I am building my own NAS, I would like to have advices,
I would like to know what would be the best processor for 10, 1080p streams and transcoding streams, is Xeon or Core i7 best? Or any other?
I heard something about passmark, what is that?
Anyone would have an advice on the best motherboard as well? I would like to have at least 32GB or ECC RAM, with 8 Sata ports, 2 Ethernet Gigabit ports, an M2 extension (not sure what it is yet, but was told that it can be an extension card, a PCIe slot or 2, section for fans.
Does Plex uses all core of a multi-core processor?
What is the fastest Sata connection?
Doest Hyperthreading is useful for Plex?
Any advise on the best casing as well?
Freenas is that a good OS for a Plex NAS?
I think I have most of my questions, I am looking for your help,
Well i guess people will have different views and I don’t tend to need that much transcoding.
But the hardware decoding on my i7 just rocks.
I’m pretty sure others will chip on with their thoughts… Just thought I would start you off
This keeps the 10 regular Sata III ports free. So 11 drives in total in my case. Be aware that the regular m2 takes away either 1 or 2 of the regular sata ports. So if your interested in m2 the Ultra m2 is the way to go.
Thank you for your response,
I was just wondering, is it really necessary to have all of those display port? is there a way to have all of that with out all of those unnecessary ports?
Well as for the display ports I only need HDMI. The fact that the other options are there didn’t bother me too much.
CPU I have an i7-4770
Case…Well I just love Fractal design cases. I’m on their Define R5 at the moment.
my i7 4790S can do 8 hardware transcodes. but if I want more at once my E5 -2697 v3 handles 12+ non-hardware transcodes. so something with 12k + PassMark if you want 10 transcodes at once
I’m running a i7-7700T … massively oversized for my demands. Its a bit more than 10.000 PassMark.
What’s even more important is your harddisk speed for the Plex Server as well as from the NAS. I’m using a WD Blue M2 HD and have connected my NAS via a dedicated network.
Like this: NAS -> PMS Server -> public net
That way there won’t be any collisions on the wire.
Well, i7 doesn’t support ECC RAM, and if you’re building a NAS, you probably care about your data so you’d be going with server-class components (since a NAS is a server) and so want ECC RAM, which dictates either i3 or Xeon.
There are tons of other hardware nuances to take into consideration. This is just scratching the surface of one item. It’s not like building just any old PC.
I am aware of that, ECC is what I want
I am planning to look at a XEON or maybe that new Naples from AMD, I also may want to go with a dual CPU config, I am planning to build a powerful machine that will last me at least 4 to 7 years.
Anyone has a dual CPU recommendation with a small form factor motherboard that has at least 8 to 12 sata ports with ECC support?
Why do you need so many SATA ports on the motherboard? Buy two cheap IBM M1015 based RAID cards, put them in HBA mode (flash to IT mode) and you have a much better solution. Do not constraint your choices based on SATA ports is my recommendation. Supermicro is a good option for server builds (Xeon and ECC).
Remember also that Plex will soon release hardware transcoding (using graphic card to offload transcoding), it is already in beta testing for Plex pass users, so that might be worth taking into consideration.
edit: You want as much passmark score as possible per core. Many times the most troublesome software transcodes are due to difficult codecs that can’t be spread amongst the cores. Fewer cores, higher passmark, is often better. Getting an older 2 CPU Xeon with 8 cores and 15K passmark, is worse than taking a new single Xeon with 4 cores. and 10k passmark.
