Home media server. Brewing ideas

Hardware Hub Build a PC
1

Good day, community,

For some time now, I have been interested in the idea of making a home media server to store movies and stuff for personal use.

It all started from buying a simple external 3.5" usb hub, which I added as an UPnP through the router, making it possible to watch from every device in the house without any hassle (and keeping the drive away at a distance, being less bothered by the noise).

Now I’m thinking of the 3rd (actually 2nd, since I simply put the 1st one on the shelf since I can’t really plug it anywhere) hdd. And this brings me to the question of something bigger than a chinese usb hub, which I have hidden from my eyes.

Overall this will be a “much text; didn’t read” thing, but I hope to hear some ideas and suggestions. Thank you in advance.

#First question is the "fundament#

My first idea was to go for Synology. But that one operates only in RAID/similar. I really don’t worry much about one of the drives failing at some point since this it’s not that hard to recover. So I want to go for pure volume and not fail safe storage.

I do know that there is RAID0 (or what was it called) where data chunks will not be written to several drives. But that one has one downside - when you add a drive to Synology, the first thing it does is FORMAT. I do not wish to experience the future problems this may uncover.

Second idea is to go for a regular dedicated PC.
This does sound better, and I’m planning to upgrade my current pc, so I’m assuming that I would only need a case (have an eye on for one specific Thermaltake, which I forgot the naming of… and where did I bookmark it).

But I’m open to the question of keeping that PC always on in terms of power consumption. To this day, I have never worked with the sleep/hibernation question and how well can it perform. Currently thinking it to be Win10 and not Linux, since I cannot find a decent replacement for Daum/Pot player (and VLC doesn’t cut it when it comes to small details, done in that player(s)).

Third option was to go Raspberry/similar. But that will still require to power the drives, which may end up in a headache of its own.

#Drives themselves#

In one hand there are Seagate Barracudas and similar, which have never failed me and I don’t really hear them working (except a few times). They are good, but I do see that after 4TB I can only find 5400 ones. I’m quite used to 7200, but I did notice that VLC can have “starvation points”(visible artifacts) when playing/resuming a 50+ Gb file. I would imagine that 5400 will make this problem occur more.

But this also may be the usb hub’s/router’s fault (although the router is a 300sh usd Asus model from last year or something).

So I’m more thinking about 7200 ones.

And this is where the IronWolf and similar NAS/Server drives come into the spotlight. I haven’t yet researched much about their lifespan and stuff, but I did come across one simple truth - they are meant for server uses, where noise levels aren’t a problem. Yes, since this would become a separate PC, this would not be much of a problem, but I would want to have that PC near the TV, since I plan to HDMI it to it and use stand-alone as an option.

P.S. For those that find my hassle a bit “strange” to say the least…
I do understand that this may raise a question of why not use netflix and stuff, but in my case the answer has a few points:

  1. I live outside of US (I would even say EU), so buying subscription for 4K is a “bit more expensive” in terms of income (and if it’s even possible to be fair) for every media service, which may have “only one series that I actually like to watch now and then”.
    1.1. Even so, it will most likely not have a decent dub (I do speak english without problems, but sometimes you just want to watch something without overthinking/turning on subtitles).
    1.2. Some old shows (at some point I tried finding “Angry Beavers”) can become disabled or scattered across several media owners (I do like watching one season on one service and then start looking for the next one on all other services)
  2. Player and pre/post-process. I came across multiple cases, where VLC would give a much richer sound experience in comparison to DaumPlayer (not even speaking about “web players” with their "we don’t bother to normalize sound… which isn’t a case if the audio goes through a sounds card and not by SPDIF to speakers with no pre-process).
2

Welcome to the home labber community :slight_smile:

You have made the first step (having a shared hard drive) and now you’re looking to extend this win.
Don’t be surprised to slowly being taken down the winding path as lots of us have done. You secretly know you will succumb to the lure of the home lab.

Take one step at a time. Only do what you’re comfortable with.

Following that logic, this seems to rule out the synology (just reading your concerns above).
The raspberry pi would work (relatively cheap starting point). This will get you a couple of steps further, but will present a road block, soon, due to its quite limited hardware capabilities.
This leaves you with your third option (“keeping that PC always on”), that I would encourage you to explore further.
Look for a power sipping PC. Some modern PCs don’t use more power than a raspberry pi when idle.
I’d look for a small form factor PC (e.g. ASUS ExpertCenter PN42 Review A Different Type of Fanless Mini PC Also follow links in the article to reviews of other product). Some of these sip power, but have similar issues in terms of expandability as your router (usb only).
Another option would be to build your own PC. I’d look for a microATX motherboard, which often are power optimized. It’s possible, with careful selection of components to build a perfectly expandable PC/server with very low power consumption. Here are some references to start:

Re: drive speed.
There are differing opinions. Lower rpm HDs generally consume less power and often are cheaper, too. These are powerful incentives, but only if they get the job done.
My personal experiences with these have left me frustrated and 7200 rpm it is for me. But don’t let that dissuade you. More and more people are looking to jump to SSD for storage, but these are still $$$ especially in larger capacity (>=4GB).

