Building a new family FreeNAS Plex Server during quarantine and looking for some feedback. Most searches on “latest” builds pull up articles/posts that are reusing old-PC parts, are four to five years old, or are building 100TB behemoths. Not looking to skimp on price but not looking to break the bank either.
Looking to do 2-5 simultaneous streams of some mixture of 1080 and 4K.
CPU - Intel Xeon E-2146G - 3.5GHz 6 Core 12M Cache Coffee Lake with “Quick Sync video” MOBO - ASUS WS C246 PRO ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1151 Intel C246 RAM - 2 x Crucial 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR4 2666 (PC4 21300) Server Memory Model CT16G4RFD4266 CPU Cooler - Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 120 AIO CPU Liquid Cooler, White Led Pump, FEP Tubing, 120mm Air Balance MF, Dual Dissipation Technology Case - Antec P100 PS - Seasonic Gold 750W Disks - 8 x 6TB WD Red Spinners
What are your thoughts on CPU/MOBO combo and some input on what type of value-add I’d get by adding a GPU as well as if maxing out the RAM to 64GB is worth it.
I’m the type that likes to build it once and not mess with it for years outside of simple sw upgrades. I’ve got over 750 DVD/BluRay titles in current FreeNAS Plex server but looking to start adding 4K, therefore, excuse to build a new server.
Looks good, but if possible, use RAID (not Level 0 though if you want redundancy), it increases your performance, adds redundancy at a little less disk space
Yes, using FreeNAS RAID-Z2 (RAID-6) will give me around 28TB and can lose 2 drives without data loss. Seems like overkill just for video files but it took years ripping all that video.
Just now looking at 4K and it seems like best practice is to store two versions, 4K and 1080 with the 1080 transcoded for lower bitrates.
CPU - Intel Xeon E-2246G Coffee Lake 3.6-4.8 GHz 6-Core MOBO - Gigabyte C246-WU4 ATX MB LGA 1151 Intel C246 RAM - 4 x Kingston KSM26ED8/16ME Server Premier - DDR4-16 GB - DIMM 288-pin - 2666 MHz / PC4-21300 CPU Cooler - CORSAIR HYDRO SERIES H60 AIO Liquid CPU Coole Boot Drive - Western Digital WD BLACK SN750 NVMe M.2 2280 250GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4
Found a newer CPU for a few bucks more along with a motherboard supporting 10 SATA. Added an M.2 drive for FreeNAS OS. Overkill on this but read about some issues using a thumb drive. Cost and performance of M.2 drive seems reasonable.
Loaded up with 64GB of RAM and plan on creating a RAM disk for Plex temp files.
I’m getting ready to do a similar build. Were you able to get your setup working? Did you end up running FreeNAS and Plex on the same box? If you were doing it over again, do you have anything you’d change?
I’ve got the parts and have assembled it. So far I’m very pleased with it. Working on transferring data from older Plex server. I do plan on running Plex on it.
As for any changes I would make, well, nothing comes to mind at this point. I’ll provide updates as I progress.
Sure. I actually forgot about this thread and thought about my own Plex Server, a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 1.5TB USB Hard drive attached, though it’s prior use was as backup for my 512GB SSD in my main Computer, and was more or less a test server as it was my first one, but I never got around upgrading it. Now as my main Computer slowly turns into a workstation and I’m running out of disk space, I used my old CPU (2C HT iGPU and Mobo + 16Gigs of DDR3 no ECC) in an even older case still lying around for some reason (you remember the ribbon-cable era? Yeah, that old) to build a FreeNas Server. Currently testing Performance and everything on an old MicroSD that I had to spare because it had a critical data corruption once, shame on me (I’m sorry), but there’s really not much to lose with one test video. Currently I’m refurbishing the 2 old drives of the MyCloud in my basement as it has an awful performance, User Management is impossible and it sometimes just forgets that it’s a NAS and not some decoration with blue LEDs (soft reset or their App just refusing to work). My Mobo got 4 SATA ports, 2 for those 2 TB drives, another 2 are probably going to be 4 TB each, both mirrored, and in the far future all 4 TB, which means instead of 6 TB (4+p+2+p) mirrored it’s 12 TB + parity (4+4+4+p), doubling the capacity.
Where did you get the Xeon E-2246G? I am looking to build a very similar server.
So far Provantage is the best price I found on the CPU, and mobo on amazon.
@teradafam what is your boot drive and/or what do you recommend? I use a Lexar 128G USB but sometimes when it boots it tells me the freenas-boot (zfs pool) couldn’t be mounted and I usually need to hard reboot the machine (screwdriver on the two pins) because the error results in a kernel panic. And after the reboot it works again, at least most of the time. The reinstall is a real hassle as this means rewiring everything because I only have one monitor, so I’d prefer using a drive with less I/O errors (which is I believe the reason for the panic).
Boot Drive - Western Digital WD BLACK SN750 NVMe M.2 2280 250GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4
My previous two builds I used USB and never had any issues with it but have recently seen posts that USB is not being recommended. So for that reason and also for performance I went the M.2 route.
Oh well, my Mobo doesn’t have a M.2 slot (chipset is A68MD) and it only has 4 SATA ports, taken up by storage (RAID 5, software controlled) and I don’t really wanna give away the only PCIe x16 port I have just for RAID, because I might want to add a graphics card at some point. Maybe splitting it would be the solution… Or Network boot? But that would require another server and I don’t know if the current Pi3 would be too happy about that. Any thoughts on this?
Hello, new to the forum, but just a thought if you’re using freenas with a USB3 stick, the 2nd rev is supposed to be less problematic. Also, perhaps invest in a smaller stick, such as a 32Gb or 64Gb, and then spend the extra on quality? I do sympathise about lack of SATA ports and it’s the reason why USB sticks are preferred. Like you say, you could get an HBA controller and put it in your PCI slot, but that restricts graphics l. Mind you, from my understanding freenas can’t make use of GPU encoding yet, though I welcome being corrected.
Another note is reinstall on two mirrored USB sticks perhaps?
Ah, it’s now been a month and as it turned out after a few more panics it now runs stable for a little more than 2 weeks and I even rebooted it several times and it runs perfectly fine. I still have no clue on what or why it happened, and maybe the freenas system also magically repairs itself, but it’s working perfectly fine right now. Thanks for all your help. And I really enjoy using Plex on this server as this one is able to trancode stuff, unlike the Pi…
