations, it seems.

I am aiming to have a proper server OneDay™ and will make sure I get one with enough PCIe lanes so I can have several slots for 4-6 HDDs or SATA SSDs but in the meantime a simple thin client + a professional external HDD has been getting the job done amazingly well.

[happymellon]

I had "a proper server", and found that it ended up being a complete hassle. I'm much happier with the current setup and I've had less data incidents.

[happymellon]

D4-400's pass back Smart data.

I've gone through a lot of different units to find good ones.

[tentacleuno]

Ahh, in that case I'm very happy to be called out on that. I have a few Seagate ones from various generations, and none of them pass any SMART data. It's quite infuriating.

[happymellon]

Yep, the Teramaster multi-disk series seem to be the only ones that actually pass back the proper disk data.

I even get the proper disk UUID rather than being overridden by the drive unit.