Building a home media server

[Peanut253]

@mihawk90

Not to be rude at the people above, but seriously if you don’t know what a NAS is or does just frankly keep out of this trying to convince someone not to use one. Someone is asking how to build a system, not how to get off the idea of building one.

Sharing a hard drive from your Desktop is not the same as having a NAS.

Real the opening post. He isn’t necessarily asking how to build a system, but rather how to get a home media server up and running. A NAS, or building a new system for it, is just one possible way of accomplishing that goal.

I merely presented some available options. An existing desktop would work for a home media server and, after explaining what the pros and cons are, it is up to Ace2020 to weigh those pro’s and cons for their use case.

[quote=“Peanut253, post:28, topic:117673”]
Transcoding (CPU) does not affect gaming performance (GPU) very much so it should not be much of a bother really. And yes I did the benchmarks that demonstrate that is indeed the case[/quote]

[quote]

@mihawk90

Peanut253:
Transcoding (CPU) does not affect gaming performance (GPU) very much so it should not be much of a bother really.[/quote]

That is just wrong on so many levels. Anyone who ever streamed to Twitch or YouTube or you name it knows this.
By the way if you’re interested GamersNexus just did a Benchmark on this a few days ago.

You missed the second sentence. It was an important one.

Topic: Windows 10 Idle versus Load Performance on FX and Ryzen

Scroll down to the bottom to get all of the games. MLL has some MLL specific issues with Ryzen so read the disclaimer post for that chart. Here is a typical case example:

I actually did do benchmarks of actually encoding in the background while running the games. And no, there is very little difference between the “Idle” scores and the gaming while under CPU “load” tests.

Want to say I am wrong? You better have your own benchmarks.

As a caveat, streaming a game is not the same thing as background transcoding. Similar? Yes, but with some minor differences. The benchmarks I did are closer to the scenario envisioned (desktop used to stream separate media while gaming), and hence they carry more weight due to those minor differences.

@mihawk90

This is a good way to loose your data. ZFS only works if the drives are of the same capacity.

It depends on how much you care about the data. If it is just media that you literally have a BD copy of already, then it might be worth it to keep costs down.

And if you are going to be buying questionable hard drives, it should not be much of a bother to make sure they are the same size.

On an unrelated note, it is actually possible to use ZFS with heterogeneous disks somewhat efficiently by creating sub vdevs for each pool. The idea is similar to extending the RAID 10 concept additional layers.

@mihawk90

You forget that those are Motherboard and CPU in a package. And with those boards you can save a lot of running costs in the long run.
Also nobody cares if it “looks nice”, who said that…

So the issue is upfront costs vs long term for the dedicated motherboards. It might be better to pay the upfront cost or it might not and spread the costs out over time. And looks are always a factor.