Home Server upgrade advice

hawker1986 · 5 Apr 2020 at 11:12

Hi all,

Not posted in the PC section for some time and ive not done any significant upgrades for some years but my home server is probably 10 years old and could do with a bit of an upgrade I think. Its currently running WHS2011 and its a self build system in a fractal design mITX case with an SSD for the OS and 2x 8TB drives in RAID. Its holding all mine and the wifes file storage but also running emby server which acts as our home DVR with a HDhomeRun quad tuner and media server functions. Its also running our Sonos server but doesnt do a lot else.

Ive been having some issues with it crashing regularly but cant seem to find anything wrong and ive considered just formatting it and reinstalling WHS2011/Windows 10 but figure it might be worth upgrading it with an i3 quad core processor and 8GB RAM which should be a good upgrade from the Athlon dual core 4850e 4gb RAM system its currently running and I dont know its not a hardware problem ive got. I was wondering would the igpu on the core i3 9x series be ok for transcoding on the fly - the nvidia chip built into the athlon board does a good job. Also dont want to buy a W10 license just to install it and find its a hardware issue and then upgrade the rig and need another license!

Lastly,. I try and keep this system as low power as possible as its running in the background and in a small enclosure so dont want it getting too hot, are there any good options with <65w processors - intel used to do a "T" series low power but I cant find any of them other than engineering samples on ebay which im not up for.

Thoughts and advice much appreciated

Avalon · 5 Apr 2020 at 20:46

OK, a few things:

RAID is not backup - if you value your data, practice 3:2:1.
TDP is not power usage, ignore it as power gating is a thing.
T CPU’s use the same idle power as normal CPU’s core for core in generation.
iGPU hasn’t changed since 7th generation in any meaningful way, 6th to 7th only added h265 decode support.
Windows sucks for transcoding, you get significantly fewer streams on the same hardware
You need Emby Premiere to do GPU transcoding.

Now with that lot established, if you want power efficient, i3 or i5 7th generation or above and Emby Premier, personally I would be using a Docker aware OS and doing it that way (UnRAID/FreeNAS or one of the FreeNAS derivatives).

hawker1986 · 6 Apr 2020 at 06:22

Thanks Avalon,

That info is really helpful. I do intermittently backup to an external HDD and then offsite but backing up to tapes or another media type is excessive for what I need - used to do it but can’t be bothered anymore as it’s never been useful.
I do have an Emby premier membership - need it to use the DVR.
I have thought about freeNas or Amahi but I know windows well...

BigT · 6 Apr 2020 at 12:37

As a long time Windows user who doesn't know one end of an ssh terminal window from another, I found the learning curve on UnRaid's GUI quite easy. It does a decent job of hiding the complexity of Docker containers for instance and there's lots of easy to install templates via their community applications plugin, including Emby. Given redundancy isn't a substitute for backup I find their method of parity very efficient for maximum usable disk space with some redundancy when compared to traditional RAID setups. Granted it isn't free but if you can keep a copy of your data somewhere else for a while (creating an initial UnRaid array s a destructive process) then you can try it gratis for a month to make sure you don't have a hardware problem and to see if you get on with it.

I certainly found it easier than OMV when I started a few years ago and the online resources for support are pretty good. A guy called SpaceInvader One has a youtube channel that covers an awful lot, albeit some of the videos are getting a bit outdated now. I never gave FreeNAS a go but there's plenty of people who have good things to say about it too. Whichcever route you go down, I have to echo @Avalon 's comments of using a Docker aware OS. So much more resource efficient than VMs and there's something for everything. Before I knew it I had containers for downloaders, media players, network controllers, 'cloud' storage, backup programs and all sorts. I just counted 24 containers that barely use my i5 and 32Gb RAM, whereas when I spin up my Windows VM (UnRaid also supports VMs) if I need it usable I have one third of my resources needing to be dedicated to it.

Avalon · 6 Apr 2020 at 17:07

hawker1986 said:
Thanks Avalon,

That info is really helpful. I do intermittently backup to an external HDD and then offsite but backing up to tapes or another media type is excessive for what I need - used to do it but can’t be bothered anymore as it’s never been useful.
I do have an Emby premier membership - need it to use the DVR.
I have thought about freeNas or Amahi but I know windows well...

Cloud is cheap, encryption is easy, 321 can be too. Windows is just what you are used to, but for many reasons, it's not the best option. You asked for advice, you can of course choose to ignore it or apply parts of it as you see fit, but believe it or not something like unraid is stupidly easy to set-up and administer, surely it's worth at least looking at?

hawker1986 · 6 Apr 2020 at 20:26

Thanks both I know you are both right about the benefits of moving away from Windows and I’ve not completely dismissed freeNAS or Amahi. I’m continuing to read up about them but I have been very happy with my WHS for the last 10 years and I feel confident working around Windows so I’ve not dismissed that either. Very much do appreciate all the advice.