Im living in germany, so electricity is very expensive (currently 38 cents per kWh). Because of that I am on the search for a efficient 1u/2u system that can run my docker images such as Sonarr, Radarr, Audiobookshelf, Overseerr and so on via Proxmox. I have a Plex instance running on a 4u Supermicro server (via truenas scale). Because that server uses about 150 watts at idle, Im only turning it on if needed. That works for me. But it would be cool, if I could instead also use the 1u/2u server for running plex (including transcoding) and the 4u just for storage. I don’t know if Plex plays nicely with the fact, that the nas would be offline a lot, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.
Something like a ARM Server that sips power would be great, but I don’t know if that’s really a thing for my environment. The power usage at idle should be as low as possible, since the server won’t get that much of traffic.
How much storage do you need and how much are you willing to spend?
Asus has an all-NVMe NAS that would probably work in your situation, but at considerable cost. Alternatively, using a low-power CPU (Ryzen 5000 series, or 4600G for onboard graphics) on an equally low power board (A520, B550) with a Pico PSU and a PCIe to quad-NVMe adapter board would probably do the same, but for significantly less cost. ARM may sip power, but if Plex doesn’t run on it, there’s little use getting that
Ah yes my bad, you’re right. Plex still doesn’t support ARM. So there goes that option. The budget is around 2000€. There is really not that big of a need for a lot of space, since I intend on keeping my Supermicro Server for mass storage. It would than probably be mounted via SMB inside the Plex container or something like that. Really didn’t dig into this for now. But maxing out the storage for the budget while keeping the best efficiency as possible is of cause also an option. I would probably go for that one. A high priority is also that the server can be mounted inside my rack. I have everything mounted inside my rack (including my PC which is connected via fiber & Icron dock to my desk in a totally different room) so some kind of rack mount chassis must be included in the calculation. Going bigger than 2u seems like a waste of space for such a rather low power system, but just in case it would also be okay to go bigger.
May not be that big of a footprint-- but $$ may spike, for chasing compactness
Are your existing drives flash or disks? Having swappable bank(s) a necessity? or perk?
How many drives are you currently working with? Would it change? [+/-]
Are you dealing with encoding? [having a dGPU, would perform better / more format support]
Given the lack of information I’m going to guess that most of this is caused by storage and/or the fact that the system cannot go into low power mode due to processes running and switching hardware won’t do much in terms of power consumption.
Thank you for your kind replies. I think the solution proposed by @bryan_v sounds very promising.
It seems my wording caused some confusion (sorry about that, English is not my first language), so let me clarify.
My current setup consists of:
A 24 HDD bay Supermicro 4U chassis
Xeon Silver 4215R
32 gigs of DDR 4 ECC RAM
Supermicro X11SPi-TF mainboard
12x spinning metal in the form of 18TB WD Ultrastar disks
This system runs TrueNAS Scale, which in turn runs applications like Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, and so on. It contains all of my Blu-ray rips in MKV format (uncompressed). That’s why it requires so much space—one Lord of the Rings movie easily takes up 100 GB in 4K uncompressed, just as an example. You could argue whether this makes sense, but that’s not the topic of this thread. Currently, this NAS is only turned on when I want to watch a movie. The rest of the time, it stays completely powered off.
There are also 3 Raspberry Pi’s in use:
One for Home Assistant
One for OctoPrint
One for Pi-hole
These services run 24/7, which is why they are not hosted on my NAS. The Home Assistant instance also runs containers like Portainer, Music Assistant, Nginx Proxy Manager, and more.
Apart from that, I’m running a lot of UniFi gear for networking, and my PC is also mounted inside the rack.
So, what do I want to do?
I want to:
Get rid of the Pi’s. It’s a cool platform, but those SD cards are just ticking time bombs, especially the one running my Home Assistant instance, which manages over 100 Zigbee devices and more.
Move all apps off the NAS so that it becomes a dedicated NAS and nothing more. If my plan to move Plex while keeping the MKVs on the NAS doesn’t work out, it might stay there, but every other app (Radarr, Sonarr, etc.) should be moved, so they’re accessible 24/7 - without me watching my power bill exploding.
Move containers installed in the Home Assistant instance that aren’t really “Home Assistant-related” (like Nginx Proxy Manager). I’ve misused Home Assistant for that, simply because it’s the only 24/7 device in my setup that can run containers without driving up my power bill… you know the drill.
So, I want to combine all these services into one (as power-efficient as possible) box that can be installed in my rack. A 2U form factor would be ideal, but larger is fine too. The budget is about €2000.
So yes, it’s possible in theory. But only for a really low power instance (maybe if you just plan on using Plex as a media server for music). I don’t think, the Pi would have enough power to stream a 1080p un compressed video file somewhere not to mention a 4k one. Well, it would be an interesting project to say the least. The thing is, I have the need for transcoding as well. Often only for subtitles, but sometimes also for downloading movies onto my phone for watching on the go. I guess that would literally take ages on a Pi.
