Raspberry Pi vs Old PC for NAS

[Jxck]

So I've got two choices to use a RPi 2 or a old HP pc of mine for a plex/nas server for old home videos totallying around 800gb if like to do a mirror raid for redundancy. I'd use WD reds for either one. If I did the pc I would only turn it on when needed as I don't need it that offen(Wake on LAN). What do you guys think I should do I realize PC would be much better for plex transcoding.  

[Crunchy Dragon]

I wouldn't use a Raspberry Pi for much, especially a Pi 2

[NelizMastr]

6 hours ago, Jxck said:

So I've got two choices to use a RPi 2 or a old HP pc of mine for a plex/nas server for old home videos totallying around 800gb if like to do a mirror raid for redundancy. I'd use WD reds for either one. If I did the pc I would only turn it on when needed as I don't need it that offen(Wake on LAN). What do you guys think I should do I realize PC would be much better for plex transcoding.  

What kind of HP are we talking about, its specifications would be appreciated.

 

Without any details, the only certainty is that the RPi will use less power, but its 100mbps network connection will slow your network transfers down to 10MB/s. It's not powerful enough for transcoding or fully saturating a gigabit link anyway.

[Jxck]

It's fairly old 11 years HP a1540n Specs linked. I have modified it the front otherwise the same but no storage device. If I chose the pc I will put a Hard drive hot swap cage in it and use a SSD for OS. Network speed is not concerning really because I already got one good stream working from raspberry pi for plex which is all I need. Now with this what do you think?

[noodle with crab]

Rpi only have a 100Mbit Ethernet Port - slower than USB2.0.

Don't use it as your NAS server.

You can easily extend your old PC with a Gbps NIC with the PCIe x16 port.

 

[Pixel5]

use the pi, the old PC has like no power and also a slow network interface.

 

your pi will make less trouble but the performance will also not be great.

[Jxck]

I believe I'm gonna use a Rock64 should work good for what i need 1Gig Ethernet and 4GB of ram much better than RP3

[Dreded]

what are you using as the front end? how do you get your videos(unsure of forum rules so be vague if needed) I myself get all video from a newspaper and everything is in h.264 and my front end is a Roku3/fire tv which plays EVERYTHING in 1080p without any transcoding even Bluray remuxes(fire tv is better than roku at remux) so literally any computer that can supply up to 3MB/s transfer over the network will do(for our purposes literally anything you could think of can do this) however if you would like to be able to transcode 1 1080p media stream into a lower format then neither the RPI or the athlon will be able to do it.. if you want this functionality I would suggest buying a cheap AIO motherboard cpu that has a passmark score of 2000 or greater... like this one https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138448&cm_re=embedded-_-13-138-448-_-Product that has a passmark score of 2500(cheaper in US newegg if thats an option but not by much) and that will run something like unraid FANTASTICALLY but you would need to find some used DDR3 ram to compliment the cheap build(quick search on CL lots for like $20)

 

However if all you want to do is serve files(your plex front end supports the format you have stored on the NAS natively and might only need to transcode audio) then the athlon would do fine but you might want to upgrade the NIC(ethernet controller) to 1Gb(go to a used shop and buy and old intel PCI card for $10) I think(but am not 100% sure) the RPi 2 would also support this however in my experience the effort in getting external HD's to play nice with the RPi is not worth the hassle.

[jj9987]

I wouldn't use Raspberry Pi. It has 100 Mbps Ethernet port and it shares on-board bandwidth with USB 2.0 ports so you will be really heavily bottlenecked by IO performance of the Pi. SD card is not a wise option for storage due to rather bad durability (does not endure a lot of write cycles).

[Dittogod]

I wouldn't use a Rasberry Pi, it's just not designed for such work. 

 

Like what @jj9987 said, the IO would cause some serious bottlenecking.