Good used server for Plex and storage

[Misinthe]

Hey everyone, so I want to get a used server for a home NAS for storage and Plex. I was looking into the Dell R710 but I saw that they only accept HDD up to 2TB. Is there any equivalent that I can get cheap that will take at least 4TB? Thank you all for the suggestions! 

[phongle123]

22 minutes ago, Miguel552 said:

Hey everyone, so I want to get a used server for a home NAS for storage and Plex. I was looking into the Dell R710 but I saw that they only accept HDD up to 2TB. Is there any equivalent that I can get cheap that will take at least 4TB? Thank you all for the suggestions! 

You can probably buy something 8 years old on craigslist or a used site for cheap. You want a CPU with at least 2000 passmark. This will allow you to stream up to 10Mb/s across multiple users. 

You can read about it here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/

 

However, for a specific pre-built I cannot really specify any. Just find one that fits what you need and know that people are always throwing away long dated 6+ year old prebuilts for about 20-40$.

[Misinthe]

2 hours ago, phongle123 said:

-snip-

My question is how do I know which ones can handle more than 2TB HDDs. 

[JoostinOnline]

6 minutes ago, Miguel552 said:

My question is how do I know which ones can handle more than 2TB HDDs. 

Get an OEM machine and put to 2TB drives in it.  They shouldn't have trouble with 4TB anyway, but either way works.

 

Ignore the Passmark thing, it's incredibly flawed.  You need a quad core CPU.  You'll get really bad stuttering on a lot of stuff if you try to play at 1080p on a dual core, no matter the passmark score.  An i5-2400 will work great.  The R170 is a total waste of money though.  You're fine with 4GB of RAM.

 

I'd recommend you buy this with 4GB of RAM and a 160GB drive.  Throw out the old drive (or properly dispose of it) and get two of these.

[Misinthe]

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

-snip-

So, starting with, that's the same price for a dual, 4 core 8 thread xeon, 24GB Ram R710. Second, shouldn't I get Server rated Drives like WD Reds? Also, I thought for Plex you 1GB ram for every TB you want to use. And I want a system that takes Drives bigger than 2TB, since there's limited real estate. If I only have 6 slots and I populate with 2TB I only get 12TB total, and if I want any type of Raid, that would go down, if I can use bigger Drives, let's say 4TB, what would make it 24TB, which with redundancy, I can have 12YB but backed up. 

[JoostinOnline]

4 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

So, starting with, that's the same price for a dual, 4 core 8 thread xeon, 24GB Ram R710. Second, shouldn't I get Server rated Drives like WD Reds? Also, I thought for Plex you 1GB ram for every TB you want to use. And I want a system that takes Drives bigger than 2TB, since there's limited real estate. If I only have 6 slots and I populate with 2TB I only get 12TB total, and if I want any type of Raid, that would go down, if I can use bigger Drives, let's say 4TB, what would make it 24TB, which with redundancy, I can have 12YB but backed up. 

Are you trying to host every movie ever made? I can't imagine what kind of files you must be using if you need more than 4TB, but that's your business. You'll probably need SAS drives if you're using a server though. There only kind of RAID you'd use is RAID1. Anything else is impractical. 

 

That Optiplex shouldn't have trouble with 4TB drives (and they use SATA), but if you want an insane amount of storage it's not going to work for you. I'm pretty sure they only have four SATA ports. The number of files you have doesn't affect how much RAM you use. You'll probably use around 3GB total. 

 

This is my Plex server btw. I used RAID1 because it's also a backup server. 

[Misinthe]

5 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

-Snip-

I was thinking on using Raid 5,in case 1 drive fails there's parity.

 

According to this, it says "FreeNAS requires 8 GB of RAM for the base configuration. If you are using plugins and/or jails, 12 GB is a better starting point. There's a lot of advice about how RAM hungry ZFS is, how it requires massive amounts of RAM, an oft quoted number is 1GB RAM per TB of storage..." 

 

And which Optiplex are you talking about? The R710? Because I read that only accepts 2TB Drives as highest. 

[AshleyAshes]

11 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

So, starting with, that's the same price for a dual, 4 core 8 thread xeon, 24GB Ram R710. Second, shouldn't I get Server rated Drives like WD Reds? Also, I thought for Plex you 1GB ram for every TB you want to use. And I want a system that takes Drives bigger than 2TB, since there's limited real estate. If I only have 6 slots and I populate with 2TB I only get 12TB total, and if I want any type of Raid, that would go down, if I can use bigger Drives, let's say 4TB, what would make it 24TB, which with redundancy, I can have 12YB but backed up. 

