Also a long time homelabber, with a lab that’s run on a tight budget. There’s no money for the latest and greatest, but today’s white hot tech quickly falls out of favour and sooner or later finds it’s way to the bargain basement. That’s where it’ll be.

It’s at this point I’ll be retiring older tech for newer old tech and so it goes on. Incremental upgrades, never finished.

On the whole, hardware wise, I’m very pleased with what I’ve got and don’t feel I’m missing out, but that won’t stop me looking for the next best thing my empty pockets can afford.

eBay is the place to go. Often you’ll see brands like HP, Dell, etc. They are most likely to be re-branded LSI raid cards. Adaptec is an alternative to LSI, I’m using both, in different servers, and they are both good.

Some cards come with batteries. If they are dead they’re expensive to replace. For homelab use, I wouldn’t be too bothered with them. For production servers, it’s more important.

If you want to use ZFS you’ll need a flash the card or buy one where it’s already been done. Expect to pay more for pre flashed cards.

I’m in the UK and prices are different here to the USA. I’ve paid as little a £5 and as much a £40 for used cards. Just depends on how urgent your purchase is.

In the UK you can buy ex-corporate SAS drives is batches of 10 and sometimes 20. Search on eBay Auction for: 10x SAS. Depends on the binding as to how much you’ll pay, but I’ve paid as little as £36 for 10x 2TB SAS drives and as much £62 for the same. The larger the disk capacity the higher the price.

I’ve found that used cards and SAS drives to be good enough for homelab use, rarely had any issues. Would I use them on a production server? No.

If you’re planning to expose a server to a world wide audience Cloudflare is a great choice. However, if it’s just for you and maybe a few selected friends or family members, consider getting a free Zerotier or TailScale account. You’ll have complete control as to who has access.

If you’re downloading movies and they are in a file format that Jellyfin can use, there’s nothing more to do. If not, use Handbrake to transform them into a usable format.

Hop over to the Youtube channel “Jim’s Garage”. Awesome detailed tutorial series for Kubernetes. If your brain cells have been enjoying the quiet life, it’s over, because boot camp is here. It tough going, but it’s worth it.

A bigger one won’t use any more power than a smaller one and are generally more efficient. Platinum is more efficient than Gold, which in turn is more efficient than Bronze.

Graphics cards really suck up power. Allow for the number of disk drives to have too.

The two software transcoders I use are, Handbrake and MakeMKV. Of the two, MakeMKV does a really good job and it can tackle Blu-Ray too. Downside, the output files are rather large.

This is where Handbrake comes in. It can really slim down the bloated output from the forma to a more modest size. If you have enough disk capacity, you can skip Handbrake.

Finally, import into Jellyfin. To output to the family TV (not 4K), I’m using a modestly priced Roku streaming device that has a Jellyfin client and it does a pretty good job.

I believe, to achieve 4K you will need to transcode with a GPU.

Currently, I’ve around 520 movies and probably around a 1000 TV episodes on my Jellyfin server, all transcoded mainly from DVDs and some Blu-ray disks I’ve bought.

1st: Virtualization

2nd: Firewalls and networking

3rd: Containers, Docker, (Podman) and LXC, (Incus)

4th: All the above leads onto Hypervisors

5th: Which leads you to Kubernetes

The first three require minimal hardware. Once you’ve got the hang of the them, it’s time to get serious with a dedicated machine with greater hardware resources to run a Hypervisor.

Kubernetes, all that built in redundancy makes it hungry beast. Enough to get you looking for one or more those big old servers that homelabers love.