Plex server/Backup NAS from old parts.

Salty22 · 8 May 2018 at 20:48

Going to be upgrading my cpu/mobo/ram soon and ill have leftover:
i5 4690k
Asus z-97p
16gb ddr3.

Was wondering if that would make for a good basis for a nas/plex server, and what other parts people would recommend to complete it?
I've got 2x3tb WD reds in my main pc ill be adding to it too.
Does GPU factor into transcoding (ill barely be doing any), because if not ive got an old Nvidia card thatll do the job for now, or shall i just use on board?
Something fairly energy efficient would be good.

Avalon · 8 May 2018 at 23:26

Spec wise it's overkill, use iGPU and storage could very quickly become a problem if you let it.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 01:24

There any drawbacks from it being overkill? Like power consumption etc?
I wanted to do a raid 5 setup for a good amount of redundancy, will this require a separate raid card?
Was thinking of adding in another 3x3tb reds for a total of 15tb before taking off the raid 5 redundancy space.

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 01:49

RAID5 isn't that great for this sort of setup.

If/when a drive fails the array rebuild time will be massive.

During the rebuild the array is exposed at a time when all of the drives will be getting hammered. You don't need to look very far to find examples of where a second drive has failed during the rebuild.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 04:27

What sort of raid would you recommend mate?

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 09:05

I’m not really that bothered if I lost a disc of movies/tv I can easily get those back, so what if I just used single discs for those?
Then maybe a small raid 1 array for backups? All I’m bothered about backing up is photos/videos of the kids from mine and my wife’s pc.
I currently back up to another internal drive every day then to an external 1tb drive every week manually.

Armageus · 9 May 2018 at 09:20

Salty22 said:
What sort of raid would you recommend mate?

Either RAID10 (although probably overkill for movies etc), or some kind of JBOD with parity solution such as Unraid.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 11:08

Heard a ton of good stuff about Unraid so I’ll do some more research into that and maybe go with that for the operating system.
I don’t think I’ll bother with raid for the media array now.
My motherboard only has 4 sata ports so what card would you recommend for extra drive connections?

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 11:24

I use unRAID on my Dell T20 and have been happy with it.

If you need more SATA ports check the support information for the NAS distribution you decide to use. I've got a Dell H310 flashed to IT mode ready to install in mine when I need more ports.

It's important to note that these NAS distributions don't usually want RAID adapters as they handle the drives directly.

BigT · 9 May 2018 at 11:29

I think I'd suggest JBOD with a parity disk too. Unraid is really very good for this and its containerisation abilities means you can add Plex easily enough to it in a very elegant way and then Sonarr, Deluge, SAB etc. to automate content grabbing too. Mine also acts as a PiHole Adblocker, Ubiquiti controller, owncloud server and automated backup server using SyncThing. All this with a Pentium CPU and 8Gb of RAM so yours will be plenty enough. Power consumption is your biggest enemy here with your old kit.

The downside of Unraid is it isn't free and if you're so minded you can do everything it does for nothing using Linux, Snapraid, Docker etc. However it's cheaper than Windows and very easy to use and fit for purpose. It also has very good support via their forums.

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 11:34

It isn't free, but you can trial it for at least 60 days. Well worth the money.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 11:39

I looked at pricing before and seems reasonable really, well happy to pay for a good piece of software.
Would you guys suggest buying say a 120gb ssd for the the unraid nas? Is it still called a boot drive? I’m really clueless so really appreciate all the time you guys have spent helping me with this

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 11:42

It boots from a USB stick (and that's the only option AFAIK).

BigT · 9 May 2018 at 11:42

Unraid needs to boot from a USB stick

SSD is useful for a cache drive though. Left on defaults things get written to the cache drive initially before once a day moved to the array. Some people use two SSDs so that the cache drive also has a parity because if that goes you lose up to 24 hours data if it's not yet moved to the array.

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 11:51

I wouldn't both with a cache drive until you've tried it without. For a start it'll take up one of the SATA ports you need for your data drives.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 12:02

How big a usb drive do you need?

bremen1874 · 9 May 2018 at 12:07

Between 1GB and 32GB.

All of this information is available on their website.

BigT · 9 May 2018 at 12:09

Tiny. I think mine is 8Gb but you can get away with 4Gb. Just get a quality one.

Avalon · 9 May 2018 at 13:42

Unraid is a much better idea than R5, free trial, great community and great software, freeNAS is another option.

Power wise intel have used power gating technology since at least the 2xxx series, if its not used, the power draw is near zero on any unused cores. That said if you don't need transcoding 'much', its still overkill. I use a 4770 to provide Plex to family and friends with reasonable concurrent user counts, that said I also tend to push content in a direct play friendly format. I'd suggest before you go down this route and potentially make a storage choice that's not scalable, you consider using GSuite for your back end and unless you have a fast home connection (at least in the upload sense) a VPS of some description. I'd pimp PlexGuide as being an ideal project for you to have a look at, but i'm biased.

Salty22 · 9 May 2018 at 14:30

Avalon said:
Unraid is a much better idea than R5, free trial, great community and great software, freeNAS is another option.

Power wise intel have used power gating technology since at least the 2xxx series, if its not used, the power draw is near zero on any unused cores. That said if you don't need transcoding 'much', its still overkill. I use a 4770 to provide Plex to family and friends with reasonable concurrent user counts, that said I also tend to push content in a direct play friendly format. I'd suggest before you go down this route and potentially make a storage choice that's not scalable, you consider using GSuite for your back end and unless you have a fast home connection (at least in the upload sense) a VPS of some description. I'd pimp PlexGuide as being an ideal project for you to have a look at, but i'm biased.

Ah so Unraid doesn't use R5 itself? I just thought Unraid was like an OS and it used whatever file sorting format etc you picked.

By power gating performance do you mean like SpeedStep?