1 Like
3

I have 2 home home servers/nas’s now one using the regular 4tb iron wolfs from seagate not the iron wolf pro’s the other using seagates 14tb exos enterprise drives. I would say you don’t need to worry about sound from the more consumer grade iron wolfs, there no louder than any other consumer grade drive i have. However the exos drives are defiantly noisy. Second im extremely impresed with the performance of both drive lines, and assuming your archetecting the storage correctly you should not have performance issues from either. The ironwolf consistently read and write at well over 100MB/s when not random read/writing.

In terms of computing horse power anything as good as a raspberry pi is good enough to serve files as fast as spinning rust can read and write for the most part. Where you may need to consider more is if you want the nas/computer to transcode video, or your really running a lot of things on the nas.

In my experience ram is usually the bigger problem over cpu horse power is memory capacity. Im a big fan of speeding up things by caching in ram. My main backup server with the exos drives has a 25w 8 core atom processor that for the most part averages about 20% utilization, and spends probably less than 2% time at 100% however it is equiped with and makes use of all of its 64gbs of ram.

Not sure i would use my nas as a media pc, i’m a big fan role separation, and also allows making sure the nas is not put to sleep or turned off when someone is done using it, who is not yourself(im assuming you dont live alone). also keeps noisy devices like hard drives and fans away from the media playback area. Firesticks, Rokus, and Apple Tv are way more adept at playback anyway given their remotes, and access to the media on a nas anyway. I prefer my servers in a closet with a shut door where there to be used remotely not seen or heard.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for such an informative response. This gives a lot of things to think about.

About the case - I finally remember where that bookmark went. This is my current favorite - Node 804 — Fractal Design. It has up to 8 HDD slots. Only thing is mITX board, which is a bit troublesome - I would like to have the option to throw in my current GPU and SoundCard there. But in terms of media server, it does look good.

I think this will be a separate research. “3rd option” is both a pain in terms of power and, especially, in terms of configuring deep sleep and something like “wake on mouse”.

This is the thing. It costs quite a lot. I do have SSDs and m.2 drivers. This was my goal for my home pc (I invested quite a lot of money and effort into making a necessity to have the power button led working in order to realize that I actually turned the pc on).

But going this road for media server. Ooof. Maybe someday, when I’ll have a different income and ssd prices for 2TB+ will not bite that much.

I do see that 7200 is the bare minimum here. It will most likely be a problem with VLC playing something big.

5

Thank you. The information I was lacking on the HDD side!

So IronWolf is not only NAS/Server? For some reason I assumed that both regular and pro are server only (and don’t have noise damp design).

Waiter! Two cups of your finest tea for this Gentleman!

Hm. But you are using them as NAS/Server, which, I may assume, is somewhere in a separate room, and not near you, right? Thing is - I am thinking of putting that PC right next to the TV to have the ability of connecting it with a good 4K 120Hz HDMI cable. And those things, apart from mostly being easily breakable optics, cost a fortune if to go 5m+ even.

Here my question would be power delivery to the drives.

HM! This is actually an interesting thought! I do plan to upgrade soon, which will leave me with a 9900K. If to ramp up the ram to 64Gbs, this does sound like a really good thing to consider.

But this implies Linux, right? Or it simply depends on the software… (makes more sense).

I did a good research on that topic. And all fall far behind of going for a PC in terms of picking things you need and not what people think you need.

I have a “2021sh” Samsung TV running Bada (but, despite my previous knowledge of early Bada), “representative” convinced me that “the bugs are tuned out”. They were not, but the screen itself was really good, so I decided to let it go. The “experience” is that half it has the minimal audio codecs, a really pathetic excuse of a player and many limitations. Comparing it to “Android based devices” didn’t really improve things much. I already use Kodi player, and although it has its uses, I would not consider it for daily use.

My first goal is basically Samba. Share as a network drive and be done with it. Secondly, I found that Android more likes UPnP (and Samsung TV), so that one is the second “service” I need.

I am thinking my options. Next year I plan to finally upgrade my main PC, which would first leave me with a 9900K, 16Gb of ram and a 800W psu, and then with a 2080Ti (and quite possibly a Monster of discrete Creative sound cards for music and stuff… If I finally decide to make my wish of Creative AE-9 come true).