You don't really have to go so overkill with a high wattage, high power, retired server just for media.

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

20 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

Hey everyone, so I want to get a used server for a home NAS for storage and Plex. I was looking into the Dell R710 but I saw that they only accept HDD up to 2TB. Is there any equivalent that I can get cheap that will take at least 4TB? Thank you all for the suggestions! 

the 2tb limit is only when using the perc 6i. If you put a h200 or h700 in you can put bigger drives in.

[Misinthe]

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

the 2tb limit is only when using the perc 6i. If you put a h200 or h700 in you can put bigger drives in.

That's what I needed. Thank you.

[jkirkcaldy]

So I have an R710, I'm only using 2TB drives as it's not my primary storage server. But. If you do decide to go with drives bigger than 2TB, don't use RAID 5 without first understanding the risks. Also, for Plex, you will likely have a better experience with gaming hardware than server hardware as to get a similar level of performance (for Plex) you will be looking at a lot more money.

 

My R710 runs all my web services and VMs but my plex server runs off a i7-3770 (which will outperform the r710 with dual xeons for a plex workload. and it's also more power efficient)

 

RAID 5 will work fine with whatever drive size you want, until a drive fails. Then the rebuild will take so long and put so much stress on the other drives that you are very likely to lose another drive during the rebuild process.

 

If you are just going to use the server as a media server for Plex, I wouldn't bother with hardware RAID. You will quickly outgrow your storage and if you have used hardware RAID then your options are more limited than using other methods.

 

I use FlexRAID - Transpared RAID for my plex server. It may not be the best option for you and there are other software solutions out there but a few pros and cons for T-RAID

 

PROS:

Shows as one big drive under one drive letter.

Drives are all NTFS meaning you can pull a single drive from the array and ready it on any computer without extra software.

You can set up multi drive parity - e.g. I can loose 2 drives before I start to lose data

If a drive fails and you can't rebuild from parity - you only lose the data on that drive, all other drives aren't affected.

you can mix different drive types, sizes and vendors - they are all pooled together to give you a total storage amount.

You can keep adding more drives later when your array is full

You can manage the array from a web browser.

It only spins up the drives it needs to access

 

CONS:

Speed - you are limited to the speed of the drive that you are currently writing to (you can set up landing drive, e.g. a ssd that acts as a write cache to speed things up)

UI - can be a bit clunky

if you don't set up sync properly you won't have any parity.

You can only add drives as big as your parity drive - If your parity drive is 1TB, you will only be able to use 1TB on your data drives. (you can swap your parity drives later to add more storage, but again it means buying a large drive with no storage gains)

Can't use any block level storage on the drive, so no iSCSI.

 

[AshleyAshes]

3 hours ago, jkirkcaldy said:

You can only add drives as big as your parity drive - If your parity drive is 1TB, you will only be able to use 1TB on your data drives. (you can swap your parity drives later to add more storage, but again it means buying a large drive with no storage gains)

That's not entirely true because you could recycle your old parity drive into a storage drive.

My FlexRAID for example has an 8TB parity drive, if I ever wanted to add 10TB drives I'd need to upgrade the parity drive to a 10TB as well.  So I'd probably buy two 10TB drives, one to be the new parity drive, the second to be the first 10TB storage drive, but once I upgrade the 8TB to 10TB, that leaves the 8TB drive ready to be repurposed for storage as well.  So I'd buy 20TB in drives and see a net gain of 18TB in terms of how much I can actually store on the machine itself.

[Misinthe]

On 4/25/2018 at 1:04 PM, jkirkcaldy said:

-snip-

That's very good info. So I want a Plex server but also a regular storage server for all my computers. Would the consumer grade still be better for that application? I want to unify my music, pictures and videos into 1. And then use the pool for my Plex. 

[Tsuki]

i just use my gaming computer as my plex server. have an extra hdd in it just for my plex media. ive never had any issues

[Razor Blade]

I went the route of getting an IBM M1015 card and cross flashing it.

 

https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/

 

Also if you go this route, pick yourself up a pair of right angle 36 pin SFF-8087 to straight 36 pin SFF-8087 SAS cables so you can connect the backplane to the new card. The conversion will allow you to pass the drives through to FreeNAS. That card can handle drives up to 8TB.