Homelab & Selfhosting Thread - One Day it will be a Home Datacenter, you just gotta believe!

[DavidS877]

I have some short runs where copper can only get 7~8Gb and the fiber does a solid 9.5Gb in iperf.

That should never happen. The cards may be crappy but the actual link makes no difference. Check the error counters, if you're seeing any hardware level errors(CRC) then there's too many.

Here's my post from the hardware thread.

Publicar en el tema 'GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights'

28 de Abr, 2026

To interrupt the benchmark slapfight with some benchmarks.
I finally, well, almost, have all my "PC" shaped boxes running on 10G Ethernet. I have an ITX system and tried out the new Realtek 8159 USB. My gaming PC I "upgraded" from an AQC card that dropped every hour to a Realtek 8127. Here are the benchmarks.
iperf3 -c HOSTNAME -t 20 plus the options listed, -R to reverse the flow, -P2 to try 2 streams. All tests run from the named device to a server with 2x 10G Broadcom in a LACP.

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
USB RTL 8159 on a USB 3.2 x2 connection.
[  5]...

• DavidS877

Reacciones: x 2

The Realtek suffer with single stream, the AQC has a glitch on dual stream, maybe flow control, but they'll all hit line rate solidly. The Intel is fiber connected. Even the shitty USB-C can do line rate on a single stream.

 

[DavidS877]

My AI homelab is alive. 128GB VRAM in 4x Intel B70 and 128GB RAM purchased before the recent unpleasantness.

The plan is to take the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and split it into 4 x4 slots using MCIO adapters. Problem is that there's apparently one vendor that can do PCIe x16 to 2 x MCIO 8i to splitter cables to 4x 4i to 4i boards with x16 slots and my order is in, for delivery next month, maybe.
Another option would have been a PCIe switch right out of the gate. One to do 4 x 8i would have been $1500, 8 x 8i would be $2500. Next year I'll re-evaluate DRAM/VRAM/GPU/etc and see if a switch makes sense and/or more cards.
But until my fancy splitter shows up. 2 cards at x8 using an MCIO splitter and 8i cards. 1 card at x4 PCIe 3 hanging off an M.2 slot with crappy cables that don't do PCIe 4. and 1 card PCIe x4 in an x16 physical slot with a flexible riser.
Similarly once the fancy splitter shows up I'll clean up the cabling and find a place in the garage to put it, maybe with a dedicated 20A 240V circuit, for future expansion.

As for performance. Z-Image-Turbo runs fine parallel. Initial GPT-OSS-120b seems pretty good, dense models are kind of slow. Current plan is just evaluating models to run. I sort of want to try AI summarizing all the MATI archive for search assistance. Also some coding AIs and some other stuff.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I just managed to accidentally buy 32 128Gb sata SSDs on an auction. I bid on a bunch of lots, assuming I'd lose most of them, but nobody pushed past my top bid. Still. 6.14GBP per drive is a steal, I suppose. Samsung PM871 2.5". Quite old from what I can tell, so probably slower than a tortoise. I wonder though, if I could set them up as some sort of caching array, or a low-power media storage of some sort. Or maybe I'll just e-bay them as singles.

 

[SchloppyI.T.Man]

I just managed to accidentally buy 32 128Gb sata SSDs on an auction. I bid on a bunch of lots, assuming I'd lose most of them, but nobody pushed past my top bid. Still. 6.14GBP per drive is a steal, I suppose. Samsung PM871 2.5". Quite old from what I can tell, so probably slower than a tortoise. I wonder though, if I could set them up as some sort of caching array, or a low-power media storage of some sort. Or maybe I'll just e-bay them as singles.

There's certainly a lot, and if a given mini-pc has at least two slots you can run whatever appliance you want reliably with redundant boot drives.

 

[Curry Teafag]

I just managed to accidentally buy 32 128Gb sata SSDs on an auction. I bid on a bunch of lots, assuming I'd lose most of them, but nobody pushed past my top bid. Still. 6.14GBP per drive is a steal, I suppose. Samsung PM871 2.5". Quite old from what I can tell, so probably slower than a tortoise. I wonder though, if I could set them up as some sort of caching array, or a low-power media storage of some sort. Or maybe I'll just e-bay them as singles.

Good job, you'll never run out of system drives anymore. If you find them too slow, create a RAID.

 

[Betonhaus]

I just managed to accidentally buy 32 128Gb sata SSDs on an auction. I bid on a bunch of lots, assuming I'd lose most of them, but nobody pushed past my top bid. Still. 6.14GBP per drive is a steal, I suppose. Samsung PM871 2.5". Quite old from what I can tell, so probably slower than a tortoise. I wonder though, if I could set them up as some sort of caching array, or a low-power media storage of some sort. Or maybe I'll just e-bay them as singles.

Unless you have 32 really old laptops a used 4tb ssd might be cheaper. Might not be faster, but when you add the cost of a 32 drive raid array it might be cheaper and faster to go with something different.

I got to be honest, if you’re doing random bidding on eBay you’re basically bound to only win the crap nobody else wants, and unless you have a very specific niche where the auction product is useful solely to your it’ll probably be a waste of money

 

[teriyakiburns]

I got to be honest, if you’re doing random bidding on eBay

Not ebay. Specialist auction site, lots of business bankruptcy clearance stuff. The drives I got are all marked spares that have never been used. I've had a lot of good stuff off there.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Not ebay. Specialist auction site, lots of business bankruptcy clearance stuff. The drives I got are all marked spares that have never been used. I've had a lot of good stuff off there.

I wish I was this lucky. Only ever got used server drives so far.

Unless you have 32 really old laptops a used 4tb ssd might be cheaper.

It's not about a strict price-to-capacity ratio but about the shear number of physical devices you can keep in spare. Having 32 of them is better than having just one. You can replace a failed drive easily and cheaply.

 

[Betonhaus]

Those of you using Jellyfin, does it seem like it improved a lot over the last few years? When I last used it it was buggy and unstable and i ended up using Emby and never looking back, but Emby has been making it very difficult to troubleshoot transcoding issues and so i started switchign back to jellyfin and so far it seems a lot more refined now

 

[Dreamland]

Those of you using Jellyfin, does it seem like it improved a lot over the last few years? When I last used it it was buggy and unstable and i ended up using Emby and never looking back, but Emby has been making it very difficult to troubleshoot transcoding issues and so i started switchign back to jellyfin and so far it seems a lot more refined now

It's development is kind of sluggish, and things like mixed (feature and series) libraries is still unpractical. You can fix the slow searching by using a mod to offload to a meilisearch database.

They did make some great leaps in the transcoding parts, AV1 just werks if the hardware is up to the task.

All-in-all, if you know how videocards work in linux, and you can set up a proxy it beats paying 500$ for the alternative.

 

[SchloppyI.T.Man]

Those of you using Jellyfin, does it seem like it improved a lot over the last few years? When I last used it it was buggy and unstable and i ended up using Emby and never looking back, but Emby has been making it very difficult to troubleshoot transcoding issues and so i started switchign back to jellyfin and so far it seems a lot more refined now

I have a friend that has contibuted some code. It's subject to the same queermo problem a lot of FOSS projects have which slows it down. I don't know about emby but Jellyfin has a pretty rich ecosystem if you take the time to figure out (and money to buy) hardware to then implement it. I just host a singular hard drive atm on my local machine though and it works.