Double Check my Spec Please.

Tom Martow · 17 Jul 2014 at 10:02

I'm trying to build a very low powered NAS to stream my full Bluray Rips off, I plan on adding more drives as I need them.

Case : Lian Li qQ25
Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-E350N mITX
HDD : WD Red 4TB (1 for now)
Ram : Corsair Vengeance 4GB 1600 (downclock to 1333)
PSU : Silverstone Strider SFX Gold 450w '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply

Will be my first server build and would just like someone to double check this for me. The GA-E350N board only has 4 3gbps SATA ports, but I could always put a PCIE SATA 2 card in to let me use 2 more HDD's.

Also, regarding the case, where do you gets these things in the UK?

Thoughts?

Tom Martow · 17 Jul 2014 at 11:44

It would be brilliant if there were 6 ports but I'd have to get a better mobo+cpu bundle or get a better board and cpu which will increase the amount of watts needed.

It really depends how many Blurays I want, I can have a total of 16TB or 24TB depending on the size of the case and it should be more than enough.

Thanks.

Tom Martow · 17 Jul 2014 at 14:35

Frozennova said:
Modern CPUs will all suck next to no power in a system running as a NAS even my sempron X2 190 based system with 4 drives pulls 60w

I was looking at the Sempron, but I only want a bluray streamer for now and feel 60w would be too much.

Thank you though.

Tom Martow · 17 Jul 2014 at 17:23

Clav said:
What are you expecting the power draw on this set up to be? It will draw very close to 60w under load I would have thought? Especially with extra HD's

If we are talking about all the drives under load and the apu I would have though it should be 50+. Am I correct in thinking that I won't be able to put the APU board and the HDD's under load, not all 4 at once though?

Edit: realized I didn't put any ram on the board either, so updated first post.

Tom Martow · 17 Jul 2014 at 20:59

R088ieS86 said:
you won't need 8GB for streaming, 4GB will do fine.
Just to be sure, all the transcoding will be done by the client yeah?

I used the GA-E350N for a total of 2ish months.
Ended up needing more power and more ports, then went HP Microserver, then went i5.
Dependant on use I guess but if you discover Plex you'll want more power than the GA-E350N has.
All latest CPUs down clock so power ratings are low, use green drives if you want even lower power, they just have more aggressive power saving settings and lower spin speeds.

Thanks for replying, yes the NAS will only be for bluray streaming with the transcoding being done on my main PC/Laptop depending where I am.

Plex looks good, but I'd be fine with just streaming. You mentioned you kept swapping, what did you use it for though? It's almost seems like you were doing more than just streaming?

Tom Martow · 18 Jul 2014 at 21:12

R088ieS86 said:
Started off streaming, clients running xbmc, then I maxed out the sata ports and I couldn't get the drives to spin down on the PCI to SATA adapter so I swapped to the HP microserver using usb adapters instead.

Then fancied playing with Plex so I could watch my collection outside of my house (mobile + browser at work) without setting up VPNs etc.
Microserver ran @ 100% whilst doing this on a single stream and got very warm.
Upgraded to ASRock B75M (8 SATA ports + 2 PCIe adapters which I haven't had any issues with drives spinning down) and an i5-2500T.

Internally (home) all clients transcode, externally my server handles the job. I can get 4 devices streaming before the processor starts to hit high 80s%.

Clearly my setup is for more than one person, but I thought I would give you a heads up one what can happen

He refused to change it

I see so I guess when you buy a server you automatically turn into a small business haha.

What I don't understand though is why would Plex cause me trouble with that motherboard if it is only a streaming app?

Tom Martow · 20 Jul 2014 at 06:17

tribz said:
Are you using any RAID redundancy?

Well I've never used RAID, but I hear a lot of people talking about it especially when wanting to protect their data. I think I would if I was going to house some really important details, but that would be in the future.

Sorry for the late replies I'm just travelling around Europe at the moment.

Tom Martow · 8 Aug 2014 at 14:34

Okay, I know I've resurrected this thread but I have been on holiday and it's slowly coming to the end in a few days.

I've been looking at the unas cases and while they're perfect it's going to be $185 to get it here, so I'm looking for a different case that's also very small. Any suggestions?

I'm still looking.

Tom Martow · 10 Aug 2014 at 21:47

Doctor McNinja said:
How small is "very small"? For example, is the Silverstone DS380 be too big?

I also wanted to address your previous comment in which you said "Well I've never used RAID, but I hear a lot of people talking about it especially when wanting to protect their data". I'm far from the voice of authority having only recently started researching RAID and I may have misinterpreted your comment but the one thing I read over and over and over again (to the point that I'm getting a bit sick of reading it) is that RAID is not a backup solution.

I settled for the Lian Li Q25 case, really nice and small. I have also changed a few components and have everything ordered, should get the stuff Wednesday/Thursday, will post some pics when I've done.

I got a little mixed up with a guy telling me about a program or a mode where you put something on drive a and drive b will automatically copy it.

RAIDing a server though, apart from an increase is speed, is it worth it?

Tom Martow · 23 Aug 2014 at 10:23

I've got whs 2011 and with a 4tb HDD, it's formatting the drive to a 60gb parition for whs and then a 2TB partition for folders leaving nearly 2TB unsusable.

I put the drives in GPT mode to make sure this wouldn't happen, could anyone advise on a way to acces the full 4TB drives please?