Advice: htpc/server..maybe router?

Tripp · 10 Jan 2013 at 01:12

Hi all

I posted this in the small form factor thread but it is probably better suited here...

Been wanting a server and htpc combo for a while now, I have the spare cash so want to jump into this before I spend on something else.

What I want
-play dvd/bluray rips and music files (on main tv and on laptops and smartphones)
-backup all my design work and photos (likely raid 6)
-be accessible to laptops, smart phones (windows, apple and android)
-be accessible off site

what I would like
-to be able to rip and compress blurays
-to use it as a (wireless) router
-to play some emulator games on
-torrent server

I basically want an always on (low power) server with enough oompph to play blurays and perform the server duties mentioned above.

I would also like an OS that can provide a slick htpc experience through my tv whilst the server backup duties remained hidden in the background

what would be the best software and hardware to achieve this.

I will put the budget at £400 for now - cheaper the better really

this is going in the cupboard so size is not a concern

#Chri5# · 10 Jan 2013 at 08:47

RAID 6 is a minimum of 4 HDs - 4 x 1TB would only provide 2TB usable space. It will also want a "proper" RAID controller so I don't expect you'll get close to £400.

Tripp · 10 Jan 2013 at 11:47

#Chri5# said:
RAID 6 is a minimum of 4 HDs - 4 x 1TB would only provide 2TB usable space. It will also want a "proper" RAID controller so I don't expect you'll get close to £400.

Ah i didnt know it needed a raid card, but I knew how much space would be required for it. guess i wont be having that then

what are my options without raid 6 then?

enigmo · 10 Jan 2013 at 14:59

Tripp said:
Ah i didnt know it needed a raid card, but I knew how much space would be required for it. guess i wont be having that then

what are my options without raid 6 then?

Personally, to come in under £400, you will need to save where you can. I would go for one of the Mini Proliant servers, stick 3x2TB drives and 1x3TB in the bays, with a small 2.5" boot drive and bluray optical up top. Have the 3x2TB drives as RAID5, giving you about 3.6TB formatted capacity, then use a simple robocopy script to back up your essentials to the separate, basic 3TB drive. Remember RAID can be a safeguard against hardware failure, but is not a true backup. At least backing up daily/weekly/whatever to a separate disk, even if it is in the same machine, is better than nothing. As for hardware RAID, you can basically forget it for the cost. Grab yourself a 2nd hand copy of Server 2003 or 2008 and use the software RAID5. I know a lot of people are down on it, but I have a mix of software and hardware RAID5 running at home and can't honestly say I see any difference at all in real-world home usage. They both stream HD movies and download whatever I want at the same time with no noticeable performance hit. Besides, so what if you're hammering the CPU? With a 15W TDP, max that bad boy out and never give it a second thought

To save more money, you could use whatever flavour of linux you prefer and madm, or even ZFS if you can get your head around it.
As for the PVR bit, with linux Myth has been the flavour of the month for a decade now. On Windows, I've been using gbpvr and then its replacement npvr for over 8 years and never seen much reason to move on from it. Good alternatives are MediaPortal or XBMC. FYI, though, check your TV. If it's newer than a few years old it may support DLNA media streaming and you could just stream direct to your TV using Serviio or XBMC.
Off-site accessibility is a seperate issue. What are you trying to access and what from? Do you already have a static IP or are you OK with signing up for a DynDNS account or similar?

Tripp · 10 Jan 2013 at 20:48

ah thanks for the advice, so you think the proliant is beefy enough then to be doing multiple tasks simultaneously at the same time - im just concerned it would have a hard time if for example I was watching a film while my other half was accessing/backing up files.

off site access is not a of huge importance but it would be nice to access my design work and photos. access would likely be through smartphones or even my laptop. I sometimes forget files so knowing I dont have to go back home to get them would be a great relief. I know using dropbox on my phone might be a simpler option for accessing files but i am curious.

with regards to using it as a wired and wireless accesspoint would this be possible with a proliant when you consider what else i want it to do. I would use my existing sky router but use the something like pfsense on the proliant so I can setup QOS and guest networks aswell as monitoring and possibly have better performance over my existing sky router?

thanks

Just checked and the proliant n40l doesnt seem to have a hdmi port which is an issue

alfalavala · 10 Jan 2013 at 21:58

Tripp said:
what are my options without raid 6 then?