This leads to a road of having a media/gaming station dedicated for the TV. But that has more hassle to it…

6

I think Synology NAS units can do JBODs if you really(really?) don’t care about redundancy. It’s an appliance though, so if you’re looking to tinker it might be easier to look elsewhere. Tinkering with a Synology NAS usually involves some amount of figuring out how to stop DSM from nuking your changes during an update in addition to figuring out what you really want to do with it.

I really like my Synology NAS, and I wish I had switched over to it sooner, but I’m more interested in using the system than tinkering with it.

1 Like
7

IronWolf is a nas orianted consumer drive. Seagate only recomends up to 8 of them in one computer chassis.

The Ironwolf pros are more prosumer small business focused and have a higher vibration tolerance and more robust with higher drive count per chassis limit.

The exos are just server grade drives.

The backup server with the exos drives is(it is actualy noticably louder without a doubt), however the second with the iron wolfs which is my main nas that runs plex, file sharing, and the rest sits in my office it each iron wolf drive by itself is really no louder than the wd blue in my desktop. They only sound a bit louder due to there being 8 of them.

usb hdd enclousers is your answer, something like found here Amazon.com

No, almost all operating systems do this if you look at the details in task manger on windows it will show you how much of the ram is storing cached files and things. Since xp windows pretty much fills any unused space in ram by programs with cached files. Linux does the same thing, along with Mac OS. I do use other things, in addition to the operating system level caching. For instance the filesystem i use ZFS uses ram for caching.

No that is what service or application your using on these smart devices or tvs. You should look at Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi, and the like, and you acces via your smart tv or device. All self hosted on your nas. I use plex. So a plex server application runs on my nas, and i use the plex app on my tvs and smart devices. Its all my media played over my network of the nas in my office.

You seemed worried about power consumption, and tbh this seems like overkill, and like it will suck down alot of power at idle.

A gtx1050 can handle any transcoding with ease and unless your running multiple vms most low power modern quad cores can handle the compute of a few vms and a handfull of docker containers.

8

the Node 804 is actually matx. I just built a new server this week. with a node 804 and 3 Exos 16TB drives.
It is quite big though. The only reason i wanted it is to house some other computer stuff in 1 case in my electrical closet.

The exos drives are definitely not quiet. But if you place it in a closet well away from you. it should be fine.

2 Likes
9

I would recommend you to consider how much storage you really need and how much storage you are willing to purchase, first.

First thing you need to consider; do you want a high-capacity, low-throughput HDD or a low-capacity, high-throughput SSD? The SSD is pretty much superior in every way these days, except price/TB, and even that is rapidly shrinking.

For the best price/TB sweet spots, I would say these 20 TB drives for HDDs are a pretty good at $15/TB, though $309 isn’t exactly cheap:

And on the SSD side, while the 8TB 870 QVO Samsung is undoubtedly good capacity and starting to become affordable at $350, it’s still $46/TB. A much better deal is a 4TB option for $34/TB or $135:

Same brand but m.2 is $140 for $35/TB btw.

SATA itself is rapidly aging now. By late 2026 it is highly probable (~75-80% certainty) 16 TB m.2 SSDs are going to cost around $350, so the question becomes, how much capacity do you need now, and in the future?

While yes, you can buy two 20TB drives for ~$625 and be done with it… You can also buy five 4TB SSDs for less than $700. You get half the capacity but apart from that, you get whisper quiet operations, slightly lower power consumption, and massively improved transfer speeds. And remember, SSDs vs HDDs price gap will only decrease from here on out, which makes SSD infrastructure the safer bet long term.

HDDs, you go big (8+TB drives) or you go home. Decent, non-SMR 6TB drives start at $100, at that price a $135 4TB SSD is a no-brainer. Further up the stack though, HDDs still reign supreme. YMMV.

10

This is a good point, to be fair. The least thing I’m interested is doing an “Arch install from terminal”.

Thanks. Will read about this.

11

Well for most people(not necciarily those on this fourm), any single modern hdd can saturate a 1G nic and come close to saturating a 2.5g nic so unless you have a 10G network ssd for anything other than random io is silly

Second thing to consider when the hdd is not burdened by all the os and programs random io like a system drive is, for home media use a ssd random io win is pointless.

This is not factoring in software and hardware raid that can make hdds saturate a 10G nic and have slightly beter random io

remember 1G nic is only really gonna push about 90MB/s and in my experince SMB really really holds this back when dealing with files under 10MB.

Hard drives are for the most part a no brainer that exos drive can probably push 250MB/s seqential like if reading a movie.

So back to small files and random io thats where zfs and its caching in ram comes in, on a weekly basis i doubt any home user will open more than a gig worth of small files which should all stay in ram if there frequently used and the ssd would be pointless

1 Like
12

I N T E R E S T I N G

Thanks. I did not know of such thing existing.

The “office” brings a bit of a difference in terms of the sound floor. When I lived in my old apartment, which had “soviet” type of wall structure (and you could hear your neighbors), when I had an air cooled PC with a few ssd’s and a hdd, the hdd (barracuda) was the least noticeable in terms of sound.

Then came the day where I moved to watercool - two fat 720mm radiators, noctua fans and a very well thought out Phanteks case - the loudest of them all was the hdd.

Now I live in a different apartment. It has a literally “monastery quiet” level of silence. Here I finally said “hell no” to the hdd being in the case and swapped it with another ssd.

There began the first step to today’s topic.

But can you do something like “server app, which basically shares media files” to “buffer” the file, which is currently being read?

Google’ing we shall gooo…

By far I am only familiar with Kodi. It is a good app, but the fullscreen mode is…debatable. In terms of playlist it is worse than DaumPlayer. In terms of pre/post process - worse than VLC.

At some point, where I finally realized how huge an impact would have an advice, which I, by sheer accident, read on one forum about sound, and, in particular Edifier R2X00 series speakers and PUT THEM on the same level as my head is when I’m watching a movie (before that I was dumb enough to have them on the floor), I stumbled upon one very interesting thing - Interstellar (the movie).

I started watching it in VLC. But at some point needed to do something different and closed the app. Then I opened the same file from Kodi, and quite fast I started to hear a huge difference in terms of audio depth. I spent a full day trying different players and came to a clean conclusion that VLC does a completely different level of audio processing.

I know. But was hoping that it is possible to make a power template, in which an idle device would go to deep sleep/hibernate (with a possibility to wake by mouse), and otherwise would draw power as it should.

13

Egh. Want it to sit next to a TV.

14

Rember that this is an “office” in my house ie a spare bedroom i repurposed as my office since no one is sleeping there.

1 Like
15

SSD’s to this day have a “bad habit”, on which I stumbled upon two times already (and helped at least 2 people with the same diagnose) - you need to do a low format before working.

When I bought my first 128gb Kingston ssd (it was 5 years ago or smt) I was building my first pc. Everything was fine until I installed everything, opened my favourite mmorpg of that time, played a little, and my system suddenly choked (both image and sound froze on the last sound). It took me over a year to test and change every possible part, wire and software piece (except storage! Because who would imagine…) I finally swapped the drive and the problem was gone (this was confirmed by Kingston’s support).

Then there was a second drive. WD this time (bought it in 2021 or something). For laughs, I did a quick format when I bought it and started using it. It didn’t take long…

And this is which brands that have a reputation. Buying a “Leven” or something that I’m entirely not familiar of with my kind of luck would be even worse, I believe :slight_smile:

Can assume that a Samsung or similar grade ssd of the same size would cost a bit higher (quite a bit). So SSDs for the moment are a bit pricy.

I understand this. I need high capacity (generally it would be a 4-8TB), For the throughput I’m not sure that I would need something bigger than an 7200rpm HDD. I do realize that SSD’s would be better, but an overkill for the time being.

I know that a day, when SSD’s will finally overcome HDD’s will happen.

In terms of capacity. I basically love to store movies and series I like. New ones and old ones (stuff like the “Golden Girls”). At the beginning of this year I bought a 2TB drive. Yesterday I realized that I have only 200Gb left, and I really picket out the things I want to preserve and have no fuss in trying to find them in the future (or even forgetting it existed).

Now I’m thinking to go for the next 2/4 Tb one.

I understand that. But 8Tb drives are noisier than I would want (and as some comments state - some put out a decent amount of heat). I want to preserve a silent environment (even the “3rd option PC” will most likely reuse an AiO, which is sitting in my closet).

16

Ah, sorry. Missed that part.

17

4TB is low capacity in 2023. High capacity is 12TB+. If you are considering 2TB HDDs in 2023 you are just being silly, personally I would never buy anything below 8TB HDDs in the current market. This is US pricing though, YMMV.

Then I have three drives to recommend. 8TB drives are not particularly more noisier than other drives, but a fair chunk of higher capacity drives are meant to sit in a server room all day long where noise doesn’t matter. Check reviews to make sure.

