Jump to content

ErrorNumber419

Member
  • Posts

    13
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Awards

This user doesn't have any awards

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Not Telling
  • Occupation
    Foundry things

System

  • CPU
    Intel Core i5-4670k @ 4.6Ghz
  • Motherboard
    Asus Sabertooth Z87
  • RAM
    16GB DDR3
  • GPU
    MSI GTX 760 4GB
  • Case
    NZXT Phantom 630
  • Storage
    ~16TB
  • PSU
    750 Watt EVGA Modular
  • Display(s)
    it changes
  • Cooling
    NH-D14
  • Keyboard
    K70 RGB
  • Mouse
    G700s
  • Sound
    5.1 Yamaha
  • Operating System
    Windows 8.1 / Xubuntu

ErrorNumber419's Achievements

  1. Back up your data ASAP. What brand HDD is it? I would suggest finding a diagnostic tool made by that company, made specifically for that brand of drives and scanning it with that. Could be nothing, but it could be something. I know WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and Hitachi all make their own diagnostic tools. That will give you a better idea where you stand.
  2. A lot of 2 and 3 TB drives are stacked 1TB platters, so the "not a single platter" argument isn't really something to worry about. WD black is a solid drive, buy the 3TB, you won't regret it... Unless some day you decide you should have gotten a 4TB...
  3. Less fans yes, but, the fans in a prebuilt NAS are generally smaller and louder. They also tend to die faster and are harder to replace. I'd say build your own so you have more expandability and functionality in the future. FreeNAS, and Unraid are both very popular free operating systems for a NAS environment. Or you can go for something more powerful such as an Windows or Ubuntu based OS. I would suggest keeping the 60GB SSD in mind, that way your stored files are always on their own drives, independent from your OS. The only reason I would go for a prebuilt system is if you are worried about the power bill difference. And we're only talking a few dollars a year, nothing major. edit: No matter which way you go, if you use efficient drives (I suggest something built for a NAS environment), your drives will spin down when not in use. Hell, even my WD blacks in my desktop spin down after a while.
  4. For a home media server, you probably wont be looking at server grade components. A happy medium would be something like a B85 TUF series board from Asus. Great validation and testing, great warranty, great fan control, and a good solid NIC to boot. My newer home server/ htps is a Z97 Sabertooth, Haswell Pentium around 3GHz can't remember exactly, 8GB of DDR3, a 500W PSU, and a pile of hard drives. Runs xbmc on top of xubuntu. Works as my home server and XBMC HTPC, does everything I ask it to.
  5. FreeNAS? Then something like a simple dual core Haswell Pentium will be fine, anything more powerful is pretty much useless and a waste of money. Unless you are going to use some of the software raid options built into FreeNAS I would use xubuntu or ubuntu server. More options, more expandability, hell you can run XBMC off of it and use it as a server at the same time. 16 GB is way overkill, but if you have it, use it i guess. Hard drives are up to you. What do you need for redundancy, reliability, capacity, and speed? Hard drive recommendations can be seen here. Raid recommendations can be seen here. Motherboard? Don't go crazy, just get something reliable with a good NIC and a good warranty. ECC memory compatibility is a big plus if you want to go down that road. No need for overclocking, in fact I would avoid it on a server. Get enough PCI-e slots for any graphics/sound/raid/network cards you think you'll need in the future. I'm a big fan of the TUF series of boards from Asus, you can't really go wrong with them. The thermal control on TUF boards is second to none and great for things like servers where you aren't going to be in the same room to make fan speed adjustments. Case? Something with decent ventilation and plenty of room for more drives, you'll want it later.
  6. If you are trying to do live transcoding for your four streams (plex), go with a quad core (i5 or similar). If you are looking to serve them up locally and you don't need to transcode them (xbmc), then a dual core will be fine. I ran a home server for years off of a 1.5ghz dual core AMD (HP N40L). Used it mainly for XBMC locally as well as serving files anywhere from 2 to 15GB to my four roommates also running XBMC. We never noticed a slow down off of that or the single gigabit connection. A good way to save system resources is to run a lightweight OS like xUbuntu or something similar. Linux can be tricky to set up but it is super reliable and light weight. It also plays nice with remote connections, ftp and samba, as well as being fairly secure. Windows Server is nice, but not quite as resource friendly. Nothing I mentioned requires very much ram, so don't feel like you have to stick a lot of money into huge amounts of that. 8GB was way more than enough for my system, it's not like file handling is very difficult. Even the official Plex website says not to really worry about ram.
  7. Honestly, just copy the data you have to where you want it to stay and use the libraries feature. Works great, pretty easy to set up. Remove the old location after you move your data and then change the new default location.
  8. I would suggest one or two mechanical drives for big data, and a 250GBish SSD for OS and maybe a few big programs like Adobe or whatever it is you're using for editing. It sounds like you are more concerned with having easy and reliable storage over real time redundancy and crazy performance. In that case I would agree, raid is probably not for you. So lets say you have a 250GB SSD, and a 1-2 TB working drive for active projects (WD Black or similar). Add onto that a 3-4 TB slower, less power hungry drive (WD Green/Red or similar) for archiving/backup (I prefer reds for their longevity but it depends on your usage and budget). Video takes up a lot of space, especially RAW video. Whatever your working drive is, I would get one double that size for your archive/backup. In an ideal world I would suggest an additional external solution for your backup/archive that is not in any way dependent on your primary system (such as an External HDD, home server, or NAS) but that my be out of your price range. Just remember, redundancy =/= backup. ALWAYS go for a true backup over redundancy every time.
  9. That much ram is WAY overkill for a plex server. I ran 4 streams simultaneously from my unbuntu based plex server, all of which were transcoding different 15GB 1080ps file to 4 devices at 4 different bitrates and I never went over 6GB of ram usage. Check plex's website, they also don't recommend crazy amounts of ram. But, if you need to do a lot of virtualization at the same time, I guess you could go with 32GB, personally, I'd say save the the money and stick it into storage or an add-on raid controller.
  10. Is there another USB 3.0 Header on your motherboard? It may use a different controller (AS Media vs Intel) and this may improve compatibility.
  11. Well, put it this way, for around $300 I just built my sister a full desktop with a higher end Pentium and a TUF series motherboard, and that included 1TB of storage. Go with a slightly cheaper case, a little cheaper motherboard, and a more reasonably sized power supply (430 W was a little overkill), and you have one hell of a plex server. Remember that it really won't use that much ram, and a reasonably fast dual core is more than enough (unless you plan on running more than one or two streams at a time, both of which which require transcoding). And any NAS you buy won't even run one trascoding stream reasonably well. By the time you buy a two or three bay NAS, you can easily buy a significantly better full system/server for the money which will wildly outperform the NAS in pretty every much every way possible. That and you don't have to worry about firmware supporting plex or it actually having enough CPU to do the job. You'll also get more that 2 bays worth of hard drive space.
  12. Grab a live CD of Gparted, should work just fine. A lot easier to use than Hiren and you get to keep your data. Available here.
×