AMD 4750G with FreeNAS

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#:freenas
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I am gathering my shopping list to build a free/true nas server. One of the thing I would be using the NAS is Plex on FreeNAS. I am looking at the AMD 4750G as a potential processor under the impression that this has an onboard GPU (APU). Given I am considering doing this on a smaller case and micro ATX motherboard, my PCI-e slots would be limited, and I am trying to avoid a dedicate nVidia Quadro P2000 if I do not have to. 95% of the time, the Plex would be streaming inside my home to an Apple TV 4K , so I don’t believe i need a heavy GPU, but is nice to have it just in case, not to mention I do not need to build and extra video card.
So the question I have is this, does Plex work with AMD APU type CPU on FreeNAS? Or the GPU on CPU option is only available on Intel CPU ?

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GPU (hardware) acceleration is not yet available on AMD GPUs/APUs. Intel CPUs w/ integrated GPUs are the only ones that can thus far and it is only certain series that can. Also I am not quite sure GPU acceleration is available in TrueNAS yet.
If you are only streaming within your house you most likely won’t need to transcode, just Direct Play, so that CPU should be fine and enable you to attach a monitor for the TrueNAS install and to watch the boot text fly by.

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If they are buying server-grade parts they likely have a IPMI/iKVM feature on the motherboard and can just view the bootup on another PC on the network.

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Are there any plan to support AMD GPU in the near future?

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I am honestly not sure. It would be nice, but I’m not a developer.

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Plex doesn’t usually publish plans. But there’s a feature request open for AMD hardware encoding support.

[Feature Request] Add support for AMD's Video Core Next encoding

If you want a lower powered CPU that has embedded transcoding support, consider an Intel CPU with QuickSync.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

I’m a TrueNAS user myself, but … if you want the best/easiest hardware acceleration support, you might consider Linux. Notes from others that have gotten hardware transcoding working on FreeNAS:

GitHub - kern2011/Freenas-Quicksync: How to guide for getting Intel Quicksync working on Freenas

Consider too the support for accelerated tone mapping:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/hdr-to-sdr-tone-mapping/

As you said, much of this may not be important if you don’t expect to use server-side transcoding. This will be dependent on your files, users, and playback devices.

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Thank you so much for the feedback. Given you are also a TrueNAS user, can I ask a more specific question / recommendation. My workload would be mainly iSCSI service for VMs, Plex is a nice value add for my family and myself when we start to travel again. With my TrueNAS /Plex build, I am planning to use the following
8 x Seagate Ironwolf 8TB (don’t see true value with the Ironwolf Pro)
Intel X540 T2 to a small 10GB Switch for my VM host
LSI SATA controller (still doing research here)
2x32GB DIMM to start
M.2 on the motherboard for write cache

I am trying to conserve my PCIe slot as much as possible, this is also why I was looking at the AMD 4750g giving i don’t need a video card, plus I would not need a GPU, kill 2 birds with one stone. I have been in the AMD space for the last couple of year, so what is a recommended Intel CPU (8 core) and respect chipset (Motherboard) you would recommend?

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Agreed that the specific drives don’t matter. The performance difference between modern spinning drives is small. The Ironwolf Pro has a better warranty, mostly. The type and number of drives and storage layout is more important by far.

There is simplicity and nothing wrong with an 8x8TB array, but it’s also good to recognize the compromises in any decision. It’s not the best value for total capacity, and a single SSD would deliver higher IOPS.

Consider another approach, with different compromises. This would improve random IO for VMs, but would divide the storage.

  • 2x1TB (Mirror) Hynix Gold 1TB SSDs for iSCSI/VMs
  • 3x16TB (RAIDZ1) Samsung EXO 16TB drives for bulk file share (cheap at the moment)
  • 3x empty for expansion.

LSI (IT mode) has always been a good choice. Plus the TrueNAS forums won’t complain at you.

ZFS loves RAM. For most real workloads the best performance improvement is a ton of ARC. Every request that’s satisfied by ARC avoids an IO to the disks.

After you’ve maxed out RAM, make sure that any SLOG device is appropriate for the job. It can be surprisingly small, as long as it’s fast, durable, and power-stable. It’s also better not to think of it as a cache: everything written to the SLOG is already in the ARC, and the SLOG is never read from in normal operation.

It’s counterproductive to use the wrong type of device for SLOG. Many consumer SSDs lose data on power loss, making the SLOG a danger, rather than a benefit. Even a $15 eBay Intel 16GB M10 Optane is a better choice than many consumer SSDs.

Think holistically about how much you value your data. Do you have ECC ram? Backups? Mirrored SLOG? If not, maybe you just set sync=disabled and get great performance and don’t worry about a SLOG at all. :slight_smile:

For actual CPU and motherboard recommendations … I dunno. It changes so fast, and I’m usually cheap. Others might give better suggestions. There are lots of “barely works” - “adequate” - “good” - “great” options.

If you’re buying nice new stuff, maybe an i7-9700K, and look at the Gigabyte and ASUS C246 boards (and SuperMicro X11SCH family). They support integrated video, ECC RAM, have 8 onboard SATA ports, and 2x M.2 slots (you need a boot device too).

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To follow up with your much-appreciated feedback, can you elaborate on the following?

