I have been using my Google Drive but recently I filled it with 2 years of photos… well I lie, I needed to upgrade it to 200gb at 40$ a year but now that is full and the next jump is 2tb at 140.
Anyway that being said Ive been wanting to make a server to hold my files. Be a Plex server and potentially run VM’s. I also have a smart home and security cams along with a Google wifi mesh, Im wondering what I should be looking at. A cool have would be being able to run chivarly game servers for me and my mates. also do recommend what usages I may be looking over. If this could play games in the living room that be cool but that somethig thats going be used once a year lie.
Being low power in idle is gonna be the main thing.
I could spend 2 or 3 grand on this but if I can do it for way less the misses wont hate me lol.
This shouldn’t matter at all if you are running it as camera storage. It cannot enter a low power idle state when it is processing data streaming in constantly
Do you want this to be a server you build with parts youreself? Rackmount chassis or tower? How many cameras and what are their resolution? What brand and models?
If you want to run Plex you should stick with an Intel CPU that ahs an iGPU. It is the cheapest price/performance plex setup you can get. They have experimental support for AMD iGPUs now, but it is still experimental so stay with Intel. But the thing is, if you use QuickSync for your Plex transcodes then you may not be able to use it for your security cameras, which means general CPU cores there which uses a lot more power and PC resources. You are only going to get 6-8 streams typically on QuickSync, so that could mean 6 cameras and 2 users on Plex.
Hey EniGmA1987,
So sorry not specifically for a camera feed, I mentioned this incase that would be a large factor but it would be for photo storage over the security cams as I will probably leave them working on google.
I stupidly tied myself to google photos and now that I’ve well exceeded it I realized I should have done this a long time ago.
I did look at racks but they seem overkill so I believe building one is the way forward.
I had initially thought that a Ryzan APU was good but I’m open to Intel.
You don’t need much compute to get basic file storage and hosting.
You could run a couple of containers with Photoprism or Piwigo or Immich, and Samba for file sharing, on basically a Raspberry Pi strapped to a USB hard drive.
VMs, will need more ram and compute than just containers, anything windows-y you’re looking at $$$ for the hardware.
Jellyfin is the new Plex. Transcoding needs oomph.
Also, Google Drive is stupid reliable. The amount of user data that Google Drive permanently loses due to hard drive and datacenters failures (incl fires flood bugs real and software) is astronomically small.
Since you don’t need a lot of storage, if I assume you care about photos, probably 6x14T manufacturer recertified drives for about $700 (off of serverpartdeals for example), and run RAIDZ2 ZFS (proxmox) - that’ll give you around 70TiB usable space.
You’ll still need backups for photos, maybe not security. You can strap a pi zero 2 to an 18TB wd elements, and periodically copy stuff over. Or you could get two of those drives and rotate them keeping one at the office.
RAM is just a function of how many VMs of what kind you want
You a gem!! This is perfect and pretty much what I’ve been scoping so far.
It got overwhelming looking at all the routes you can go but wondering am I over powering the server for what I need vs what ill use, and also the energy cost.
I did come across the N5105 Industrial Motherboard on aliexpress which seems like a steal having the cpu on it already. Any thoughts?
They also have 100$ Eypc 7551P but I think this route would give me a massive power draw which Id love to have access to that power but it would be every now and again, maybe.
Also wondered about the newer intel NUCs combined with a drive bay.
They do have a nice wee setup too.
I did recently upgrade my PC and im wondering if its better to sell these off as I’d get more out of reinvesting the money (FOr the CPU maybe a Ryzen3 2200G build.
Corsair TX550M
sus TUF X570pro
Ryzen 5600x
Trident DDR4 3600 2x8gb
Quadro FX3800 (Sitting in the closet)
for low power you want to go for an intel system or some select amd apu systems.
It depends on power usage though, maybe the best thing is to put a 5700g in your old computer if you don’t have that high power cost (this is a comparison between power cost and cost of hardware). the x570 is still a power hungry system though.
For example, my server can use about 5W where a x570 with 5600X is probably closer to 30-50W. Where i live 50W continious costs 200 Euro per year.
Looking at your post you want to have a relatively powerful system to run proxmox with multiple VM’s and hard drives. I would just build a new system with an intel cpu with multiple hard drives and 64gb of ram. the harddrives are the most expensive part if you want a lot of storage.
In comparison my nas is a intel i5 12400 with 2 ssd’s and 3 16tb hard drives. it uses about 30W idle and this is without parking the hard drives. (the limitation is somewhat in my motherboard). My small virtualisation server uses 20W but i think i can get it down to 5-7W if i stop using the nvme drive.
Transcoding is going to be tricky in a vm! I just caved and use my nas for plex which is just bare metal debian.
( you can check my forum thread here Nutral's HomeLab blog )
somewhat off topic, but you may want to consider a small ecoflow / bluetti / anker battery (that doubles as a free UPS), that you can charge at night 20%-80%, and then use during the day. I don’t know exactly what country you live in and how complicated it’d be to ship these to you.
This is because the difference from what you have there, and those things you mentioned, and e.g. maybe some other system isn’t that big for your use cases.
And because, you already have the parts, you know they work, you’ll never get an ideally “fair” price when buying and selling stuff and it’s always a hassle to wait for the perfect buyers/sellers to show up. I think it’s not worth it.
From what I’m observing your biggest hurdle would probably not be the hardware, but probably your own lack of experience with these things. Additional cost in electricity over the next year or two is probably marginal at best.
You should be able to either use PCIe passthrough that GPU, or run jellyfin on the proxmox host itself insade an LXC container (aka “system container”).
One thing I’d maybe consider is adding more ram, but since you have 16G you can start with that and see how it goes. I don’t know how much game servers need.
I pay the same during the night as well as the day so this won’t help me. (and even if i did the difference would not be big enough to justify a battery). (and the netherlands is not great for solar panels especially with a roof that is slanted the wrong way.)
more clouds, more lattitude, mostly east-west roof with some buildings overshadowing west roof, especially during winter. Also, many tradesmen are of dubious expertise here despite high labor rates.
… but I used globalsolaratlas.info and some hourly/monthly average data to build a giant spreadsheet that kind of acts as a sim, … and nowadays 400W panels are common.
… I don’t have the delta/ecoflow/anker stuff, but I have about 250W-300W of “base load” and an EV, and so I was considering doing something there.
At least we have “EV charging rates” from 2am-5am, which are useful for charging batteries of all kinds. Our pricing is roughly 10c EV charging rate, 25c night, 45c day, 55c peak.
I’m jealous of Finland / Norway and other places where they end up paying wholesale_spot+fixed_provider_rate_x as their electricity price most of the year.
anyway, even at 1 euro / kwh – doesn’t matter for small personal server which will idle most of time and will be a huge time and effort sink. …
it might make a small difference if you have a couple of servers + wifi + camera + random iot stuff drawing power, but then you apply a solution that takes care of it alltogether on house-wide level.