Cost effective NAS/Backup Server/Web Server

[Slahit]

Hi LTT community!

 

I'm struggling deciding what to do about an home server with different purposes.

The main purpose of the system I want to build / buy is to serve as a remote backup server in sync with my other systems (probably with Nextcloud).

A large hdd would be used as a media/download bucket for torrent and (maybe) streaming content with PLEX (max 1 4k or 2 FHD streams).

Last I would like to use it as a light game server (Minecraft) but mostly as a web server with low traffic.

My budget is very limited and can't go over 300€ (without disks). I live in Italy.

 

I tought of a different solutions:

- Buy a prebuilt Synology or QNAP 4 bay system.

- A very low power system based on ASRock J4105-ITX (4 sata ports), 4gb ddr4L and a decent but cheap PSU 80+. The complete system, case excluded costs about 160€ more or less.

- A system based on the recent pentiums with hyper-threading (g4560, g4600) and a cheap board with 4 sata ports. I suspect that power cost would be much higher than the j4105 system.

- Gen8 Microserver with Pentium 1600T and 4gb of ecc ddr4 (they are now sadly out of stock).

- Buy a used server. I found mostly dual cpu systems and their cost of power is so high that the cost of running them for a year could cover the cost of a better system.

 

Thanks a lot for your attention!

[tikker]

I doubt a Synology box would be powerful enough to host a server properly, but would work fine for the other services.

[Jarsky]

I wouldn't call minecraft "light"...depends on how modded you want it to be, but it used to use a tonne of resource on my old dual Xeon E5540 (8C/16T) server....

If you want to run Plex, If you want to do 4K streams with transcoding its going to require a modern CPU (that benches above 8000) - not a SoC like that cpu/board that you posted. 

 

ideally to support all of that, you'd want to look at a system built around a Ryzen 5 2400G or an Intel i5 8400

 

Looks like you'd be struggling to get it built for less than €400

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 2400G 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor  (€143.89 @ Alternate Italia) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350-Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€76.98 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: G.Skill - Value 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  (€79.53 @ Amazon Italia) 
Case: Cooler Master - Force 500 ATX Mid Tower Case  (€41.66 @ Amazon Italia) 
Power Supply: be quiet! - System Power 8 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  (€54.49 @ Amazon Italia) 
Total: €396.55
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-18 19:40 CEST+0200

 

 

If you were to direct stream (rather than plex) or use lower content like 720p/1080p then the solutions you mentioned may work, but you probably still wouldn't have the power to decently run a minecraft server on top of everything else you want to do, you'd just be overcommitting the cores too much and you probably won't have the memory. 

[Slahit]

1 minute ago, Jarsky said:

I wouldn't call minecraft "light"...depends on how modded you want it to be, but it used to use a tonne of resource on my old dual Xeon E5540 (8C/16T) server....

If you want to run Plex, If you want to do 4K streams with transcoding its going to require a modern CPU (that benches above 8000) - not a SoC like that cpu/board that you posted. 

 

ideally to support all of that, you'd want to look at a system built around a Ryzen 5 2400G or an Intel i5 8400

 

Looks like you'd be struggling to get it built for less than €400

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 2400G 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor  (€143.89 @ Alternate Italia) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350-Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€76.98 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: G.Skill - Value 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  (€79.53 @ Amazon Italia) 
Case: Cooler Master - Force 500 ATX Mid Tower Case  (€41.66 @ Amazon Italia) 
Power Supply: be quiet! - System Power 8 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  (€54.49 @ Amazon Italia) 
Total: €396.55
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-18 19:40 CEST+0200

 

 

If you were to direct stream (rather than plex) then you could possibly use a SoC like that one you listed, but I doubt it would have the power to decently run a minecraft server...

You are right about the minecraft server, I know that a modded one is really heavy.

I can sacrifice using the system as a PLEX server, since it seems that it requires powerfull hardware. Can you reccomend any of the other systems?

I care a lot about power efficiency, since I want the machine to be on 24/7, and the Ryzen 5 doesn't seem to be so so cheap to mantain powered up.

[Jarsky]

12 minutes ago, Slahit said:

You are right about the minecraft server, I know that a modded one is really heavy.

I can sacrifice using the system as a PLEX server, since it seems that it requires powerfull hardware. Can you reccomend any of the other systems?

I care a lot about power efficiency, since I want the machine to be on 24/7, and the Ryzen 5 doesn't seem to be so so cheap to mantain powered up.

If you ran the Ryzen @ 100% 24/7, then you're using about 80kWh - in NZ thats about $11/month.

Modern CPU's have frequency step down, so when its idle, its consuming about 30Watts which is about 20kWh...around $3/month

So if you consider its transcoding frequently then maybe i'd be looking at about $5-7/month....pretty cheap (price obviously depends on kWh in your country)

 

You can run Plex on less hardware, and you can run it in a container on the Synology/QNAP, but as I said you would be limited in your quality. 

[Slahit]

Thanks a lot for your really valuable opinion Jarsky, you gave me a lot of informations I originally didn't have!

 

For now i think that i can sacrifice using PLEX but what i need for sure is a stable backup system. As I wrote in my first post, the real priority is a backup system and gameservers or PLEX are not my priority.

Will I be ok with the j4105 system using it only for backup, downloading and light traffic web server applications? Or do you think that a system with ECC should be kind of mandatory for data safety? I found an interesting ASRock E3V5 WS motherboard that doesn't break the bank but supports ECC memory, has an Intel LAN and 6 SATA ports (This probably is pretty good for freenas).

[Slahit]

Thanks to @Jarsky and @tikker I think I'm starting to make my mind.

I think I can start building a FreeNas system like that, sacrificing 4k PLEX streaming for now:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Pentium G4600 3.6GHz Dual-Core Processor  (€60.90 @ Amazon Italia)
Motherboard: ASRock - E3V5 WS ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  (€120.30 @ Amazon Italia)
Memory: Kingston - ValueRAM 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  (€54.99 @ Amazon Italia)
Power Supply: XFX - XT 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  (€42.49 @ Amazon Italia)
Total: €278.68
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-21 10:47 CEST+0200

 

If you guys have other suggestions feel free to share and thanks again for your valuable opinions!

[Pyramiden]

If you could find a Gen8 (for example second hand), go for it! Order a Xeon E3-1265L/1260L and you will have a fast and power efficient home server.

However, it does not use DDR4. It is rather picky and needs DDR3 ECC UDIMM memory.

[Slahit]

3 hours ago, Pyramiden said:

If you could find a Gen8 (for example second hand), go for it! Order a Xeon E3-1265L/1260L and you will have a fast and power efficient home server.

However, it does not use DDR4. It is rather picky and needs DDR3 ECC UDIMM memory.

Thanks for the suggetsion @Pyramiden but for some reason I can't find a Gen8 with the G1610T for less than 450€, that's really a lot!
I'm now considering buying a used server with a single (for power consumption) E3-1200 series processor (even if v1). I've found some with 8GB of ECC DDR3 and sometimes a couple of HDDs. They support also multiple LANs and sometimes also remote management. They come with a decent rack case too (I have one that is of an old desktop, unecessary big).
They seems pretty good for experimenting with VMs and remote management without costing me too much.
 

What do you guys think about buying this kind of stuff used?

[Pyramiden]

Their prices went through the roof with the introduction of the Gen10... Unfortunately the Gen10 is way worse for server purposes, since it does not have iLO, and you can't swap the processors...

I don't have a lot of experience with buying whole servers second hand. I did buy a Xeon E3-1265L, a Xeon X3470, a HP P410 and a HP P420 second hand and they have all been functioning fine.