Use zfs. Best option to enable you to do lots of other things would be to install ubuntu and use zfsonlinux as it can easily be installed from a repo.

Tripp said:
ah thanks for the advice, so you think the proliant is beefy enough then to be doing multiple tasks simultaneously at the same time - im just concerned it would have a hard time if for example I was watching a film while my other half was accessing/backing up files.

I have a HP microserver and it can easily do this.

Tripp said:
off site access is not a of huge importance but it would be nice to access my design work and photos. access would likely be through smartphones or even my laptop. I sometimes forget files so knowing I dont have to go back home to get them would be a great relief. I know using dropbox on my phone might be a simpler option for accessing files but i am curious.

Many ways to do this. Depends on your phone as well. ssh/scp is the simplest form. Apps like owncloud might work (never tried myself, my home broadband upload is waaay too slow!) but dropbox or gdrive would work. Plus offer you some offsite backup for critical things.

Tripp said:
with regards to using it as a wired and wireless accesspoint would this be possible with a proliant when you consider what else i want it to do. I would use my existing sky router but use the something like pfsense on the proliant so I can setup QOS and guest networks aswell as monitoring and possibly have better performance over my existing sky router?

With linux, yes. Probably need to buy another NIC and a wireless adapter. IMO, it would be better to buy a router that you can install DDWRT/tomato/OpenWRT on and use that instead. Mainly as it's simpler to setup (built in wireless and switch) and a nice GUI to setup things like QoS. Plus your server doesn't become "internet critical".

Tripp said:
Just checked and the proliant n40l doesnt seem to have a hdmi port which is an issue

Buy a half height silent gfx card, max you'd need to spend is about £40 for it to play 1080p and do emulation.

I'd recommend HP microserver, primarily on cost - nothing can beat it with the £100 cashback. It's more than capable of running xbmc, fileserving, downloading, streaming media etc.

enigmo · 11 Jan 2013 at 09:54

enigmo said:
Grab yourself a 2nd hand copy of Server 2003 or 2008 and use the software RAID5.

Small amendment to my comment: Go to WebsiteSpark and sign up and get Server2008 or 2012 for free! One thing to bear in mind when it comes to the Mini Proliants; I have the older N36L and it handles everything I want fine, but, stick some extra RAM in it. Moving from the 1GB mine came with to 8GB was like night and day regarding performance.

Tripp · 11 Jan 2013 at 15:10

@alfalavala - thanks for your comments, plenty for me to look into now - as long as I can watch upto 2 films on seperate devices with no stuttering then thats great.

@enigmo - awesome, thanks for this!!

been looking into the hp some more and looks like the cashback offer is no longer running so it will be ~£250 for one now - would it be a better option to build my own server from scratch, would have a few extras like wireless and hdmi, maybe even have a bit more power too?

alfalavala · 11 Jan 2013 at 15:15

If it's not on cashback anymore, then it may be worth pricing up your own. With £100 cashback nothing could even come close to competing.

Although plenty for sale secondhand on eBay at the cashback price or thereabouts. I was just looking today as I wondered what I could get if I sold mine!

enigmo · 11 Jan 2013 at 15:19

If you can wait and want one new, the cashback offer is meant to be back on in a couple of months to coincide with the release of the n54l. Even better, with the new release the current n40l should drop in price a bit too!

alfalavala · 11 Jan 2013 at 15:22

enigmo said:
If you can wait and want one new, the cashback offer is meant to be back on in a couple of months to coincide with the release of the n54l. Even better, with the new release the current n40l should drop in price a bit too!

