Well, it hasn’t been too long since I built my media server, think it was the beginning of last year using Unraid.
A week or so ago my motherboards onboard SAS has died, so I now have to purchase a new SAS card, (bought the AOC-SASLP-MV8), I’m still waiting for it to arrive, but I’m not too sure if it’ll fit in my Lian Li Q26 case.
I’ve been wanting to start downloading 4K content, which will of course be fine when I’m direct playing it, but I’m not too sure how well my E3-1240 v3 would even handle one transcode of 4K. It’s a decent little processor, got a passmark of 9,702.
I’ve also noticed dual Sandybridge Xeons going for dirt cheap on eBay, a pair of E5-2650s going for as cheap as £70 with a passmark of 15,191 (single E5-2650: 10,275)
Or a pair of E5-2670s for as little as £162 with a passmark of 18,337 (single E5-2670: 12,325).
Would people recommend the dual Xeons? I’ve no idea how much more they’d use in electric compared to the single E3-1240 v3 I have at the moment.Right know I don’t even have a 4K TV, and nobody even streams from my Plex as my upload is terrible and I still live with my parents. But within 6-12 months time I will be moving out and getting my own house where internet speeds will be much better, and I wouldn’t want to be spending £200/300 a year just to run the server on electric.
Also, what would everyone recommend as an OS for a storage server. Currently running Unraid. I have 7x4TB drives at the moment and I do plan on getting a 20 or 24 bay server case, using the same size HDDS. So that’s up to 96TB minus parity(s). I was planning on doing Freenas with my current build, but the RAM requirements are insane, to the point where my motherboard couldn’t even support the amount of RAM I’d need.
Oh, and the reason I posted a single and double passmarks scores, is I’m guessing dual CPUs lose performance effeciency?
That said, looking at passmark results… the Ryzen 1800X has a passmark of 15,358. Depending on electric consumption that might be worth a shout…
Before I explain why trying to transcode 4K right now is futile, convince me that with the specs you’re talking that this is not for commercial purposes.
Commercial purposes?
Nope.
I’ve not, at the moment looked in to this all that much, I’m spending my time trying to fix my current server. But the issues I’ve had, has made me think about it (I was planning to anyway in the long run).
Right now, I don’t own a 4K screen, other than a laptop.
Within 6-12 months when I move out, I will own a 10bit 4K HDR TV, and I was hoping if I jumped on this now, that I could start getting the content for it.
I currently don’t really transcode at all, well apart from an Amazon Fire TV stick, if I got the 4K content now, I would need to be able to transcode to that, occasionally.
When I do move out, I do share my library with a couple of friends, and whilst my 20Mbps upload in the new house wouldn’t be able to support 4K, I would still need to transcode to lower bitrates.
For my own needs, I only need to direct play. In my new house I will have a decent TV and I plan to build a HTPC, with a graphics card that should be able to direct play H265 from my server. However on my currently minimal research, I have noticed a couple of people on forums suggesting that H265 seems to always transcode regardless of the playback device, even when they have a H265 capable player/HTPC.
From my minimal research I did see a lot of people suggesting that 4K, being 4x the pixels of 1080p should require 4x the processing power. I do realise it is not as simple as that. But what I’m basically wanting something capable of transcoding one 4K Blu Ray file.
Forget about sinking a fortune into hardware. If you have a decent Internet connection the simplest & cheapest answer is to buy Plex Pass & then use Plex Cloud. Store your data on Google Drive Business for $10/month. Plex Cloud does an outstanding job of transcoding 4K. I uploaded a 65GB 60Mbps 4K UHD Blu-ray rip & this happily plays on all my devices (Roku 3, Roku Ultra, iPhone 6s Plus, Amazon Fire TV 4K, web app on my Retina MacBook Pro etc). It even plays nicely on the iPhone on 3G/4G cellular when away from WiFi.
Plex Cloud is a game changer. Anyone thinking of buying hardware for their own Plex Server should think again. provided you have a decent Internet connection Plex Cloud can provide a better Plex experience than local hardware & the cost saving is enormous.
@sremick said:
Before I explain why trying to transcode 4K right now is futile
Plex Cloud does an outstanding job of transcoding 4K. Forget about purchasing your own hardware.
