Home Media Server Build Review

Yeah, I had that fight. Told them it is not my problem.
You can buy a new Roku for a few bucks or just get the basically ISP TV default standard AppleTV. AppleTV does not support all audio formats but that is easily transcoded. It does however support H.265. I am no wasting energy just because you are to lazy to buy hardware instead of using the LG webOS client from your 2015 TV.

New or used?
SFP28 is pretty cheap new (250$) here, something like a Intel E810-XXVDA2?

It’s not verified but there have been reports that WD Black SSDs not playing nice with ZFS so you might want to take that into account. Unsuitable SSD/NVMe hardware for ZFS - WD BLACK SN770 and others · openzfs/zfs · Discussion #14793 · GitHub

Not sure I see the benefit going to with the Supermicro board over the Asus one unless you really need IPMI.

I would be a bit a bit reluctant buying Intel NICs off eBay given the high amount of fakes circulating but that’s up to you.

I doubt it’s worth going from platinum to titanium and why would you need a 1000W PSU? :slight_smile:

My cat’s name is Dizzy,

Yeah for nas if you want wd ssd’s still the red’s over black

I’d say you preferably want something else than WD (and RED is just marketing) such as Crucial, Micron, Solidigm if you’re looking at “consumer” hardware.

Edit: Seagate have a few decent models too…

Toshiba / Kioxia. I would think

I never had luck with Seagate. put i think its personal. At this point it feels that WD is almost always a lot of marketing.

By the way you are right about red. If black stuckles with the iops. Red would do it for sure with its 1/3 iops

Look at pdf name. yeah that is marketing marketing

Thanks I’ll check that out. That’d be great if I wanted to self-host a LLM or something someday.

I actually started with a similar setup on Ubuntu - but after a few years I ‘downgraded’ to Unraid for the simplicity and ease-of-use. My first kid was just born; I don’t have the spare time that I used to, and I need an OS with a friendly GUI that “just works”.

No I hadn’t considered that. Thanks for putting it on my radar, I’ll look through the specs on the PSU and see if I can make it work.

I have 5Gbps fiber. Just recently upgraded my OPNsense box and switch to 10G hardware, definitely want my server to be able to use it.

I did that with brothers & friends to moderate success. But I’m not gonna broach that topic with my mom/grandma/in-laws. I would rather just accommodate their shitty clients. Even buying grandma a better client myself would mean I have to teach her a new remote control… :fearful: … I’d much rather just spend the money/power on transcoding.

Lol, damn, are there any SSD’s manufacturer’s that don’t have issues these days? I’m not planning on using ZFS so I guess it’s not a dealbreaker, but I’ll check out Kingston’s offerings to be safe.

That Asus board was LGA 1700 and I’m changing to AM5. I picked that Supermicro board for the ECC support and because I trust the brand. But I just stumbled on this board: ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR that supports ECC too - and the price is slightly better. Might be changing my mobo pick. (I don’t really need IPMI).

I’ll try to find something new that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

The Titanium rated PSU’s are apparently more efficient in the 20-80W range, which is where I’m hoping my server will spend most of it’s idle time. I don’t need 1000W but that Hydro Ti Pro Titanium looks to be more efficient in the 20-80W range than all of the 500-750W PSUs I looked at.

The SSD’s in this build will be for a mirrored Unraid cache (Docker container appdata, VMs, buffer for downloads). They won’t be part of the actual NAS storage. I have 10 x 10TB Seagate Exos HDDs that I’m already using for that.

I was wrong. If you look at the brochure for the wd disks, the black would be better for you

If it is a few bucks extra, for the peace of mind, sure.

However, the Titanium PSUs perform a whopping 3%-5% better… In the 20W-80W range. That is between a 0.6W - 1.6W difference. At best this will save you around $5 a year.

If you still feel that is worth it, by all means go ahead :slight_smile: It is not complete snake oil (unlike gold plated copper cables), but Ti PSUs are hitting those diminishing returns when it comes to power savings.

I won’t argue the point further though, it is a nice PSU, and sometimes we should buy something nice for ourselves. If you can afford it, why not? Just wanted to point out you’re not going to be saving much power from that. :slight_smile:

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@wertigon

Thanks for putting it into perspective. I guess I should probably worry more about finding something that can handle the 16 HDD SATA power connections instead of obsessing over the idle efficiency so much.

I don’t mind paying a premium for good stuff though. I’m hoping to get at least a decade of use out of this server - and I’m willing to splurge a bit for quality top-shelf components. This isn’t a budget build, but I don’t want to waste money.

For the longevity, I’d actually consider a Titanium PSU too. Like I said; it isn’t a bad PSU, not by a loooooong shot, but the added efficiency is a pure bonus in this case. Build looks solid otherwise. :slight_smile:

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if you care about SSD quality then you might want to consider an enterprise grade drive, you can get high quality used U.2 drives for reasonable prices ( example: Solid State Drives | Enterprise Grade — ServerPartDeals.com ) and these can be connected via M.2 or PCIe with simple adapters. Note that using a U.2 → M.2 adapter requires an extra SATA power connector whereas a U.2 → PCIe adapter usually does not. Additionally, this is why I chose the Western Digital Red SN700 for my NVMe M.2 SSD instead of a more consumer oriented version as well, though its not really enterprise grade.

another thing worth noting, is that you dont need an SSD cache drive if you dont use Unraid. There’s no requirement for it if you run mergerFS + SnapRAID. I only use SSD drives to host applications and for high-write workloads (e.g. downloading all the media to fill the Plex server). This was one of the reasons I abandoned Unraid, though the largest reason was the complete inability to manage and interact with the proprietary filesystem from the cli. I understand you are interested in “simplicity”, but ultimately the GUI does not make your life any easier, it just makes it more complicated by hiding the simple management settings and commands from you behind endless pages of clicky menus and buttons. When I come back to the server after not touching it for 6 months, I just scroll back in my ~/.bash_history to see the commands I used to manage it; you cannot do this with any GUI.