Recommend keeping the RPi for Home Assistant. Unless you need more processing power, the RPi is going to be the most energy efficient setup (HAOS becomes annoying as a VM). You just need to streamline the setup by:
a) Grab a NVMe or SATA hat/carrier for the Pi. Check out Jeff Geerling’s Github for some ideas. You can also 3d print a mount for the drive if you end up with a 2.5" drive
b) Retire the Octoprint Pi and keep it as a cold spare in case your HAOS Pi dies.
Separating the “Media NAS” and “Everything Else NAS” is also probably a good idea. I suspect if you remove all media and “N-1” software isos, your total size will be <4TB. This should fit on a compact, low-power NAS.
Depending on the depth of your rack, and your preference I would recommend one of the following chassis:
a) MyElectronics 2U chassis (I mentioned earlier); or
b) InWin IW-R200-02N short depth chassis, if you can find a local supplier; or
c) a used Supermicro Chassis short depth (523L-505B is my favourite 2U chassis for these uses, but it is hard to find)
d) drop down to 1U because you probably do not need the extra space, so something like the Inwin IW-RF100 is a great option.
If you do not need a lot of performance and want lowest idle-power, get a Asrock N100 mATX, then:
Get a 2U chassis for compatibility (also you do not need to buy PCIe Risers)
Get 2x 512GB Intel S3510 or Intel S4510 to use as OS drives (you can use 1x drive if you do not need to mirror the OS)
Get a 2x used 4TB U.2 drives, Intel P4510 or Kioxia/Toshiba CM5 drives recommended (most are in China/HK now, but try local first, you may get lucky)
Get a M.2 to SFF-8643 adapter (Amazon or Aliexpress, but you get the idea) - this is for the M.2 slot (x2 electrical)
Get 2x SFF-8644 to U.2 (SFF-8639) cables: Supermicro example, but everyone has them
Connect the U.2 drives using the cables and adapters. These are your main storage drives. You can mirror, stripe, or use single disks. Because the ports are x2, your I/O will be ~60% the max or 1.8GB/s out of the max 3GB/s. They are bulletproof drives and will probably last another 10-15 years.
For network, get a low profile Intel X540-DA1 or DA2 card and use the x1 slot. This will give you low power 10G when you use a DAC. If you cannot find a X540, an X520 or CX3 card will work, but you won’t have advanced features like native virtual NICs (virtual functions) and will use a little more power.
For OS, if you prefer to use VMs install Proxmox. If you like containers, use TrueNAS Scale and follow the guide on this forum on how to install Docker and Portainer (TrueNAS would be my recommendation.) TrueNAS will also allow you to create NFS and SMB shares at the host OS level instead of inside a VM.
If you want more power, I/O, or storage, you can either:
Get an Asrock Rack X470D4U(-2T) or X570D4U(-2T); with an AM4 CPU, if you want lots of PCIe lanes with bifurcation and IPMI; or
Get an Erying motherboard from Aliexpress if you want low power and performance, but no PCIe bifurcation, and do not mind playing with the BIOS (Wendell, GN Steve, and Jeff from Craft Computing have done reviews on these boards); or
Wait for the new AM5 boards like Supermicro H13SAE-M, AsRock B650D4U3-2Q/BCM (2x 25G SFP28) or MSI D3052 (also 2x25GbE) which are due in Europe between Oct and Dec this year. You can use these boards with either 8000-series 35W AM5 CPUs, BIOS limit a 7000-series CPU with eco-mode and/or PPT, or just use a stock AM5 CPU (they all idle at the same power)
Whatever you end up building will probably last you 7-10 years.
I think something like this could probably replace all that in one chassis. Put one of the lower power 65W Epyc 4004 CPUs in it, which I am sure would be enough for your needs, and you’re off to the races.
The thing is, anything with spinning disks is going to suck a lot of power no matter what they’re in as it’s the disks that really take the power, not the CPU. I think it was Serve The Home that did a video on this. If I can find it, I will link it. Perhaps replacing the spinners with SSDs would lower power required to operate enough to offset the cost.
Get a rack shelf and an odroid h4+ or h4 ultra with the 4x ssd (type-3) case. There’s also the option to get the smallest case (type-1) and slap the ssds in a 3x 5.25" bay to 4x 3.5" bay (or better yet, a 1x 5.25" to 4x 2.5" bay - the CMR-425 is nice) from Chieftec (they’re more available in Europe, so go for them if you can), IcyDock or IStarUSA.
Alternatively, get a 1U or 2U case (rosewill make some good 2U cases, idk about 1U) and get a board with an intel n100, n97 or i3 n305, with a pico-PSU and 4 SSDs.
Slap proxmox on it and make a zfs pool for exporting SMB and NFS.
Try moving to Jellyfin if you can.
Time to learn to Netboot your Pi to run root-on-nfs on a zfs ssd pool (assuming your pi is wired).
Alternatively, install Alpine on your SD card. The default alpine pi install is the diskless mode, which means alpine will run from RAM. Workable on the 4GB+ versions (maybe even the 2GB model), but terrible for the 1GB model. The 1GB model will probably work with pi-hole though, if you disable logging. Octoprint might also work on alpine, but idk the Home Assistant requirements.
