I’m looking at building a new home server that I could use with proxmox to support a NAS, security camera storage and mostly to hold and stream the 100’s of old DVD and blue ray movies I have taking up space.
I have an old tower PC case with plenty of 5 1/4 bays, that can take a full size ATX motherboard. I would like a mix of speed and storage capacity in this build.
It’s been over 10 years probably closer to 15 years sense I built a pc or server. So any suggestions on motherboard/cpu/ram and other hardware would be great as I know a lot has changed.
As far as software if anyone has a suggestion on how to covert the DVD’s to digital for streaming that would also help.
None of that needs a huge amount of processing power, so you can definitely get a lot of use out of previous-gen stuff. Do you have a specific budget, do you know what kind of storage capacity you need?
For budget I have a good chunk of money I can spend but I would like to keep it under 2,000 to include some drives. Without knowing what a normal dvd movie or a blue ray will take up for storage I’m not really sure on total storage needs. I’m thinking something that I can add additional drives as needed would be good and maybe start at least with 40-60TB.
I have over 100 dvd’s taking up space so eventually if it works well I would like to add them all to my plex library and get them out of my way.
A DVD is usually 5-9 GB each. So 100 of them won’t break the 1TB barrier. That’s peanuts for modern drives these days. You’re recommended to purchase 2x 16TB HDD drives and use these in a RAID1. Furthermore, I suggest the following in general terms:
AMD B550 mainboard, select an A-brand board that has the features you want.
AMD Ryzen5 4600G APU: 6 core, 12 thread CPU with onboard GPU. If you can find one locally, they may not be available where you live. IDK, sorry.
RAM: 2x 8GB minimum, more is better. Again, A-brand won’t hurt reliability, only your budget.
A 1TB NVMe SSD for the OS, any VM’s you may want to run and some cache for the harddrives if applicable/desired. I have a 1TB Lexar NM620 drive (actually, I have several ) that can be had for under 50€, so 55-60USD should be possible. Other options available and equally valid/suitable.
HTH!
[edit: a Bluray disk is usually 25 or 50GB each, still small compared to HDD sizes)
Ok, this will be long, but bear with me; the TLDR is, IMHO you should get a Flashstor as you do not need more than 20 TB of capacity for what you want to do.
The use case
So the OP is asking for a NAS to store DVDs and BluRays. Every DVD is between 5-9 GB, and every BluRay is between 25 to 50 GB. This means you can fit ~500-900~ 100-250 DVDs per TB and 20-40 BlueRays per TB. Assuming you have 200 DVDs + 200 Bluerays, you would need between 6-12 TB of storage for that collection.
For the camera feeds, depending on the refresh rate and resolution of the camera it is usually about 5-10 GB per month per camera. After that, it is just math, but 1 TB of storage can easily store 10+ years of worth from, say, a 2-5MP security camera.
Bottom line, I will assume the OP is happy with something between 20-40 TB of storage capacity, and that the machine is not business critical e.g. NAS being down for a day or two is not catastrophic.
The SSD NAS
So, as a baseline, let me introduce you to the Asustor Flashstor:
6 or 12 bays, decent specs, 10 GbE, low power, dead silent. This is the baseline for SSD storage machines. Not the end-all, be-all, just the thing you want to beat, if you run any kind of storage. So, what would this cost you, surely more than you can afford? These are the current prices of three decent SSDs:
Whoa, gets expensive really fast, no? See… That’s the thing. It’s not, well, not really. Let’s have a look what a few configs fully decked out might cost, and how much capacity each one has:
6x2TB
12x2TB
6x4TB
12x4TB
6x8TB
12x8TB
Capacity, raw
12 TB
24 TB
24 TB
48 TB
48 TB
96 TB
Capacity, RAID5
10 TB
22 TB
20 TB
44 TB
40 TB
88 TB
Capacity, RAID6
8 TB
20 TB
16 TB
40 TB
32 TB
80 TB
Costs, base unit
$474.99
$799.00
$474.99
$799.00
$474.99
$799.00
Costs, SSDs
$418.08
$836.16
$1049.94
$2099.88
$4919.94
$9839.88
Costs, Total
$893.07
$1635.16
$1524.93
$2898.88
$5394.93
$10638.88
The first three columns are interesting for home use, while the fourth is only interesting to look at for larger storage needs and the last two are really only there to show what is possible, but are at the moment way too expensive. Still, a mirrored 2x8 TB in a 6-bay Flashstor for ~$2.1k is also worth a consideration, if you are planning to expand your setup in the future.
