Home server advice

[Treboren]

Greetings LTT forum, it's been a while. 

 

I've recently gotten back into PC gaming and would like a new home server for file storage/ running some game servers (Minecraft) and perhaps a something along the lines of plex. 

 

I'm sure this is a common request so perhaps if you have no specific recommendations you can point me towards some useful recourses. 

 

My hardware knowledge is very out of date and so to sanity check currently I'm probably going to purchase a cheap second hand pc to use. There's a cheap desktop I've found on marketplace for £90 with a Ryzen 5 2400G which I'm assuming would be fine for my needs? Add a little more ram, a few hard drives bish bash bosh server done? 

 

Cheers for reading.

[johnt]

I've over simplified my server needs. I am not sure about Minecraft, but I am able to put Plex, Homebridge, and use the device mirroring in Windows 11 for some basic level of redundancy for data instead of RAID. This basically puts me in RAID1 configuration and I need two drives instead of one for each group, but I wasn't willing to give up the performance with RAID5 or 6 (or the extreme over complication). I am able to share this with my MacBook (phone and tablet too) and gaming PC over the network. So it's basically acting as a very simple NAS too. I'm doing this all with Windows 11 on an i5-12400. The motherboard I purchased has 2.5 Gbps (some ASUS Prime board that went on sale to $100 on Black Friday 2022) so transfer speeds have been impressive. The CPU was the most expensive part unfortunately. It was just lower quantities back then. I used left over DDR4 memory and a cheap M2 drive for OS.

 

Although, as I understand it, Windows 11 has Storage Spaces that can handle multiple types of RAID. The RAID recovery methods were significantly less clear if there is a problem, so I decided against that. Volume mirroring is in the Disk Management screen. There is almost no recovery process if one drive fails... the other drive keeps working like normal. It's a very attractive option for simple home use for tax documents, old MP3s, pictures, movies, and kids homework.

 

I think you could get away with a Ryzen 2400G for most of your needs... not sure about Plex transcoding though. I use Apple TV to access my Plex library so there is not much demand for CPU usage. Transcoding is a bit of a bear if you are going to watch in browser or change resolution on the fly. It's great Plex can do this but I have no need for it. There is some CPU demand from audio encoding/decoding because the wonderful Apple TV doesn't support lossless audio passthrough smh but that's another problem.

 

There are other operating systems you can get for your server, like TrusNAS, Unraid (not free), CasaOS, and others. But there is a learning curve with all of them. So far I haven't seen anything from these NAS solutions that is any better or different than Windows for my personal needs. I just don't have the budget for 4+ drives that are hundreds of dollars a piece like 14 or 22 TB drives. I also don't have that much junk lol

 

I am sure the purists will have a lot of heart ache from my practices and recommendations.

[dhkatz]

If you want to run Plex then you are better off going with an Intel CPU for transcoding.

 

Game servers are typically more reliant on more powerful per thread performance, so you'd also be better off with higher clocked but less cores than just a ton of cores. For Minecraft you won't need anything too powerful but keep in mind if you ever want to run more CPU intensive game servers.

 

Also use an NVMe drive if you can for boot. You can also put your game servers on it if you get a 2 TB one (Minecraft worlds can get a bit large). Then put your media library on HDDs in some form a raid configuration.

 

You don't have to go crazy with OS choice. My own server that's at almost 256 TB is just running plain old Ubuntu server with my drives running in ZFS raidz1.

[Bersella AI]

The Ryzen 2400G processor would be inferior to more recent models due to compromised single-threaded performance, in Minecraft hosting.

Also, how much was your budget? Minecraft prefers a faster, and thus pricier processor to work with. The Core i5-12400 (non-F) would be a good start for such scenarios, as well as Plex transcoding.

[Mr.Zixxel]

I just want to emphasize a big minus with using Windows for your Plex Server, and that is that hardware transcoding with HDR tone mapping requires a graphics card from Nvidia, if you want to use, for example, Intel QuickSync, I recommend you to run Linux instead. However, if you will never transcode HDR to SDR, you can ignore what I wrote.

[Treboren]

Hey everyone. Thanks for all your replies. 

 

I ended up implementing quite a few of the suggestions. 

 

Managed to get an old dell with a i5 8500, 16GB Ram, 256GB Nvme, and a 1TB Hdd for £120 which I think was a decent price. It's been rock solid for me and my friends game servers and going to set up jellyfin next.

 

Been really enjoying tinkering with is, experimenting with unraid might switch when my free trial ends.

 

Thanks again.