Soldato
- Joined
- 30 Sep 2005
- Posts
- 16,726
Hi Everyone,
This week I've been setting up a pi-hole ad-blocker and plex media server which will be left running 24/7. My requirements were:
Fairly low cost (but not something crap)
Low Power Usage
Low Maintenance
Can be left hidden out of sight (no keyboard/mouse)
Easy to use (copy media to from my windows PC)
Block adverts (inc Sky TV)
I tried three different mini PCs and ended up with a £209 Beelink U59 Pro. This has an 11th gen Celeron N5105 (quad core), 8GB DDR4 and a 500GB Nvme drive. I then added a spare 1TB 2.5" SSD to use for media. The main reason I went for the U59 was that the N5105 performs close to the i3 8109U whilst only consuming 5W of electricity at load, and virtually none when idle. This processor can easily serve up multiple 4K HDR streams so long as your device at the other end supports the codecs (in my case, LG OLED TV, Xbox and the latest chromecast). Yesterday I had three streams playing and the CPU never went above 2%.
The one thing which has impressed me more than anything is with the linux server operating system. I decided to use Ubuntu server (minimized bare bones install), which has been far easier than I expected. The tricky part was getting to understand how to partition, format and mount my 2nd external hdd.
If it's of use to anyone, would you like me to write up a step by step how-to guide? I'm a windows user, and up until two days ago knew very little about linux.
This week I've been setting up a pi-hole ad-blocker and plex media server which will be left running 24/7. My requirements were:
Fairly low cost (but not something crap)
Low Power Usage
Low Maintenance
Can be left hidden out of sight (no keyboard/mouse)
Easy to use (copy media to from my windows PC)
Block adverts (inc Sky TV)
I tried three different mini PCs and ended up with a £209 Beelink U59 Pro. This has an 11th gen Celeron N5105 (quad core), 8GB DDR4 and a 500GB Nvme drive. I then added a spare 1TB 2.5" SSD to use for media. The main reason I went for the U59 was that the N5105 performs close to the i3 8109U whilst only consuming 5W of electricity at load, and virtually none when idle. This processor can easily serve up multiple 4K HDR streams so long as your device at the other end supports the codecs (in my case, LG OLED TV, Xbox and the latest chromecast). Yesterday I had three streams playing and the CPU never went above 2%.
The one thing which has impressed me more than anything is with the linux server operating system. I decided to use Ubuntu server (minimized bare bones install), which has been far easier than I expected. The tricky part was getting to understand how to partition, format and mount my 2nd external hdd.
If it's of use to anyone, would you like me to write up a step by step how-to guide? I'm a windows user, and up until two days ago knew very little about linux.
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