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orby

orby

orby

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Good morning all

am trying to work out what OS I should use, I have been using standard windows for many many years just adding drives as I go and thought it’s time to move into something more robust for the data

I currently have a 8700k, 32 gig of ram and Msi board, 2 Hba cards both using IT firmware, 3x12tb wd drives taken from usb externals which are all empty currently, 6x8tb wd reds all with data and random 4tb ones all empty, 2x1tb ssd’s 1x500gig ssd case is silverstone tj07 with some drive bay caddies to fit all the disks

I have 64 gig of ddr4 2400 ecc ram and looking into a Xeon chip to use it so looking for advice here on that and motherboard also

primary use is store/stream music, photos and movies

all on a gigabyte network for the time being also

thanks for looking and sorry it’s all a bit of random waffle
 
Freenas or whatever they are calling it now is stable and reliable, and Unraid is also good - personally I'm using Proxmox now.

Unraid is probably the easiest to use for your use case - but I prefer ZFS to the the parity drive setup of unraid, and had to move away from the BSD based freenas for better hardware support.

Ubuntu server or centos with one of the webguis like Cockpit is probably also suitable for what you want to do.

Might be worth playing with each in a VM, and look into how hard risky/easy patching/upgrades are before making a decision.

Is the the 64GB of DDR4 you have buffered or unbuffered? That will probably have the biggest influence on choice of CPU/Mobo
 
orby said:
Good morning all

am trying to work out what OS I should use, I have been using standard windows for many many years just adding drives as I go and thought it’s time to move into something more robust for the data

I currently have a 8700k, 32 gig of ram and Msi board, 2 Hba cards both using IT firmware, 3x12tb wd drives taken from usb externals which are all empty currently, 6x8tb wd reds all with data and random 4tb ones all empty, 2x1tb ssd’s 1x500gig ssd case is silverstone tj07 with some drive bay caddies to fit all the disks

I have 64 gig of ddr4 2400 ecc ram and looking into a Xeon chip to use it so looking for advice here on that and motherboard also

primary use is store/stream music, photos and movies

all on a gigabyte network for the time being also

thanks for looking and sorry it’s all a bit of random waffle
Click to expand...
This is an amazing coincidence... ive just got a new PC and is about to do exactly the same with my old PC housed in a TJ07! There's a company in Portugal that sells after market parts for the TJ07. I'm about to buy a new front panel to replace the 7 5.25" bays as a mesh intake.

Btw check whether your WD red are shingle drives. They are not suitable for NAS use.
 
I'm using the older Xeon E5 2660 V3, these 10 and 12 core chips are very inexpensive at auction right now and support registered RAM.
Paired with a Supermicro X10SRA-F and you get 4 x PCI x16 (x8) electrical + 10 onboard SATA in a standard ATX board.
The bare board with 4x16GB Registered DDR idles at just under 40W on a gold PSU.
You'll also need a Nvidia (GTX class 1050+) GPU for transcoding or it can hit the CPU very hard especially on a 4k transcode, direct play is OK.
WIth Plex at least, decode and encode is now suported for Nvidia GPU.

The newer platforms such as Xeon E-2288G only support unbuffered ECC (UDIMM) so it may be worth moving on the RDIMMS as this CPU has IGP which is great for transcoding your films.
64GB is somewhat overkill for a media server, 16GB would be fine. I only got 64GB (ex server) as I run 2x low end remote gaming VM's and even then, I don't really use more than 20GB.
ASRock Rack E3C246D4U mATX MB with IPMI has 8 SATA + will support PCI-E X8,X8,X4 and seems popular but is rather expensive, typically £1000 for the CPU, memory and board.

AMD I have less experience of in the home server space, the gaming PC's are all AMD based but I find intel / Nvidia 'Just works' in linux and most of the issues I see are AMD related.
AMD offer a lot of core to the £, especially on older geneations, however ECC support isn't guarenteed or often well documented and is board dependant while virtualisation can be hit and miss and you need X370/470/570 board to break out the PCI-E lanes and then many of these boards insist you have a GPU in a primary slot limiting expansion for the HBA's
 
decto said:
I'm using the older Xeon E5 2660 V3, these 10 and 12 core chips are very inexpensive at auction right now and support registered RAM.
Paired with a Supermicro X10SRA-F and you get 4 x PCI x16 (x8) electrical + 10 onboard SATA in a standard ATX board.
The bare board with 4x16GB Registered DDR idles at just under 40W on a gold PSU.
You'll also need a Nvidia (GTX class 1050+) GPU for transcoding or it can hit the CPU very hard especially on a 4k transcode, direct play is OK.
WIth Plex at least, decode and encode is now suported for Nvidia GPU.

The newer platforms such as Xeon E-2288G only support unbuffered ECC (UDIMM) so it may be worth moving on the RDIMMS as this CPU has IGP which is great for transcoding your films.
64GB is somewhat overkill for a media server, 16GB would be fine. I only got 64GB (ex server) as I run 2x low end remote gaming VM's and even then, I don't really use more than 20GB.
ASRock Rack E3C246D4U mATX MB with IPMI has 8 SATA + will support PCI-E X8,X8,X4 and seems popular but is rather expensive, typically £1000 for the CPU, memory and board.

AMD I have less experience of in the home server space, the gaming PC's are all AMD based but I find intel / Nvidia 'Just works' in linux and most of the issues I see are AMD related.
AMD offer a lot of core to the £, especially on older geneations, however ECC support isn't guarenteed or often well documented and is board dependant while virtualisation can be hit and miss and you need X370/470/570 board to break out the PCI-E lanes and then many of these boards insist you have a GPU in a primary slot limiting expansion for the HBA's
Click to expand...

thank you for this, if i want ecc i think it has to be the older route like yourself as i can't spend a huge amount more and so far the board is looking £250+ and not many offerings

i do direct streaming so i don't think i need any kind of gpu apart from desktop useage
 
just a little update i have managed to get a X10SRA i am not sure how not having the IPMI is going to effect my usage i guess nice to have but wont be a killer and picled up a 14 core 2680v4 hoping to have it all by the weekend for some experiments
 
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