The DIY NAS
Let us assume you have found a Mini-ATX chassi that suits your needs, then here is my current standard setup for a six bay NAS:
This setup does allow you to insert an RX 7600 or RTX 3050 for hardware video decode, should you so choose - although in your use case I suppose this is not necessary. We are already beyond the 12 bay NAS and draw some extra power right now. The above setup DOES allow for ECC memory though, which is nice if you care about that. At home, I do not care about that though.
Next, the drive cost. We have six bays, let’s load it up with six drives. No need to hold back since HDDs are so cheap, so, enter:
Six of these babies add $1559,94 to the total. So, a fully decked out system would therefore cost you… $2406,30.
The Synology / QNAP option
Naturally, while DIY might be beyond your budget, there are some finished products from QNAP, Synology and other brands. These might be a bit restrictive and some might not even allow you to use your own HDDs in there, instead only QNAP drives are allowed in a QNAP system for instance. Still, this could be a cost efficient option, so let’s do a quick exploration.
The most cost-efficient option I have found is a 5 bay QNAP for $645, granted I have not done a deep search:
Again, decking this out with five 16 TB drives for 259.99 cost 1299.95, so the total is $1944.95 for this build. More cost effective, sure, and a RAID5 instead of a RAID6 makes sense with five disks.
Summary
So, which variant wins? Let’s summarize in a table, sorted by least expensive to most costly option:
System
Capacity, raw
Capacity, RAID5
Capacity, RAID6
Price
Flashstor 6x2TB
12 TB
10 TB
8 TB
$893.07
Flashstor 6x4TB
24 TB
20 TB
16 TB
$1524.93
Flashstor 12x2TB
24 TB
22 TB
20 TB
$1635.16
QNAP 5 bay NAS
80 TB
64 TB
48 TB
$1944.95
DIY 6 bay NAS
96 TB
80 TB
64 TB
$2406.30
Flashstor 12x4TB
48 TB
44 TB
40 TB
$2898.88
We can see that for raw storage nothing beats the DIY 6 bay NAS in capacity, however the gap is much narrower for the Flashstor 12x4 TB in RAID6 mode. Flashstor 6x4 TB is also a very interesting budget alternative here.
Conclusions
So, now that we have taken a look at the total cost on the low capacity NAS market, I think it is pretty clear why a full SSD NAS might be worth a second look in 2023. Especially now, because in three years time chances are high 8TB and 16TB SSDs have both crept below $400, maybe even $300.
That is not to say HDDs do not have their place; for cheap higher capacity, still a must, and if you already have an HDD NAS by all means use it. This is for new systems and for places that want a new NAS, not an expansion of the old one.
What you need to decide on is if you want ECC support, process things relatively quickly and to some extent how much ability you want to expand in the future. In that regard I would not recommend the AM4 platform as ECC is a hit or miss and the lack of AVX512. There’s a thread where someone is going through several motherboards and CPUs on the forums. AVX512 give you a rather nice boost then it comes to software decoding/encoding however there’s only a very limited set of “consumer” CPUs that support it (AM5 and Intel’s 11th Gen however due to recent mitigations performance of the 11th CPUs are slightly reduced).
In terms of video formats you should at least target H.265 aka HEVC or AV1. While AMD does have have video encoders (VCE) they’re still behind everyone else and quite hard to utilize. Intel (QuickSync) is by far considered the best ones, 11th gen can do H.265 however only decode AV1. You can of course software encode AV1 but it’s slow and the only viable option unless you have tons of time is SVT-AV1 but you need at least 32Gb of RAM if you want to do 4k encodes.
What you can do to offload the CPU is to pop in an entry level Intel ARC GPU, these will do AV1 encoding in a fraction of the time and do it well over all. The downside is that they’re relatively new so driver support might not be available and/or reliable outside of Windows. nVidia also works but driver support is a bit troublesome and they’re more limited than Intel GPUs when it comes to simultaneous encodes.