  1. Which latest LSI model is supported by TrueNAS, as I find like 2 or 3 versions out on ebay (9207, 9211, 9300)
  2. The divided storage suggestion by you, are both the Mirror and RAIDZ1 on two different Pools or the same pool?
  3. My MB limitation would be 128GB, I do plan to start with 64GB. Would L2ARC with SSD has any benefit in your experience? Or the 128GB ARC should be more than enough for most use case?
  4. Who make SSD that has power loss prevention for SLOG?
  5. and regarding to the motherboard, I think AMD has 24 PCIe lanes versus Intel of 20, so I was thinking of going with the AMD 4750G and a mother board with a B550 chipset (with 2 onboard M.2 for the boot drives) I am still debating on the case, Fractal Node 804 versus something bigger. Ideally, and this is why I am thinking of 4750G as it has integrated video, and it will still leave me 3 PCIe slots (at least x8 on each). This should allow me one LSI, one intel x540 dual 10GB, and another one LSI in case I want to expand beyond 8 disks
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A bunch of this is really well outlined on the FreeNAS Hardware Storage Guide blog post thingy.

  1. They’re more-or-less all well supported. 9211 are the old PCIe2 cards, and ubiquitous. They’re fast enough to drive 8 spinning disks. 9207-8i has PCIe3, is also pretty old, and is a great value choice. 93xx is newer, 12Gbps, and sparkly-fast.

  2. They’d be separate, which a big obvious downside. You’d have to think about where you put different types of data, etc. The advantage is consistent and much higher random IO performance on the SSD-based pool.

  3. L2ARC is most useful if you have a consistent working set of data that’s bigger than your ARC. Enterprise deployments only sometimes do; home users often don’t. A downside is that L2ARC also uses memory that might be better as ARC, so it’s not a case of “might as well, it couldn’t hurt”. It’s nice to be able to add if you identify a need for it, but I wouldn’t plan it in a small build. Large VM & iSCSI use might qualify.
    https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/use-cases-for-l2arc.72924/
    Aside: Now that L2ARC can be made persistent, I have been experimenting with using it for metadata only. This seems beneficial for file servers (but doesn’t apply to iSCSI), doesn’t steal very much memory from ARC, and reduces latency for things like directory browsing. This is a huge improvement for Plex, actually, because Plex does a lot of directory traversal.

  4. Intel Optane. Samsung stuff with “Datacenter” in the name. ZeusRAM. The magic phrase is “power-loss protection”. The SLOG is a circular buffer, and only needs to be big enough to handle your synchronous write load.

  5. The Intel x540-T2 is PCIe2, so it needs x8 lanes, but a PCIe3 dual-port card only needs x4 lanes (Intel x550, Chelsio T540). And while you’re slot and lane-planning for the future, there are LSI 9300 cards with 16 ports.
    But that kinda comes back around to your original question. Plex itself doesn’t have any support for AMD Video Core Next, so maybe that means you want the ability to add a GPU.

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What so special about Intel Optane, isn’t this the just Intel branded SSD, or does it has some form of battery backup? Also, would this work on AMD motherboard?

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Optane uses a different storage technology from SSD that is fundamentally safe from power loss. It should work fine as SLOG on AMD too.

SSDs normally have some DRAM built in, which is inherently volatile. So SSDs with power-loss protection add a capacitor or battery so they can finish their work and save data if the power goes out. It’s like a miniature UPS.

Optane doesn’t need to do that. It doesn’t have the DRAM buffer layer. Written data is safe from power-loss immediately.

The “intelligent acceleration” stuff you see referencing Optane and supported motherboards and Windows is bios updates and a set of drivers. But a basic Optane NVMe shows up as storage and can be used directly as a ZFS SLOG.

Oh! I forgot about the hybrid Intel SSD/Optane devices, like the H10. Those are both an SSD and some Optane on the same M.2 device. That’s not what I was talking about - those rely on bios support and drivers to be “combined” into one device for Windows. But I don’t know how they would appear on a non-Intel motherboard. As two devices? Maybe. Unclear.

Benchmarks of the H10 are a good demonstration of how cache doesn’t always make slow storage perform well. Sometimes they do OK, but not better than a standard SSD.

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Just to double check, is this the right Optane?

  1. how to check to ensure they work with AMD type mother board also?
  2. Do you purchase and use them in a mirror configuration?
  3. And lastly, how to I ensure the motherboard support NVMe with their M.2? I know most modern (2020) mb has dual M.2 slot on them, just want to make sure they are not just M2.sata
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1 & 2) Yes, those will appear as a standard NVMe device.
3) You don’t strictly need to mirror them any more. If ZFS notices that the SLOG device has failed it will stop using it.
4) Which motherboard? I looked at a couple of B550 examples and the ones with dual M.2 are all similar - one slot supports NVMe PCIe4 and SATA, and the other supports NVMe PCIe3, and may or may not support SATA.

That might be a good affordable choice. Take a look at the 800p though. It’s slightly more expensive, but newer and significantly faster.

The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size

The point isn’t that these are the fastest devices, it’s that they have low latency while also having power loss protection.

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Given the 800p has a longer life and faster write, no brainer there for sure. Thank you. I do have few questions I want to address. GIven TrueNAS is not Windows, on top of that it is FreeBSD base from what I understand. What’s the likelihood I will run into a driver issue with a new motherboard and CPU like B550 or Z490, especially around the onboard NIC, onboard SATA, or just the CPU itself?

  1. As much as I would like to do the build with MicroATX, it just make more sense to stay with ATX due to PCIe slots limitation. With that being said, is there advantage of AMD vs Intel when it come to maximum number of PCIe lanes between the B550 and Z490? I know in general, they both account a 16x for the GPU, and 4x for the onboard M.2, but if I recall, doesn’t the AMD max out at 28 lanes? or was that Intel?
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