Building advice for a Plex and storage server

General Discussions
1

Hello!
I have decided to build a budget Mini-ITX server for using as my Plex media server and overall NAS. What I need from it is to be able to transcode one 1080p stream (I will only use it personally at home so 1 full-HD transcode without buffering will be enough for me).
For OS I thought about using FreeNas since it is free and can be booted from a USB-stick (which reduces the cost of the build since I won’t need a main disk for the OS).

So far so good or would Linux or Windows be a better choice for OS? Any advice is appreciated since the whole server/NAS-thing is new for me.

And now over to the build itself, I have been running google searches for days now and can’t really find any proper answers for the parts needed to satisfy my demands. I know that a CPU with a passmark of over 2000 is recommended for one 1080p transcode. I have also found out that 16GB of RAM is recommended for FreeNas (Will I really notice the difference? Was planning on going for 8GB of Ram initially).

So here is the hardware I have chosen so far, what do you guys think, will it be sufficient for my needs?

Chassi: Cooler Master Elite 110

Motherboard: MSI H110I Pro, Socket-1151

CPU: Intel Pentium G4500 Skylake 3.5GHz (Passmark: 4010)

Ram: Kingston HyperX Fury Black DDR4 2133MHz

HDD: 2 x WD Red 2TB 3.5”

PSU: Fractal Design 400w

This build fits my budget and I of course wouldn’t mind if it was overpowered for my needs, I just don’t want it to be insufficient and would really appreciate your feedback.

2

I’m going to give you the short version. I highly advise starting a build thread at the FreeNAS forums. They are no stranger to Plex, but know FreeNAS to the best degree while most people on these forums build computers for other purposes and only a few are even casual FreeNAS users.

You don’t just throw any old/cheap hardware at FreeNAS. You build for FreeNAS using specific hardware known to be supported and work well in this sort of environment.

Short version:

  • Change the motherboard. You want a “server” motherboard, with an Intel NIC chipset (otherwise expect to add an Intel NIC), ECC RAM support and no consumer/gaming nonsense like audio, overclocking etc. Look at SuperMicro or ASRock for starters. Perhaps the ASRock E3C236D2I

  • You want a CPU that supports ECC RAM. Look at an i3 or Xeon E3

  • Get ECC RAM certified for the motherboard. Avoid Kingston. Crucial is the standard go-to.

  • Yes you want 16GB of RAM minimum if you’re running PMS in a FreeNAS jail.

  • Fractal Design is ok for cases but I’d go SeaSonic for a power supply.

  • That’s not much storage. With just 2 drives the best you can do is mirroring. Are you sure that’s enough redundancy for you? These days it usually isn’t (only one drive can fail, and a single read error while rebuilding the replacement results in total loss of your entire pool). And 2TB won’t get most Plex users very far.

3

Perfect, thank you very much for your advice. I will look into the hardware suggestions and probably make some changes to my build.
I am however starting to think that FreeNas maybe is a little overkill for my needs? Since all I really want is a low key server for plex which I also can use for storing some files. I have some experience with Linux and am fully comfortable with both Windows and OSX, should I perhaps just use a more desktop standard OS for my “server”?

4

@sremick said:

  • Change the motherboard. You want a “server” motherboard, with an Intel NIC chipset (otherwise expect to add an Intel NIC), ECC RAM support and no consumer/gaming nonsense like audio, overclocking etc. Look at SuperMicro or ASRock for starters. Perhaps the ASRock E3C236D2I

  • You want a CPU that supports ECC RAM. Look at an i3 or Xeon E3

For what it’s worth, I’ve recently built a FreeBSD (not FreeNAS) server with that motherboard and a Xeon E3-1240 v5. The motherboard “only” has 6 SATA ports, but with an internal USB A port for a FreeNAS stick that should be enough for most smaller builds.

5

Warning…opinion coming…

I would just use LVM under Linux and skip the ZFS trouble if you are just hosting rips of media you own. Use a largish external USB (Seagate 8tb) for backing up your data periodically to prevent the whole library from needing to be re-ripped, but if you suffer bitrot (way overblown fear in my experience) just re-rip that media. Even if your video suffers from bitrot, it is very unlikely you will even detect it while watching.

Now, if you are downloading your media and don’t own it, that changes things a bit, but I won’t even speak to that here.

Queue the my distro is best discussions… :slight_smile: