OS recommendations for media server

[Wikedeye]

I picked up a dell studio xps form the salvage pile at work.  It has a 990x and 32 gb of ram and works just fine, its just been replaced by a newer system.  i am thinking of using at home for a NAS/Media Server.  I am just curious what OS would be the best for my needs.  I want something easy to use, but not limited.  I have access to windows server, but I am leaning more towards a linux distro.  I have some experience with linux, but I am not a daily user, so there would be a bit of a learning curve.

[spark12072001]

I would suggest FreeNas with the Plex media server plugin. It works perfectly.

[Heffe_The_Boss]

No matter what OS you pick, with that much ram.. make sure to setup a ramdisk (10-16gb) for plex transcoding. It'll save your SSD from a ton of temp writing... and its lighting quick compared to an old mechanical drive.

 

Plex. RamDisk. Any OS.

 

In business.

 

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Heffe_The_Boss said:

No matter what OS you pick, with that much ram.. make sure to setup a ramdisk (10-16gb) for plex transcoding. It'll save your SSD from a ton of temp writing... and its lighting quick compared to an old mechanical drive.

 

Plex. RamDisk. Any OS.

 

In business.

 

Personally I'd suggest that the extra RAM would be better used elsewhere. I wouldn't be worried about the Plex Cache living on an SSD, assuming it's a decent modern SSD, and not a 1st generation one.

[Wikedeye]

2 hours ago, spark12072001 said:

I would suggest FreeNas with the Plex media server plugin. It works perfectly.

Does FreeNas still give me an actual OS that can be used for other applications, or is it somewhat stripped down.

[Heffe_The_Boss]

52 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I wouldn't be worried about the Plex Cache living on an SSD, assuming it's a decent modern SSD, and not a 1st generation one.

 

It depends on how heavily you transcode, I have a list of 15 or so users and I'm constantly serving a few users at a time... That is tons of tiny files being created/deleted at the same time.

 

 

 

 

[dalekphalm]

13 minutes ago, Wikedeye said:

Does FreeNas still give me an actual OS that can be used for other applications, or is it somewhat stripped down.

FreeNAS is 100% a Server OS. There is no "desktop".

 

If you plug a monitor into the physical server running FreeNAS, you'll see white text on a black screen, with some configuration options and a command line.

 

You interact with FreeNAS through the Web GUI 99% of the time.

 

Through here, you can do a number of things, including creating Virtual Machines (in FreeNAS 11 anyway). So through a virtual machine, you could run Linux or Windows or some other Desktop OS to run applications.

 

But FreeNAS also has built-in support for a number of plugins, that provide "applications" for specific things. Plex is one of those plugins.

[Wikedeye]

So what is the benefit of FreeNas over something like Ubuntu?

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Wikedeye said:

So what is the benefit of FreeNas over something like Ubuntu?

That highly depends on what you want to use the system for.

 

Ubuntu is either a Desktop OS, or a Server OS, depending on which version you download (And granted, you can run the Desktop version as a server).

 

The benefits of Ubuntu is you have a Desktop GUI, and it's a "General Purpose" OS, with many Linux compatible applications, web browsers, etc. You can, in effect, use Ubuntu the same way that you would a Windows computer.

 

However, that comes at a cost: Overhead. When you run a server like FreeNAS, a Desktop GUI is a waste of memory and processing power.

 

FreeNAS has very low overhead. The minimum requirements to run the OS are fairly small. It also has built-in native ZFS support (Linux has ZFS support, but it's not native, it's something you need to install and then manage, usually through a command line terminal interface).

 

FreeNAS also has a built in Web GUI interface, which means you can manage the entire server from a web browser on your regular computer (laptop, gaming desktop, etc).

 

FreeNAS is built more as an "Appliance" in the sense that the UI is very refined, and all of the basic things you would do are easily accessible over the Web GUI. With Ubuntu, there's no built in Web GUI. So you have to remote onto the computer (either through Terminal via SSH, or through a remote desktop GUI application) to make changes.

 

So it entirely depends on what you want out of the system.

[Wikedeye]

Thanks for the replies.  I will read up on it and get a better grip on what I want to actually do with this machine.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Wikedeye said:

Thanks for the replies.  I will read up on it and get a better grip on what I want to actually do with this machine.

Yep, I'd recommend reading some comparison articles (FreeNAS vs Ubuntu, for example). There are lots of similarities and lots of differences.

 

I personally run FreeNAS, but inside a VM (My base server runs ESXi, and runs a FreeNAS VM and 3 Windows VM's, with expansion room to run a Linux VM if needed).

 

If you need a file server (lots of HDD's into a big "volume"), I prefer FreeNAS, as it's easier to get setup for that purpose, over Ubuntu, and ZFS (if properly planned for), has a lot of benefits over Linux MDADM RAID.

[paddy-stone]

Going off your first post OP, freenas would be the recommended application IMO. However if you wanted a server/NAS/desktop to stream media from and to actually watch media from, then a desktop linux distro would be the best IMO.

How would you want to load media ONTO the disks? would you want to use a separate PC to either download the media and then transfer to the server? would you want to use a separate PC to download the media to the server through an interface like JDownloader - so in other words jdownloader would be running on the PC, but the download disk is set to your servers IP address eg \\192\168\1\49\downloads\temp ?  or use something like torrent client in freenas?

 

I personally use jdownloader from my PC, it's IMO simpler and I can monitor the downloads, it also auto unpacks rar files, you can also set the unpack folder etc so that you don't have to then rearrange any media if you don't want to. Personally though I use file explorer to check my files and rearrange them as needed manually, because they're already on the server it takes little to no time to move them elsewhere on the server. The only downside is that you need your PC to be on at the same time, so if you have a slower internet connection or you want to just go out and have it download stuff for you then a torrent client would be more suited I think. I haven't explored all the options though, there could be a better way that I don't know about, so this is only MY experience and usage.

 

It all sounds much harder than it actually is, once you get used to it there is nothing to it really, just remember to have backups of stuff you really value and wouldn't want to lose.