Most important component for streaming HD content

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 14:56

I'm in the process of speccing myself a home server to stream content to all machines in the house and the HTPC. From experience I know that streaming SD content is fine over pretty much any spec server, however is there anything you need to be careful about when streaming HD content?

Does the CPU speed, or amount of RAM have an effect on streaming HD? It will be on a 100Mpbs network.

caithomas44 · 26 Jan 2008 at 15:29

if possible you really want 300mbs wireless or gigabit networking if it is going to be under heavy load, otherwise ram is very very very important

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 15:59

An upgrade to Gigabit network won't be too hard, how much ram are we talking though? 2GB on a WHS box or 4GB?

therealnerd2 · 26 Jan 2008 at 16:15

HDTV is around 8-14mbps apparently, so realistically you're looking at no more than 3 or 4 simultaneous streams on a 100mb LAN.

I cant see you'd really need a particularly beefy server. My server streams 3 streams simultaneously without breaking sweat. (Opty 144, 1GB RAM)

I would worry most about hard drives, both seek times and transfer rate.

caithomas44 · 26 Jan 2008 at 16:29

therealnerd2 said:
HDTV is around 8-14mbps apparently, so realistically you're looking at no more than 3 or 4 simultaneous streams on a 100mb LAN.

I cant see you'd really need a particularly beefy server. My server streams 3 streams simultaneously without breaking sweat. (Opty 144, 1GB RAM)

I would worry most about hard drives, both seek times and transfer rate.

HDTV can be a lot more than that, it all depends on the compression rate

therealnerd2 · 26 Jan 2008 at 16:41

caithomas44 said:
HDTV can be a lot more than that, it all depends on the compression rate

Yeah - raw HDTV is 1.25Gbps.

caithomas44 · 26 Jan 2008 at 16:45

therealnerd2 said:
Yeah - raw HDTV is 1.25Gbps.

exactly

so a gigabit ethernet conection is advisable, along with 4gb of any ddr2 ram

ubern00b · 26 Jan 2008 at 19:45

I dont see why you would need 4gb of ram for a server streaming HD content. It would be far more I/O intensive so a RAID0 setup would be more benificial and of course as mentioned, gbit network. As the server isnt doing any decoding or encoding (unless you are going to stream to an xbox or ps3) you shouldnt need much in the way of cpu and ram. In my experiance wireless is pants for streaming HD, even so called "300mbit" wifi as its never anywhere close to that.

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 21:11

I think I'll probably go with just 2GB to start with, will probably only be streaming 1 piece of HD content at a time.

Would a RAID 5 setup have any effect on the streaming of HD? (i.e. slow it down)

therealnerd2 · 26 Jan 2008 at 21:30

Furton said:
I think I'll probably go with just 2GB to start with, will probably only be streaming 1 piece of HD content at a time.

Would a RAID 5 setup have any effect on the streaming of HD? (i.e. slow it down)

Not enough to be noticeable, certainly not with only 1 stream.

decto · 26 Jan 2008 at 22:38

Raw HDTV may well be 1.25GBs but nothing will stream at that rate.

100mbps should be fine for a couple of streams, if you need more add a second lan card and put some machines on a different subnet.

If you're looking at raid 5 then consider how you'd back it up and how you'd recover. Only a limited number of controllers support adding drives to an existing setup if you need to expand and it's no good working out how to fix the raid once it's failed. You need to have a recovery stratagy ready.

Any dual core CPU and a couple of gigs cheap DDR2 will be fine, actual CPU usage will be quite low streaming unless you're using the CPU to convert formats on the fly.

Also invest in a copy of diskeeper. I have it on my media centre and the main storage drive (1TB) has had over 2 million fragments removed since September..... by default it interleaves the TV programs if you record more than 1 at once creating massively fragmented files. Diskeeper sorts it out in the middle of the night.

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Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 14:15

Any suggestions on this spec then?

I'm going with a 80GB HD just for the WHS OS install, then 5*500GB HD's in RAID5 for storage, I'm going for RAID 5 as there's some sort of redudancy in there, i.e. one drive fails and it's possible to re-build the array again. There won't be any vital data there, just ripped DVD's e.t.c

Can't decide on a case though?

crazyDAJT · 27 Jan 2008 at 15:07

i was under the impression that most motherboards cant do more than 4 drives in raid 5.

you might want ck on that, i would also like to know if this is true as Im looking at doing a similar thing.

also why an SLI board, get a P35 chipset EDIT: ignore this last comment, missed the AMD root, which is the way to go for this sort of build.

Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 15:32

Just went for the SLi board as it's the only AMD one I can find with 6 SATA connectors on it and it's rather cheap.

Will download the manual for the board and check on the 4 or 5 drives thing.

decto · 27 Jan 2008 at 16:06

The raid features on that board look pretty good.

I'd go for 2GB of the OCZ 6400 DRR which is a stunning ~£25 this week and for the CPU I'd go up a notch to the 4200 which runs a little faster and comes with an AMD approved heatsink and fan for £43. The 256KB of cache is cutting it a little thin on the cheapest core.

Will you be using the 2400 for HD output? otherwise you could go for a MATX board with 4 x 750 GB drives and onboard VGA / DVI / HD etc.

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Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 17:46

decto said:
The raid features on that board look pretty good.

I'd go for 2GB of the OCZ 6400 DRR which is a stunning ~£25 this week and for the CPU I'd go up a notch to the 4200 which runs a little faster and comes with an AMD approved heatsink and fan for £43. The 256KB of cache is cutting it a little thin on the cheapest core.

Will you be using the 2400 for HD output? otherwise you could go for a MATX board with 4 x 750 GB drives and onboard VGA / DVI / HD etc.

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I won't be buying it for a few weeks so just went for the cheapest RAM assuming it would be the same price that time. Will the CPU be that much of an issue? Wouldn't have thought CPU usage would be high for just streaming HD content, decoding will be done on the HTPC and client PC's.

The server will eventually be headless, might just stick it in the attic after setting it up, just went for the cheapest GFX card available in case I needed to hook it up again.

decto · 27 Jan 2008 at 20:36

Hi,

I read an article about the new Celeron which is a Core Duo allendale with just 512kb of cache vs 1MB in the 2xxx series, and 2MB 4xxx series. The article said it really hurt performance so I'm a little cautious of the 3600's cut down cache epecially when you factor in the included heatsink and fan with the 4200 it's only around £7 dearer.

I was looking at this the other day:

Mainboard £35
Does Raid 5 but only 4 x sata ports. Built in VGA so no need for a graphics card. saving of arounf £45 inc the graphics card and cheaper mainboard.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-012-FC&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=807

Factor in 4 of these SATA 750GB drives @ £106 each (£424) then it costs 10% more but you get 10% more storage under raid 5 if my maths is correct. (capacity of 1 drive lost to support the array)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-054-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940

For the system drive you can pick up an IDE as the foxcon board supports 4 ide devices.

I'm just in the process of reusing an A8V-VM SE socket 939 board with my old opteron 165 that I can't sell as I removed the IHS. It's using just 42w with a single drive under cool and quiet wheras when the chip was in a full blown Nforce board it was using around 90w at idle due to the amount of power the board and the required external graphics card (6600GT) consumed.

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therealnerd2 · 27 Jan 2008 at 21:08

decto said:
...I read an article about the new Celeron which is a Core Duo allendale with just 512kb of cache vs 1MB in the 2xxx series, and 2MB 4xxx series. The article said it really hurt performance so I'm a little cautious of the 3600's cut down cache ....

But where on the server are you using CPU-intensive applications? Streaming data is a basic northbridge function, very low CPU usage. No need to buy a bigger, hotter processor for a simple task.

crazyDAJT · 27 Jan 2008 at 21:23

decto said:
Mainboard £35
Does Raid 5 but only 4 x sata ports. Built in VGA so no need for a graphics card. saving of arounf £45 inc the graphics card and cheaper mainboard.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-012-FC&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=807

it looks as if that only has 2 SATA ports, also if your getting a CD drive you might as well go with a SATA one, so if your looking at doing a 4 disc raid 5 setup you need at least 5 ports, best go with 6 as you can have separate boot drive.

EDIT: http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_overview.aspx?ID=en-us0000359 says it has 4 SATA ports, I never like it when the pictures don't match up.

megakid · 27 Jan 2008 at 21:33

Maybe I am missing something but it depends on how you're going to be streaming this content doesn't it?
If you're watching HD allowing the clients to decode the stream then you should get away with a not-so-special server.
If, however, you're using MythTV or something on the server using "Extender"-style clients then won't your server will be doing the decoding and need to be beefier?