Plex server with old xeon c602

Arnold Ma said:
Xeon vs Ryzen - Dual Xeon is much cheaper than a single Ryzen, and far more powerful, I've read it's hit and miss with 1800x on 4k transcoding.
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Those xeons are ancient, and cheap for a reason. Even if your not a fan of Ryzen - build a newer single socket intel based server. Power and noise are a concern with any dual Xeon servers.

Arnold Ma said:
hardware acceleration via GPU - I believe the quality is not as good with this? I may try with my current set-up as i just bought a RX580 and see if it helps.
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The quality is what you set it at, whether gpu or CPU transcoding. Its always a trade off between speed and quality.
Newer intel chips can transcode using the gpu part via quick sync. Nvidia GPUs via nvenc (but limited to 2 concurrent streams with all geforce cards, and entry level quadring cards). Amd cards can transcode and have no artificial limits, but support can vary.
Even if you could only offload a couple of streams onto the AMD card, that reduces the work the CPU needs to do. (Not sure on Plex, but emby had an option to limit number of transcodes on each form of hardware acceleration e.g. so you could do 2 on an AMD card, 2 on a Nvidia card, 2 via intel gpu, and then anything else would fall back to CPU only transcoding.

Arnold Ma said:
transcoding on server vs end player - I'd have to get everyone a nvidia shield or an apple TV
...
PS. also need to transcode 4k to lower bitrate as my internet is crap, so 10mbps 1080p is best I can serve...
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Do you have *any* 4k clients? If not then don't bother ripping/sourcing 4k content, or as above do a seperate 4k library, and rerip most common content into a format that doesn't need transcoding and can be direct played at 1080p/720p and a codec that works across your devices.
From my brief trial of Plex a few months ago, I'm sure you can even maintain 1 library, but have e.g. the same film as several different resolution/codec files in each folder - the Plex client picks the appropriate one. I'm sure there's even a scheduled transcoding option to re-encode lower quality copies during off-hours.
By storing multiple copies that don't need transcoding as they stream you reduce the CPU/gpu requirements and push it to storage which is arguably easier to solve.
 
If you’ve got the space then I’d store multiple copies of your media and ditch the power hungry CPUs.

If you consider Unraid (I use it and love it) have a look at the YouTube videos from ‘Spaceinvader one’ which I’ve found incredibly helpful. His latest ones on auto re-encoding downloads using a handbrake docker seems quite apt for your situation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yibUWakxR18
 
Thanks everyone for taking the time to input, really helpful and some interesting solutions here - I guess I just went for the lazy option of getting some cheap, beefy processors to do the hard work and transcode on the fly rather than getting creative with re-encode / two versions.

I already keep two copies for some films (but hate the space it takes, however HDD is cheap...), and yes, you can select which version to play on most Plex clients. But this is a good opportunity to move to a home server solution for reason mentioned before.

What is a good balance of price/power on consumer stuff at the moment for a home server? if not older sandy bridge Xeons.

Re unRAID, thanks again everyone, sounds like a winner, the least I need would be a few dockers for torrent, Plex and parity? any tips on parity/torrent much appreciated!

PS. I keep 4k content for local consumption, I'm a quality freak!
 
Then just make sure you can direct play your 4k media to whatever box you're using. That removes the requirement to transcode.
 
The parity protection is built in to unRAID rather than it being in a docker (I've got Plex, Deluge (torrent client), a separate media server for home videos and photos and krusader which is a graphics-based file manager because I'm not at all savvy with command line stuff!)

I love the parity protection against a single drive failure (you can protect against multiple drive failures but it requires additional parity drives!) - it's actually really interesting how it "calculates" what you have lost in terms of "ones and zeros"

I'd recommend a small SSD to install dockers to etc so they run a quickly (and you can use it as a cache drive too!)

Best of all I'm fairly sure you can try it for a month FOC!
 
Stop. Pretty much everything in your op is wrong and this will end badly.

Lets start with the basic's:

1) Old Xeon's suck, anything pre LGA2011 is dead to you, the e3 12xx v1 and v2 is OK, but it's no different to a desktop chip of the same vintage in this scenario. People have this idea that buying an ancient server/server hardware cheap from eBay is a good idea because it's got Xeon's in it and it's enterprise class hardware, those people end up hearing impaired and financially worse off every month because they ignore the noise/power usage and the noise. DO NOT BUY A DINOSERV! A modern i3 or similar is perfectly adequate and the iGPU is capable of multiple hardware transcodes/decodes which makes life a lot easier, it also won't destroy your ears or make your room stupidly hot. What you are suggesting is rated for 12k of CPU mark per CPU, you have two remote users, your remote users are not streaming 4K and your local clients will direct play, so why are you going this route?

