What's the best value for building/buying a personal media server?
Considerations:
- Upgradability
- Footprint / form factor
- Cost
Will be a server for:
- Plex (1080p or less)
- tt-rss or similar
- Torrent seeding
- Media hard drives
>>55326610
Off lease office equipment. going rate for a Optiplex 980 with a i5 2500 is $150. For storage use a NAS or connect an external.
Forgot to mention that for PLEX it'll likely not need to transcode, but I would want the option to upgrade (to allow transcoding) if necessary. Also, it'll serve 1-2 streams at most.
>>55326740
Good idea. Are these physical or online stores? Where do you see for $150?
>>55326610
depends on what you want to do.
but a cheap second or 3rd gen intel core is strong enough to take advantage of plex hardware accelleration and could stream to an entire household easy enough.
mini itx or micro itx are possible so formfactor isnt an issue. the most expensive part is probably storage.
then you need to decide what software to run.
plex runs on a bunch of operating systems so you could go the free nas route but youd need a bunch of ram for zfs to work correctly. otherwise a standard linux server can do the trick.
itll run you about 400 to 600 bucks if you build it from scratch. its gonna be strong enough to stream and do additional tasks like torrenting or even hosting other things like gameservers.
this is my setup for reference.
http://pcpartpicker.com/list/bGghqk
pretty much as is but ive added two 2TB wd cavier greens. and an old old gigabit nic in the pci-e slot.
runs on arch from an usb stick.
this does media streaming via plex, automatic shows downloading via sickrage and couch potato, and hosts an owncloud server.
additionally plex usually doesnt need to transcode but if it does the igpu is more than enough to handle it.
>>55326891
Are there any incentives for using Windows? Compatibility or otherwise?
So far I believe everything I need it for can run on either OS but I'm thinking down the line if some services are Windows-only or if, for example, sharing NTFS hard drives causes any issues.
>>55326971
setting up samba shares on linux isnt an issue they can be shared through ntfs-utils like on windows.
there really isnt an incentive to use windows but also not a strong one to use linux.
its just easier to maintain in my opinion.
since atleast in arch linux if you install a piece of software that is designed to run as a daemon or service pacman will automatically create a systemd service for you to control as you like. plus power consumption is way down since you can run it headless without any desktop environment.
i control my server over ssh. its really simple. i just install the software i want.
enable the systemd service and configure the actual software over their web interfaces.
my hardrives are actually ntfs formated too and are accessible as samba shares only inside the local network.
power consumption is also easily configured for me since my cpu governor is set to ondemand and is mostly stepping anyways. and because the hard drives are cavier greens they spin down really slow if they are not in use.
tl:dr; windows is fine, might be not as easy to manage.
What about Intel NUCs?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102097
Come to think of it, I don't think these are very upgrade-able so why would people ever buy?
>>55327588
Quite useless if you want a large storage media server. I'm personally looking in to getting a low power NAS setup with 4 HDD bays but the commercial ones are way, way too overpriced and have literal garbage specs
What will you be running tt-rss for?
>>55328733
I need some sort of self-hosted RSS because there's no free (or paid?) service available that allows you to have unlimited articles. All of the services I've seen will mark articles read after 30- or 90-days which is a deal breaker for me.
>>55328218
If by large you mean HDD space then no I don't need more than 4-6TB. I agree they may have garbage specs but aren't there some that are relatively affordable?
- QNAP
- Synology
- Drobo
Used Rack Servers are cheap as fuck on Ebay now. I saw a HP Proliant on there recently for just over a $100 with no H/drives in it. It had 2 Xeon processors and 24 Gig of Ram.
The only downside to it was they use lots of Electricity, I think. Servers in general are cheaper buy/build because alot of companies are using Cloud Computing.
>>55329794
Eh I don't know if I have room for a rack...unless I could mount it in some weird vertical way or just use the parts.
And how does it compare to buying off lease pcs, like >>55326740 suggested?
>>55326871
>>55326871
>Where do you see for $150?
spawn camp craigslist or kijiji for awhile
>>55326610
Nvidia shield I guess or one of those WD boxes
I have an SSD VPS with emby and deluge daemon on it. 2GB RAM and 120GB space. Serves 3-5 streams at the same time.
>>55329820
Rack computers aren't that big.They are about the size of an ATX Desktop case. The Optiplex Dell's are well made computers. I have one.....a 775. The 980 is a good enough machine but you can't much Ram in it.
With a HP Proliant, they will take up to a maximum of 192 gb of Ram and they have 4 to 8 H/drive bays. That would give you alot of options for running Virtual Machines etc.
>>55329820
You can find tower versions was well. For HP DL is rack, ML is tower. Dell is T vs R (T620 vs R620). Usually, the tower is rackable as well, with a conversion kit.
I would stay away from anything HP that's G5. It's all DDR2 based, and anything worth your time requires FBDIMM's.
Same with the Dell x9xx (1950/2950/R900, etc)
MicroServer G8's are cheap, as are Xeon 1230/1240 V1's.
So I setup a plex server to dick around with on my computer, why the fuck does it transcode everything even though im literally playing everything on the same pc
>>55331954
Web browser doesn't natively support your format. I use emby and kodi as the front end to avoid this issue
How is this for a general purpose HTPC? The motherboard is more expensive than I would like, but it's the cheapest one that has Displayport which I need for 4k60hz.
>>55326610
I've run PMS on Windows and Linux and either works fine. Windows is even easy to run headless just use terminal or something like teamviewer and you're gtg very minimal. My personal case I had it running Win7x64 pro until I had certain things changed around hardware wise and switched.
My Plex serving 1-2 local streamers (Roku's) and 1-3 non local streamers (Samsung 4k TV and Roku sticks) are decent. I have around ten mobile devices that can access it at any time and utilize Plex to sync photos and videos from some phones. The non local Plex users are on basic Comcast 25/10Mbit. I'm on 150/25Mbit. I toss out SD to non local unless it's a movie and that is HD1080. SD sits around 480-576 typically. Plex requires 2000 passmark on 1080 HD content per stream. Locally I would need a 4000 passmark CPU or better. Keep that in mind when looking for hardware. 1500=720 2000=1080. Plex loves pure GHZ and cores. Using a leftover 2500k i5 that's bumped up to 4.3 on a h90.
Try to nab a used Xeon box if possible. Mind the passmark.