If you want whisper quiet ops though, here are a few SSDs of reputable quality, choose the one that fits budget and needs best:

Disk Interface Capacity Price
Samsung 870 QVO SATA 2.5" 8 TB $366.00
Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan SATA 2.5" 4 TB $137.99
Teamgroup MP34 PCIe 3.0 m.2 2280 4 TB $158.99

All of these are of sufficient quality I would trust them for a media server, despite two of them being DRAM-less and QLC. Careful with the MP34 though, it definitely could use a heat sink.

Would an 8TB HDD be a better purchase, yes, $200 for 8TB is a better purchase in some cases but $210 for a 12TB is an even better purchase. HDDs are not worthless, but the lower tiers are now unable to compete against SSDs.

1 Like
18

Honestly it sounds like your power and noise requirements make you well suited for something like the flashstore

2 Likes
19

Ok you can get a 4tb ironwolf for ~56$ on amazon.

To be compared with the super cheap garbage tier teamgroup t-force vulcan 4tb that has no d ram cache and poor performace compared to most ssds on the market. And yet still the hdd in this comparison is than 2/5 the price you can almost get 10tb of storage for the same money you spend on this low end sata ssd.

heres the spec sheet on the ironwolf series. The 4tb model can do 210MB/s sustained sequential transfer.

my problem with m.2 ssds is that your paying for speed you cannot use for the most part

Really you dont need the thousands of iops ssds offer when there being used for bulk storage. unless you plan on running a large database that cant fit in ram, there is no need for the iops. Also unless you have 10GB networking any meaningful speed improvement a m.2 ssd would not be able to be utilized.

A 2 hour movie that is 40GB in size would need to be read at a rate of 12.5MB/s. You could theoretically read 16.8 movies simultaneously off a 4tb iornwolf.

I would consider the samsung qvo an actually half decent drive, but still for the same money as the 8tb qvo i could have 6.5 4tb iron wolfs.

So would you rather take 1 8tb ssd with no data redundancy or 6 4tb ironwolfs totaling 24tb of storage, and if you lost just one drive worth of storage for redundancy you could have 20tb of storage for same price.

Or consider a mirrored set of striped hdd drives that could break past the 550mb/s write and read limit of sata, that stores 12tb and has redundancy out performing a ssd in all but iops

ok one more scenario to consider at the point you get 2 8tb ssds so you can mirror and have redundancy, you could also have 12 4tb hdds. That means a two groups of 6 drives striped together with each having 1 drive lost to redundancy. Thats 40tb of usable storage compared to 8tb and both setups have 1 drive of redundancy. Ssds just dont compete on a cost to tb stored

1 Like
20

Yeah, because 450 MB/s sustained write is such a poor performance for the use case we are talking about…

Which is the theoretical maximum. Real world? 180-110 MB/s.

  1. That is five drives, because the raid controller card will also cost 60 bucks. Most motherboards the last years only carry four SATA connectors.
  2. Six drives will not fit most modern cases, unless you specifically look for it. So, that is a new case for $100-$150. So now you can only buy three drives with the same money.
  3. … Unless you do not want a big tower case taking up half your living room, at which point you need to basically invest in a new system, built to fit inside your living room (everyone doesn’t have a closet with good ventilation)
  4. That drive is producing noise which may or may not bother you, but the 8TB Samsung will produce pretty much no audible noise whatsoever - it is possible there might be a small coil whine as with all electronics, but we’re talking ~3dB here in that case.

Twelve 4TB HDDs take up a lot of space, and virtually no one has a case at home with twelve HDD bays. You can however easily fit two 2.5" SSDs in most cases - in the worst case you can jank it with double sided tape, since they are so lightweight.

For most people it just isn’t practical with more than eight HDDs, especially not for a home server. Heck, more than four HDDs are a challenge for many motherboards. And since you can buy two 8TB HDDs for as much money or slightly cheaper than four 4TB, 4TB just don’t make sense anymore.

No, they do not. HDDs are cheaper when it comes to cost/TB. This, however, is pretty much the only thing they are better at, and you also need to consider the cost of infrastructure.

That said, yes, you can buy a single 20TB HDD for cheaper than a single 8TB SSD, and two 16TB HDDs for only 20% more money. If you need the capacity and do not care about the drawbacks, you should get that over the SSD.

My point is that HDD infrastructure costs a lot too in terms of space and money, and is often taken for granted. Do I think you should invest in HDD infrastructure today, only if you have great capacity needs, because SSDs are taking over.

My best educated guess is that SSDs will reach HDD price parity within five years, but future is never writ in stone and HDD manufacturers could very well have a trick or two extra to come up with. However, I just don’t see how they can create a 32TB drive that is cheaper than an SSD with the same capacity in 2028.

For now though, HDDs still rule the high capacity market, but investing in SSD infrastructure over HDD also makes sense for many use cases.