2) You really don't want to transcode 4K. You really, really don’t want to transcode 4K HDR. It's inefficient and you would be better off carrying a split library set-up for 4K (which you ensure can only be direct played using TauTulli) and Plex can only output to h264, it can’t do tone mapping from HDR to SDR so the results are rubbish. Plex suggest 2K of CPU mark per 1080 AV transcode, that's slight overkill and due to the way plex transcodes you could get away with more streams (it goes flat out to fill the buffer to the set time limit and then stops).

3) With a 20Mbit upload and wanting to output to remote users at 10Mbit/1080 then that's a maximum of two uploads, if you have a recent 9/10 series Nvidia GPU then this falls nicely into that capability (more than two streams requires a Quadro or unlocked drivers on Ubuntu), with 20Mbit you don't need a Quadro as everything local should be direct playing or you're doing it wrong and you still have software (CPU based) transcoding to fall back on for subs/audio etc.

With proper media and client selection I have run a Pi3 as a Plex server (no transcoding), it worked OK. The key is to know what you're doing and make sure your media direct plays on your clients.

Now we've got the basic stuff out of the way, how comfortable are you with non windows OS'?

Option 1: UnRaid
You can throw random drives at it, it uses the largest for parity, add plex docker and the excellent BinHex torrent dockers with VPN/Privoxy included. Understand that 2 remote users + torrenting on 20Mbit will suck based on what you have already said you want to do (2*10Mbit/1080).

Option 2: Ubuntu + PlexGuide installer
Unlimited remote storage with a local drive for meta data and transcoding. Your remote storage bill will cost £6-7 a month, likely less than powering the two CPU's you were planning on running 24/7.

For hardware transcoding you need a plexpass (lifetime is 25% off now), if you don't have PlexPass then you need CPU power to transcode. Hardware wise a 6th/7th gen i3 or i5 is where i'd look at, I built an i5 6500 for testing a while back for under £200 all in, my 2630L wasn't much more, parts sourced from here and from eBay, even a 3rd/4th gen is going to do an OK job with an iGPU, but the quality/codec support improved from early generations, 4th onwards is quite capable. 8GB is adequate, with unraid use an SSD cache drive as direct to the array is inefficient and VM's will be faster if using SSD, with Plexguide use an SSD where possible, especially if you want to run Sonarr/Radarr/NZBGet/torrents and transcode at the same time. The other options is to rent a remote server, SYS have a £30/m deal with 250Mbit each way that would fit the bill, Hetzner Cloud do VM's from £3ish upwards, 10G shared each way.

If you have questions, ask. Too many people make really crappy hardware choices and then take a financial hit trying to fix them or go deaf in the process. Don't be that person.
 
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^ reply of the thread right here.

I only use old Xeon hardware because the server sits at work and I don't have to pay for the electricity.
 
Beautiful, thanks again everyone for the candid tips! Especially @Avalon really appreciate your time. Point taken re old server chips. Remote is an interesting option as it removes my bandwidth bottleneck - will look into this. I guess I can always have a NAS at home to back up the data on the remote server? Is it viable to rent a server with 20TB+ of storage?

@StevieP got it re unRAID, liking this option more since doing a bit more research myself.
 
You're going to struggle to rent a server with 20tb for any reasonable amount of money I fear.
 
It's not (quite) as simple as some of the posters above make out with regards to old Xeons.

Moving to an Xeon and appropriate board gives you various features you simply don't get on consumer level kit:
  • Multiple NICs
  • Proper remote management, integrated KVM etc.
  • Integrated proper hardware RAID.
  • ECC RAM
My server uses a Supermicro X8-ST3F, 24gb of ECC RAM. Can't remember the processor off the top of my head (6 core xeon), but 1366 Xeons are somwhere from 100w to 120w at full load, and obviously less at idle.
A Ryzen7 uses about 95w at full load.

If we assume the motherboard and peripheral consumption is in the same ballpark, I'm probably using 10% more power for 10% less raw performance.
On the flip side, there's no Ryzen board I know of with 2 NICs, full IPMI / KVM management, 14 SATA ports etc.
This doesn't even take into account the purchase cost (24gb of DDR4 alone is probably triple what I paid for the entire setup)


Having said all of that, you need to ask yourself whether you need any of the fancy features I've pointed out above.
The answer is probably no :)
 
If you're using unraid, hardware raid is irrelevant.

ECC memory is supported on Ryzen is it not?

S5500bc with 2x x5660, 32gb RAM and 6 HDDs draws over 200w idle.

Server boards use a surprising amount of power.
 
leezer3 said:
My server uses a Supermicro X8-ST3F, 24gb of ECC RAM. Can't remember the processor off the top of my head (6 core xeon), but 1366 Xeons are somwhere from 100w to 120w at full load, and obviously less at idle.
A Ryzen7 uses about 95w at full load.
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It's not just the 1366 processors that are an issue - the chipsets used for 1366 motherboards use a huge amount of power compared to anything recent - I had a 1366 single socket board as a mining rig for a while, at Idle with a low power xeon it was still something like 90watts - modern boards/chipsets are <20watts.
 
