Windows does NONE of the data integrity checks that FreeNas does, you're desktop will be majorly slowed down any time someone decides to plex stream any of the video off the box, you'd have to keep your desktop on all the time, Windows is not nearly as easy to setup for these kinds of things (considering you literally install a pre-configured plugin for FreeNas to have it serve as a media streaming box), etc;
I have no doubt you are right. However $900 to shuffle a few movies around the home sounds retarded.
Dell is asking $150 bucks for this. How is making a $900 NAS better than this for shuffling some movies around the home?
Throw in a couple HDDs and you;re well under budget
You have to choose between 1 drive redunancy (which means only 1 hard drive's worth of space) or no redunancy and you can lose all of your data with no means for recovery without sending the drive off to be professionally recovered (expensive), its severely under-powered so it will not be able to do many if any concurrent plex streams, WD My Clouds are notoriously under-powered and can't saturate a gigabit connection, the My Cloud software kinda blows from what I've heard, it does NO data corruption prevention, it has no avenue for upgrading, drives run HOT in those enclosures, etc;
It's not even that much cheaper if you want to get 10TB of storage and a single drive of redundancy. You'd want slower spinning hard drives since the faster ones will run hotter, so you would rationally go for 10TB WD Red's, which are $380 a pop and you'd want two.
Two of those and a WD My Cloud is approching the cost of a FreeNas system, and the FreeNas system can:
- Be expanded
- Has data Curruption prevention
- Can do multiple concurrent plex streams
- Can do multi-gigabit connections if you wish
- Can host VMs
- Can be a game server
- Can do 2 or even 3 drive redunancy
- Etc, Etc, Etc,
For $919, your WD My Cloud can do Nothing listed above, and has 2TB less space.
To each their own.
@Ace2020boyd
Overkill all over the place. Just share a HDD over your network and be done with it. Save the cash for something more productive than shuffling movies around the home.
If you were to open this up to the internet and have multiple trusted users access this content then I would say put down some cash. That's not the case here. Inshallah.
You can attach a USB drive to your router and if you want to share stuff across the internet, just do it over password protected http.
If the op wants transcoding, he'll either need the CPU or will need to transcode on the desktop/workstation and keep stored copies on the fileserver - maybe op can script that.
I haven't looked into it but I do have a AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case and Asus M4a87TD EVO ATX Motherboard Some older hardware laying around to get started if possible to maybe keep the cost down. Thoughts?
The motherboard does support DDR3 2000(O.C.)/1600/1333/1066 ECC,Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory which i'm curious if it is possible with these parts upgrading down the line for a better cpu, mobo and mem later.
Stick 16GB of ram in there along with the hard drives and your good to go. It won't be the most power efficient NAS, but it'll get the job done. ECC memory is "nice to have" but not "do or die" with ZFS:
Then grab the hard drives (I assume you have a power supply? If not, then grab the unit I put in my PcParts list above).
The laziest and cheapest option is to use your existing desktop PC. Just add a hard disk and leave it always on. An 8TB HD is like $200. 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.
The second cheapest option is to get any parts you have lying around, buy some questionable hard drives, stick them in a case and hope for the best. This is what I did and ended up with 10.5 TB usable for $400. Questionable reliability but that is countered using ZFS and RAIDZ-2. For non-mission critical data, it's fine.
The issue with that Phenom II X6 is that it does not have the AVX instruction set which is heavily utilized when transcoding. That means it could probably handle 1 stream easily, but might start stuttering at 2 or 3 simultaneous transcodes depending upon the quality settings. It should be fine to use as long as you configure the software to disallow more than 2 transcoding instances at any one time.
The third cheapest, is to make sure those drives are new which bumps the cost up to ~$900-1k. Yeah...
The most expensive option for a home setup is new core components (with ECC RAM) + new HDDs, or specially designed ones like buying those ITX motherboards that cost $200-$400 just for the board itself and to care that it "looks nice." o_O That comes out to what, 1.5k-2k for NASFeratu?
That makes sense to run a home business out of, but ripping BDs and streaming? It's lazier to just leave a desktop PC always on in the corner.
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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.
I didn't really want to comment on any of it, but I kind of have to...
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.
This is a good way to loose your data. ZFS only works if the drives are of the same capacity.
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...
