As part of my Homelab, I have TrueNAS Community Edition running in a big case with a bunch of Frankenstein parts including two GTX 1080s. TrueNAS recently phased out support for these older cards and I’ve been having to go through and manually install working drivers, which seem to have gotten overwritten on the last update anyway. Since I’m not actually using anything for video output (and have onboard HDMI if needed). One of the cards I am passing through to a VM (where it has no problem being recognized and used). The other card was used by Truenas for my apps.
Do you have any recommendations for hardware to accelerate tasks like Immich, Jellfin transcoding, media fingerprinting for metadata, OCR on bulk-uploaded pdfs etc.?
I was never really a hardware guy, especially when it comes to self-hosting and servers.
- I don’t want to play games on my server.
- I don’t want to empty my accounts to put a 5090 TI in a server.
- The above tasks are too slow on CPU alone, so I have to put something in it.
- I could keep running the 1080s with manually installed drivers, but it’s a PITA and I wouldn’t mind not doing that.
Are there reasonable options that can take up the workload, but come in at a decent price point? I know with a server, I don’t necessarily have to run the same stuff as gamers. Are there options outside of the typical NVIDIA and AMD gaming linups that would work for my purpose, perhaps acquirable via FB marketplace, Craigslist, etc.? Does your server have video acceleration and, if so, what hardware are you using?
I appreciate any guidance the community can give me.
Proxmox or Incus can use ZFS, but i doubt you’d be able to directly move your container datasets from TrueNAS. You’d most likely have to rebuild the containers and/or move application configs/dbs. If you keep static data in datasets (your video media for instance), those will transfer over fine.
Proxmox might be overkill especially if you’re not using high availability features. I only use it on one of my machines because switching is too much hassle, but every new system I set up uses Incus on top of regular Debian.
For a big migration, you can use a cheap VPS for compute + Backblaze for a ton of cheap storage to help. For instance you could install TrueNAS on the VPS, move all your stuff over to the cloud temporarily, wipe your local hardware and install Incus, then move your containers back to your hardware. The other option is to do the opposite and set up the new environment in the cloud, then when its setup, wipe your local and move your new OS to on-prem.
But yeah this would be a time/research investment, rather than the monetary investment of just upgrading your cards.