PiKe said:
If you're using unraid, hardware raid is irrelevant.
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Unraid is a triumph of marketing, nothing more...
It's only a proprietary software RAID / drive pool and some nice UI bits.
I'll take a hardware RAID every day, thanks. Write performance on the hardware RAID will be much better too.

PiKe said:
ECC memory is supported on Ryzen is it not.
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Yes and no.
https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/for...ws/75030-ecc-memory-amds-ryzen-deep-dive.html
It's board dependant and officially unsupported.

Again, I'd much rather take the supported route.

PiKe said:
S5500bc with 2x x5660, 32gb RAM and 6 HDDs draws over 200w idle.

Server boards use a surprising amount of power.
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I really don't know what you'd expect a dual CPU Ryzen setup with this much strung off it to draw...
Try comparing apples to apples, not oranges ;)
A better comparison would probably be with ePyc server boards, but anyways, this is a brief seat of the pants fudge comparison:

Call it 50w - 60w idle draw for the Ryzen & board with all DIMMs populated etc.

Most of the idle power draw will be from the CPU not the board itself, so let's call it 40w for the theoretical 2nd CPU.
If our disks are spun up, we'll use ~10w each.
We'll also need a GFX card as Ryzen has no integrated, so maybe another 20w.

That gives a 'comparitive' power draw of somewhere around 170w for the theoretical 2CPU Ryzen setup.

That's pretty close to my 10% higher figure for the Xeon from above.
Use a single CPU Xeon board & your real power figures will be similar to the Ryzen, but 10 - 20% slower performance.

Servers eat power either way.
Only you can decide whether the useful features from the Xeon are worth the power drop.
 
Armageus said:
It's not just the 1366 processors that are an issue - the chipsets used for 1366 motherboards use a huge amount of power compared to anything recent - I had a 1366 single socket board as a mining rig for a while, at Idle with a low power xeon it was still something like 90watts - modern boards/chipsets are <20watts.
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That's marginally worse than I'd expect for a single socket, but not certainly not unreal.

<20w idle for the newer board sounds optimistic though unless you're using horrid low power tat with no poke at all.
For a something like a Ryzen7 or equivilant I'd expect about 40 - 50w or 60w with all DIMMs populated etc.

Either way, call it about a 50w difference tops, which sure is something, but nowhere near as bad as some are making out.


Again, I'n not saying the Xeon is the best choice, but rather that there are pros and cons to each you need to be aware of.
Look beyond the scaremongering to the facts :)
 
Lets dispel a few more myths... this isn't a commercial install, ECC and IPMI are of limited benefit to most home users (read unless you are a r/homelab regular or replicating a work environment at home you are highly unlikely to use IPMI more than once in a blue moon), but in a commercial set-up can be invaluable, i'm not dismissing the benefits in those applications, but I do seriously question why you would feel they apply to the OP based on his post? They don't come across as someone with several racks of servers who does remote management on them regularly with business critical data.

Current daily driver: Xeon 2630L v3/32GB/500GB NVMe is pulling about 64w, that's an 8c/16t chip with a CPU mark of 9476 and TDP of 55w. Let's assume you followed JDM's build advice from the land of cheap hardware/power.. dual L5640's pull a CPU mark of 9721 but 60w TDP per chip. Servthehome's numbers were 158w idle (ouch) and 243w load, the same source puts an i7 2600 at 32w idle. Just based on my power costs (13.3p comparison value inc s/c) that's 1384kw (£184.07) for the dual 1366 and 560kw/yr (£74.56) for my 2630L. Obviously it gets a lot worse once you actually load up the cores, but £109.51 extra at idle per year at idle is a hefty price to pay, it almost justifies an even more power efficient build wouldn't you say? Also my build is far from efficient, it's got a 1KW PSU which is highly inefficient in this application, I reckon I could get sub 50w with a little tweaking in both hardware and BIOS.

Also my Ryzen 1700/32GB was sub 20w idle, not bad for a chip that pull 13749 of CPU mark with a 65w TDP, it will spike to 30w idle under normal workloads, but it is making 40% more performance using a fraction of the power and it's near silent. Do I need IPMI? I think I plugged a monitor and keyboard into it once post set-up and i've had it since launch, ECC hasn't been a problem for me and I prefer to have NIC's of my choosing (i350's or similar).

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-l5640-60w-dual-core-processor-benchmarks-review-power/
 
I'm not denying any of that per-se (Power figures will vary per system), simply saying you need to look at the bigger picture in terms of hardware features :)

Even taking into account a £100 difference in power costs per year (13p / kwh is high, but still..), you're conveniently forgetting the new option will cost £300 - £400 more upfront.
If we then assume a lifespan of 5 years (optimistic IMHO) & similar price differentials each time you upgrade, over a 10 year period you're looking at a cost of £20 p/a extra or there about.

To me that's worth it :)
Again though, this by no means suits everyone and makes vast amounts of assumptions.
Do your own sums on the costs / benefits.
 
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