Yeah this is my biggest hesitation with the build plan in its current form. I’ve been trying to find a good comparison of idle power draw for the i5-14500 vs the R9-7900 but I’m not having much luck.

How much worse is it?

As far as SSDs goes, Crucial, Solidigm, SK Hynix and Seagate appears to work well in general (mid range/ high end) unless you go for U.* ones but they’re way overkill for your build.

The Asus board is also solid overall and well tested on the forums.

Found this thread which concludes:

“a System for Ryzen 7000 series float around 70~80w while some results showed they can go as high as 100w during idle, whereas Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake system could go as low as 60w.”

they also mention:

“all 7000 series in this test were paired with a very high end power hungry X670 Extreme chipset”


I might be going down the wrong path here with AM5. @diizzy’s warning about potential P and E-Core scheduler issues worry me, and I’d love the extra performance of the R9-9700… but between the higher idle power and the added burden of a GPU for transcodes (that I wouldn’t need with Intel)… Ugh, I just don’t know what to do.

I wish Intel didn’t have the microcode issues with their 13th/14th gen limiting me to their older/lower-end stuff if I want to avoid it. I wish the new Arrow Lake was more of a slam dunk regarding idle power efficiency. I wish AMD had better video transcoding. I wish ECC-capable motherboards were easier to find.

Sorry to vent. I’ve spent too much time obsessing over this today and need sleep. I’ll keep marinating on it.

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Fair enough. For me it was sobering to see that a lot of my users did not use Jellyfin after a few months. Simply because they forgot, or were only on Netflix anyway. The other group of my users loved Jellyfin and used it a lot. So I realized that they want something from me not the other way round :slight_smile:

I made that comment before seeing you have 10 HDDs. Compared to 10 HDDs the power difference might not be so significant any more. Depending on spinning down on idle and how often they would be spinning. Count perhaps 5-6W for a spinning low load HDD, up to 12W for heavy random access. Negligible spun down (for a modern HDD).

That said, these are my data points:

  • My NAS/home server with an i3-12100, 2 HDDs (spun down), 1 ssd and a connect-x 3 NIC takes 28W idling. I did try to tune it for low power, but my board (asrock itx h-670) doesn’t seem to properly support ASPM, and the connect-x takes more power than a more modern intel NIC would. With the right choices, 20W would be possible IMO. With 2 discs spun up (Toshiba MG08) it goes to about 40W.
  • My 7950x desktop with 2 SSDs, RTX 3060 and a connect-x 3 NIC takes about 80W. Though it is rather tuned for performance (mem oc, so high VSOC) and a Kingston NV2 that doesn’t support ASPM either. A well tuned AM5 system could probably go down to 50-60W I estimate.

I’m in Europe with pretty high energy costs (I think 35c/kWh at the moment but trending down luckily; at some point closer to 50c…) so it’s pretty significant over 3-5 years running 24/7. If you get cheap power that changes the calculation (cost of ownership vs. purchase) of course.

Under Plex/Jellyfin load power would depend on transcoding efficiency. Here I think an intel iGPU would be a lot more efficient than a dGPU (not sure what a dGPU would use). If I run a single 4k HEVC → 4k H.264 transcode my NAS goes to 60W (HDDs + compute), a 1080p transcode runs at 52W, a single direct stream runs at about 45W. The transcode numbers are slightly overestimated since it will transcode at full speed until the full file is done (so it will finish before playback has finished).

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My peak rate is $0.13 per kWh, so the difference between an idle 50W system and a 100W system is only about $5/mo for me. I guess then the question becomes ‘is the extra performance of the AMD worth $60/year to me?’

This is assuming the system is idling 100% of the time (which it won’t) and the R9-7900 does seem very efficient under load compared to Intel. Depending on how hard I’m using it there’s theoretically some point where it could become more power efficient than an i5-14500 (although I doubt I’ll be using it hard enough to hit that point):

I also just noticed that the ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR has onboard 10Gb ethernet. Which means I could potentially go without the SFP+ NIC - but my switch only has SFP+ 10G ports and those 10GBase-T transceivers run HOT, and presumably aren’t at all power efficient. So maybe I’d want to get the SFP+ NIC regardless so i can use a DAC.

I’ve just read through both of your home server topics and I’m getting conflicting information. Just to be clear, what is your priority for this server? What is roughly your budget? What is your idle vs heavy load time?

My priority is performance, but I’m trying to get the best “bang for my buck” on long-term power efficiency. There is no budget, but I don’t want to waste money. The server will spend 90% its time idle, but the other 10% I push it hard. Sometimes I’ll have 6+ simultaneous transcodes in Plex, that come close to maxing out my current pair of E5-2670 v2’s:

Basically I’m looking to upgrade my current setup in every way. I want it to be faster, quieter, use less power, exhaust less heat, and be as reliable as my current Supermicro X9DRi-LN4+ has been.

Considering my current system idles at 200W, is loud as hell, warms half my house, and has lasted almost a decade without a single hardware issue - I think my goals are attainable. All of the options I’ve looked at are probably better than my status quo, but I’m trying to thoroughly consider everything.