If it gets £100 cashback it'll be worth it. Although the spec boost isn't that much to shout about.

Tripp · 11 Jan 2013 at 16:06

AMD A8-5500 3.2ghz 65w TDP

ASRock FM2A75M-DGS AMD A75 Chipset (Socket FM2) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard

Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply

Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit

comes to under £200 leaving spare cash for software and HDD's and a large cheap case (will be going in cupboard so size is more important than looks)

would this be a decent setup for my needs

enigmo · 11 Jan 2013 at 16:57

alfalavala said:
If it gets £100 cashback it'll be worth it. Although the spec boost isn't that much to shout about.

True. £50ish extra for a fairly small CPU bump with no other changes. Still haven't been able to get a definite answer on the TDP bump either; HP say 15W like the older ones, but the CPU specs say 25W. I know that probably amounts to only a few £££ extra per year even if it's on 24/7, but still.

enigmo · 11 Jan 2013 at 16:59

Tripp said:
comes to under £200 leaving spare cash for software and HDD's and a large cheap case (will be going in cupboard so size is more important than looks)

would this be a decent setup for my needs

It would. Certainly more grunt than a MiniPro, but £200 for drives and case isn't much these days. You could concentrate on getting the perfect case with a single decent drive and expand later as needed.

Tripp · 11 Jan 2013 at 17:04

enigmo said:
You could concentrate on getting the perfect case with a single decent drive and expand later as needed.

That is the immediate plan - I would buy a 3tb hdd + a ssd (for os and other programmes - then in a few months I wil buy another 3tb drive or more if needed

enigmo · 11 Jan 2013 at 17:27

Tripp said:
That is the immediate plan - I would buy a 3tb hdd + a ssd (for os and other programmes - then in a few months I wil buy another 3tb drive or more if needed

Just be aware of not being able to do RAID level migration in case that was what you were planning. Unless you've got a decent card, if you start with a mirror you won't be able to move to RAID5 without a backup and recreate.

Tripp · 11 Jan 2013 at 17:54

oh ok, well thats good to know. thanks

alfalavala · 11 Jan 2013 at 19:04

Ditto for zfs filesystem. You want all the drives first to build the pool (array).

However, it depends if the data really matters....for example:

You've got 50 GB of family photos you never want to lose. Probably worth having those on several drives, cloud, portable drive at mum's house, programs/cron that automatically makes 5 copies on each drive etc. etc.

You also have 2 TB of blurays you've ripped for convenience of watching. If you had them on one hard drive which failed would it matter? Okay, it probably took you ages to rip them but you've still got the discs or maybe the film was crap anyway...You could slowly add them back or prioritise re-ripping.

You have 10 TB of movies you made and edited. Probably want backups of these as maybe they can't be remade, you also want to read and write to them quickly to whilst editing. Something like RAID/zfs/others is what you need.

Depends on your data, don't assume that you have to RAID/ different filesystems. Often it adds more bother than it's worth.

Stu · 12 Jan 2013 at 23:55

enigmo said:
Small amendment to my comment: Go to WebsiteSpark and sign up and get Server2008 or 2012 for free! One thing to bear in mind when it comes to the Mini Proliants; I have the older N36L and it handles everything I want fine, but, stick some extra RAM in it. Moving from the 1GB mine came with to 8GB was like night and day regarding performance.

Regarding WebsiteSpark, Is there still the $100 program fee at the end of the three years? What will happen to a Server 2012 install when 3 years expires?

I was all for putting Win 8 on my new N40L until I saw this possibility... is Server 2012 overkill for a home media server?

Tripp · 13 Jan 2013 at 03:09

Stu said:
Regarding WebsiteSpark, Is there still the $100 program fee at the end of the three years? What will happen to a Server 2012 install when 3 years expires?

I was all for putting Win 8 on my new N40L until I saw this possibility... is Server 2012 overkill for a home media server?

not signed up to it yet - had no ide you had to pay after 3 years! - would like to know more about this