I saw this on Amazon for $400 and which I think is a great deal for a stand alone server. It looks like it has a heck of a lot more beef than some of the ARM processor or low end Celerons packaged with stand alone NAS units (Synology, WD PR4100, QNAP, etc.)
On that server, there are only 3-4 things I need to understand before I pull the trigger.
Can I remote into it from a desktop running Windows (whether the server is ClearOS, Win Pro, Linux, etc.). I want to put in a corner and leave alone. Ripping media on a desktop PC and then transferring to the server remotely.
Are the drive bays really Hot Swappable or only Cold Swap? (this is not a deal breaker)
Will this transcode/direct play 4K media - if not, this is a deal breaker if it can’t transcode 4K
Will this support RAID 10 or only RAID 5
With the prices of drives coming down, I’m holding out for 4 x 8TB NAS drives (currently $259 for WD Red) to get me 16TB usable with RAID 10.
I’m not quite clear on the ClearOS system but I guess it’s a RedHat Linux derivative (from what I’ve read). I’ve seen on YouTube where they have a Plex plug in for ClearOS so that gives me hope to not having to spend $$ on a Windows Essentials Server license.
Anyone running a Gen10 with the AMD Opteron X3421?
It looks like you can swap out the DVD Optical bay with an SSD to load your OS. The one limiting factor I’ve seen is it shows a limitation of 4 x 4TB drives for the HDD bays. These are also not hot swappable - not the end of the world. but 4TB drive limitation is a little concerning. 4K media at 50GB+ each will suck that up in no time.
Transcoding 4K takes a ripped system to the best of my knowledge. The processor you’ve identified is anything but. It will work fine for 480, and could handle 2 transcodes of 1080 BluRay rips.
That makes it sound like you might need 32,000 score for H.265 4K content. It’s not nearly that high. If you have a recent cpu with quicksync that support 265 it’s not nearly as important.
However, 4K has it’s own issues. The biggest problem in my mind is HDR to SDR which is a no go. If your 4K rips are HDR material then it will only play back correctly on an HDR TV. If you transcode it down to 1080p or lower you loose the colors as there is no type of “tone mapping” for this during transcoding so everything may look very washed out.
4K media right now is best only direct played and should probably never be transcoded in real time. If you have clients that need transcoding you need a non HDR version in 1080p to use for them which can also serve as the media for any transcoding if needed.
Keep your 4K media in it’s own separate library shared only with people who can direct play it and avoid this issue completely!
Great advice. Thank you. I might just stick with the 1080P stuff then. It works great on a 4K TV and still looks fantastic. I’m disappointed in the Passmark scores on the AMD Opteron x3421 as this box, running under CentOS Linux would seem to be ideal - at least 10x better than a Western Digital PR4100 with it’s Intel Pentium N3710.
I have 8 other users on my Plex Server which is currently running on a late 2012 MacMini - Quad Core “Ivy Bridge” 2.3 GHz Intel “Core i7” (3615QM) processor. This shows a Passmark score of 7373 which is really pretty impressive for a 6 year old box. I jut want/need to move this to a newer box which will not throttle if everyone decides to be on at once.