Hey guys! I’m looking to build a 2U rack mounted computer to put Plex and a few other random things on. I would love some help picking parts and such. Not looking for a crazy expensive rig but something to handle 1-3 users.
Alright buy a dell c2100 then get around 100gb of ess ram from ebay or amazon. If not already installed. After that figure out. How much storage you need for me it around 20tb. My suggestion is to buy 3tb nas drives from either wd or hgst. Avoid seagate and other brands. They might fail. After that install freenas or linux server os with plex server and done. Also it already has gigabit ethernet. So no worries unless your going to transfer mass storage.
@NetflixSucks said:
Alright buy a dell c2100 then get around 100gb of ess ram from ebay or amazon. If not already installed. After that figure out. How much storage you need for me it around 20tb. My suggestion is to buy 3tb nas drives from either wd or hgst. Avoid seagate and other brands. They might fail. After that install freenas or linux server os with plex server and done. Also it already has gigabit ethernet. So no worries unless your going to transfer mass storage.
What about graphics cards? Any recommendations?
96GB of ECC RAM sounds expensive. I assume that advise came from ZFS + dedupe without a cache disk? I would suggest in such case that a cache disk would be used and no dedupe. The small performance hit that remains would be OK imho.
ECC RAM is dirt cheap on ebay. If the server he got was barebones and he needed to buy all of it, it wouldn’t be more than like $500 for 128GB…
Your server doesn’t need a discrete graphics card. The onboard video is fine.
And I second the use of Hitachi/HGST drives. I’ve been running 2TB Deskstar (consumer grade) drives in my server 24/7 for almost 6 years now (almost 50,000 hours on SMART) with not a hiccup. I’d expect that the enterprise grade (Ultrastar) drives to perform nothing less… Just be careful buying drives on ebay (and even Amazon). Lots of sellers have used server pulls listed as new. Drives are the only thing I wouldn’t go to anything but a retail giant for.
Actionally found my ram for under 100$ it’s off brand but has good reviews.
@jaymemccolgan said:
@NetflixSucks said:
Alright buy a dell c2100 then get around 100gb of ess ram from ebay or amazon. If not already installed. After that figure out. How much storage you need for me it around 20tb. My suggestion is to buy 3tb nas drives from either wd or hgst. Avoid seagate and other brands. They might fail. After that install freenas or linux server os with plex server and done. Also it already has gigabit ethernet. So no worries unless your going to transfer mass storage.What about graphics cards? Any recommendations?
It has one already. I don’t think your going to need one since plex realizes on cpu speed not gpu. .
I’ve been down both the prebuilt old server and custom build routes, both have their advantages over each other.
Prebuilt servers off eBay are absolutely untouchable when it comes to sheer bang for buck. The noise is typically barely tolerable, they consume shocking amounts of power and many have issues with large drive sizes limiting your scaleability.
I ended up building my own custom machine after I got lucky picking up an Areca 1880ix-24 for chump change. I went with a 4u 24 bay with managed fans, went with an old i7-2700K I had from a prior upgrade and initially went with 6 HGST 4TB NAS drives in a raid 6 plus 4 2TB DM001s from my old Lenovo in a separate raid 5. The OS is on it’s own SSD attached directly to the mobo SATAs along with a 1tb backup drive and a seperate SSD that’s dedicated purely to Plex’s data and transcoding. I went with Windows Home Server 2011.
It does the trick nicely and disk throughput is never an issue. I’ve not got enough CPU horsepower to transcode 4K HEVC yet but I intend on putting a 1050 in there to see if Plex will use it.
The best thing about this solution is scaleability, from my initial 6 drives, I’ve thrown in a further 3 more drives with room for another 11 yet. Power consumption is also a huge win with it pulling around a 3rd of the power of the old Lenovo at the socket regardless of the situation. It’s also significantly quieter which is a relief given that it has to live next to the TV at the moment.
On the downside, it took a lot of hunting to get some of the bits at a decent price and all told it took me about a year and £1000ish to get the build done (and it would have been significantly more if I hadn’t have gotten so lucky on the Areca).
Hardware raid is also starting to be a concern now, my main raid 6 is 36tb and modifications are typically a full day long affair. I’m guessing unraid/freenas would make a lot more sense here.
If I was to start again from scratch, I’d use a 4u 24bay with an expander backplane and a cheaper controller card to simplify things. Ryzen 7 would look extremely tempting assuming the software support was there.
Eitherway, it’s a fun process to build your own setup if you can afford it.
@Peter_W said:
96GB of ECC RAM sounds expensive. I assume that advise came from ZFS + dedupe without a cache disk? I would suggest in such case that a cache disk would be used and no dedupe. The small performance hit that remains would be OK imho.
You can get ecc ram for it. Online for cheap! I have a 2 r710s. I got ram for booth for 100$ each. It came with 96gb.
Thank you everyone! I think I’m going to go with building my own server. I’m going to try to shoot for a 2U shallow rack server. I don’t need a ton of storage because I already a Nas and not a ton of content (yet). I’ll be posting back as I start my search for equipment.