In reality there’s very little to gain if any by re-encoding (transcoding) DVDs unless you do some manual work. Old DVDs are in many cases very noisy, have grain and compression artifacts which greatly reduces compression rates if you want it to be somewhat transparent. If you want to reduce size you very likely need to use Vapoursynth with some filtering (which is going to be unique per movie/disc). This also applies to BD but to a smaller extent however if you want to squeeze out as much as possible it’s still something that “needs” to be done. You can of course use FFmpeg as-is but as I mentioned earlier, your compression ratio will likely suffer quite a bit for unprocessed material.
I personally looked into this topic and decoded on AM5, I still lack the GPU mainly because my NAS OS (FreeBSD) don’t yet support Intel ARC hardware encoding.
In general regarding hardware I’d say at least one 8x PCIe slot (GPU) and one 4x PCIe slot (HBA/Storage controller) is what you should be a looking at. If there’s another 4x for an additional NIC further down the road it’s not a bad thing.
Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus if you can live the with Realtek NIC, this one is 16x/4x/4x
Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI, Intel 2.5G NIC and 10G Marvell, this one is 8x/8x/2x (or 16x/8x/Disabled)
The 2x slot is a bit meh but serviceable with PCIe 4.0/5.0 devices.
If you’re going with DDR5 avoid 8Gb, all platforms scale pretty bad with 4 DIMMs so at least 16Gb / stick is recommended. Running one stick will give you a performance penalty but it gives you much better options expanding later on.
For conversion and ripping spinning rust will be just fine, as for storage. I second that you should use NVME as boot drive (I’d look into Crucial’s P3 Plus or P5 Plus series as they’re relatively cheap and gets the job done without any fuzz) and for the fact that SATA ports a somewhat limited without a separate controller. As for spinning rust look into Toshiba’s MG08/09 series and/or Seagate Exos, there’s no need for a separate ZLOG/cache devices in your case, it just adds unnecessary complexity and ZFS’s own cache will handle it just fine on its own.
Since you don’t mention what devices you’re targeting it’s a bit hard to give recommendation about software but a quick rundown in general.
MakeMKV is by far the most competent ripping utility, it’s produce a Matroska file with “all” contents of the disc. The final file will be a copy and no transcoding will be performed by default. What matters quite a bit is how you want to consume the media. As much as Plex, Emby, Jellyfin offers “eye candy” as far as UI goes they add a quite a bit of overhead on the server and may waste resources as they will do “unnecessary” transcodes for compatibility reasons.
Out of the box Matroska still sees very little support in many devices despite being around for about two decades now. It’s a very competent container but also in most cases not supported by commercial devices out of the box especially when it comes to streaming. From a resource perspective if you can use VLC/Kodi/* to playback files off your NAS via NFS/SMB you’ll save a ton of resources on the server given that the playback device isn’t a potato. Newer TV sets have SoCs that support AV1 however I’m not sure if that yet has materialized in 3rd party apps otherwise H.265 is the newest compression format you can use. Most mobile devices will also struggle with AV1 for now unless they’re very recent and use software decoding which will result in battery drain. So if you’re going this route you might want to look into what your target devices support before transcoding media (if needed) into a final encode.
Option #2 is use some kind of “middleware” (Plex, Emby etc), this may offer a better eye candy user experience but it also results in degraded quality (how perceptive you are to it is another topic) and very likely a much higher server load as it will transcode each stream per client so some kind of working hardware accelerator is needed and it’s not limitless. They are somewhat aware of video and audio format support of the target device but they use (to my knowledge) “better safe the sorry approach” so you may see unnecessary transcodes just to ensure that playback works.
Hate to say it, but your math is off, by some margin. Assuming a dual-layer DVD of 9GB, 100 makes 900GB, so within the TB limit. Not 900 disks, as that’ll be 9*900=8100GB, which is 8.1 TB
I’m also taking issue with your averaging out the BR size at 35GB. You may want to rethink that theory (which I know you can, having seen numerous of your previous posts )
Thanks, I seem to have suffered a really big brainfart. I updated the Use Case section slightly with better min/max numbers, I still think ~30 BRs per TB is a reasonable assumption, but then again I’ve rarely ripped a DVD and was a complete Netflixer once BRs got popular, so will admit to some ignorance on the area
) that can be had for under 50€, so 55-60USD should be possible. Other options available and equally valid/suitable.
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