PS: I took the liberty and moved the topic to build a PC and tagged it 
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Thanks for moving it
@mihawk90 what are your thoughts on using some of the old parts laying around. Also, the difference with say the Synology NAS Which I'm guessing are just similar to a build but prebuilt.
As long as it's not the HDD's it's perfectly fine. Depends on the parts though. If you have some older CPU it might be a problem with encoding multiple streams, missing instruction sets and/or just slow speed, you can test it beforehand if you already have them and if it works fine, if not you can still buy stuff.
I wouldn't use used HDDs if you can avoid it, never know what they have endured already. ZFS is fine if a drive fails, but since you need equally sized disks in the first place... might as well get new ones.
I have never used a synology NAS myself, but we had a QNAP (I think?) at a place I used to work and the system is pretty locked down. If there are apps you can install that do whatever you want it's fine, but if you want to do more customization you're going to need to jump through some hoops to "unlock" the underlying OS since they are typically rather locked down for security purposes.
And yes, they are just regular PC parts in the end, but watch out as for most of those if you just replace the RAM you're technically voiding the warranty.
You can also lookup the Thecus NAS' that wendell reviewed a while ago, he was pretty impressed with it. Though in either case I don't know how well they encode, depends on the board they are using. Some are just using dual-core atoms, some the same 8-core Atom mentioned above, some use Celerons... pretty much just look up what hardware they actually use.
On the bright side if something breaks you have a warranty to work with, so that's nice I guess.
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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.
You missed the second sentence. It was an important one.
Topic: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/windows-10-idle-versus-load-performance-on-fx-and-ryzen/117278
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.
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.
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.
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That heavily depends on the CPU you're using though. Do the same with a 7700k and that already struggles, let alone a weaker CPU. Watch the GamersNexus benchmark for it from a few days ago (can't link it since YouTube is blocked at where I am currently).
And I'm aware transcoding is slightly different from game streaming, since most of the load is the encoder itself though it's at least comparable.
Exactly what I was saying all along.
This is in direct conflict to the results I posted above. Switching from an FX 8350 throttled @ 3.4 Ghz to Ryzen 1700 OC'd @ 3.7 Ghz did not yield significantly better or worse performance under the above chart.
Under Win 10, in any game that is GPU bound, or nearly so, there will not be a significant difference in avg FPS while under CPU load. The benchmarks I did prove that. They don't suggest it. They prove it. And it actually also makes sense if you stop and think about it.
I watched the GamerxNexus videos before my first post in this thread. Why do you think that I do not believe their results contradict mine?
Then you should be fine I my self just use a regulator computer no raid no ECC ram, but I am only have one stream going at the same time and I don't use FreeNas. I have been using Plex for about two years.
It would definitely be new drives never know where used ones have been.
I also been looking on Ebay at used enterpirse servers for possibly a cheap route maybe don't know much about the Xeons CPU over desktop ones. Also, they have desktop style ones over the 1U-2U which at this point if I had a Network Managed Switch and Router I would lol
If you can get one cheap sure go for it, just weigh the initial cost vs. the running costs in energy and whatnot Maybe also an enterprise surplus center if you have one around.
As of right now I hooked up the spare parts I have with DDR 3 8gbs of ram with a 1tb storage I had laying around. I installed FreeNAS and Plex Plugin. I Ripped Rogue One with makeMKV came to ~40Gb the video ran fine on my gaming desktop client streaming from the server. As for Streaming that on to the Chromecast cause a lot of stuttering due to playback of original size but once I went to Quality Settings to due 1080p at 8 Mbps stuttering went away seems fine but I feel it off but it might just be me. As of right now i'm placing the video file through handbrake to bring down the size and see what the results are from that.
yes, reduce/reuse/recycle ... if it doesn't work out, you can always just transplant the flash drive on which you installed the system and the HDD to the new system.
As for streaming to chromecast, ... if it's an older 2.4GHz chromecast, and you have an ethernet port closeby, you can try wiring your chromecast. .. there's also chromecast ultra that does 5GHz, can stream 4k and comes with an ethernet power adapter.
Your benchmarks are using basic entry level GPUs, Gtx 660 Ti and Gtx 1050 Ti. Your not seeing a performance degredation because your GPU is bottlenecking FAR before the CPU, because the GPUS in question are very, very weak cards by todays standards. Your using a 1700 and a 8350 with WEAK video cards, throw a 1070 in there and you will see VERY different results...