I don’t like SPOFs. Doing a SSD NAS + Hypervisor combo is kind of a SPOF, even with the rpi’s (assuming you go with root-on-nfs instead of alpine diskless install), but at least it’s a usable solution. The least I’m asking you is to power on your big server once a month to take backups of the new build you have, no matter if it’s going to be an h4+ / ultra, or anything else.
The H4+ and Ultra have an intel GPU, which support quicksync.
Well, I guess I will take on the Project to see if a Raspberry Pi could be used as a Media server. Since I am purchasing a bunch of Raspberry PIs to create a Pi cluster anyway, I might as well try. Who knows I might write a WiKi on how to use a Rassberry Pi as a media server.
Tom from Switched to Linux has been running an rpi4 as a Kodi Media Server (local storage on a USB HDD) for years now. But this would count more as a HTPC. I see the hardware selection for the jellyfin project asks users to stay away from pre-11th gen intel J and N cpus (I’m pretty sure the j3455 would be fine though) and recommend stuff like 12th gen and later (so n100, n97 and n305).
They also say that rpi, even pi 5, can’t run it well. Probably they meant for hardware encoding. They recommend rk3588 boards. So basically radxa rock 5 and orange pi 5. This chip has h.264 and h.265 8-bit encode and decode.
I’m kinda shocked to see Apple Silicon as the best recommendation, above all else. But not the Asahi version (they even say to not use jellyfin on macs if you are running asahi), but on macOS ().
You can probably run it on the pi, but the broadcom GPU probably doesn’t have hardware acceleration. Which might be fine for a single 1080p stream.
IDK how I completely forgot about the friendlyelec cm3588. Runs the same rk3588 and has 4x nvme slots and 2.5gbps NIC. That’ll probably be a great jellyfin device (and serve as a NAS on the side). Slap 4x 8TB nvme drives (doesn’t have to be the fastest, quad-level cell should be fine, because the 2.5G NIC is the weakest link anyway, but for local encoding, having 16TB nvme flash in stripped mirror would be great, at its low-power wattage).
A rpi can probably still run jellyfin, but no hardware encoding, so direct-stream basically. At which point, why are you running jellyfin and not just read the video files from a NFS export anyway…
Try obtaining a more fact-driven set of requirements.
How much compute is required? How much storage is required? How much storage performance is required? etc.
How do all the proposed solutions line up to these requirements? Do they offer enough compute/storage? etc.
Of the remaining proposals which is the one with the least power consumption.
Finally, don’t forget to tally up the power consumption of all devices remaining. Doesn’t seem to be an issue in your case, but want to mention it anyway.
I like my Pi’s and am not too worried about SD cards (I like the netboot idea mentioned), but then again I don’t have that many devices connected to HA. I like the hw independence of running services on independent hw. I find them to be too limited in compute to work as main 24/7 platform.
Same for N100. Idle power consumption is great, but once you load it up with services it’s not so sippy compared to other platforms with higher compute potential.
Beware of power requirements for storage. Enterprise U.2 drives typically consume 5W at idle with spikes of up to 20W. They also require extra cooling, with the required fans using another couple of Ws. They’re reliable like tanks and very fast in comparison to SATA, though.
A B550 (mATX) mobo with an AMD 5700G (iGPU) CPU only consumes ~20W idle, but has lots of compute capacity. I assume a Zen4 version (7700X) paired with the right mobo even more so.
Consider using such a platform with a single m.2 nvme (up to 8TB) as always-on platform. Sync changes to mass storage on a regular (daily?) schedule.
Finally, in case you’re not aware: Wolfgang has focused on finding the best solution to your problem on his youtube channel.
It would be very time consuming, but if you transcode all your .mkv files to h.265 .mp4 files you can probably disable all transcoding on the plex server and only allow direct streaming, and save some space as well on your HDDs. That codec and container format should work with the majority of devices out there now days (phones, smart TVs, firestick, etc) and allow you to use almost no resources on the plex server (thus very little power consumption and low end hardware). Though it also would mean if you are in an area with not enough bandwidth to play the file (like 4k stuff) in original quality you will get a lot of buffering. If you spend more time with it and transcode 2 copies, one “original quality” and one lower quality then you solve the low bandwidth buffering issue as well by using up more storage space for the 2nd copy.
You could also add an icydock 6 bay 2.5 unit (converts a 5.25" bay) in your new chassis that you want to get, and buy a few 2-4TB sata SSDs and move your “most used media” or currently watching TV series over to that. That way you have a very low power set of storage that can always be on with your plex server and in use, and you can fire up the rest of the HDD storage at points you want to transfer something over or find something not on your low power array.
I am very aware of Kodi and what it is capable of. I used to use Kodi to circumvent the limitations of using the free versions of Emby and Plex on Android tablets. Thanks for the information you provided; it is appreciated.
Why would I want to have all my 4K movies in a direct stream format using Jellyfin or Plex instead of a direct stream app like Kodi? Most Smart TV app stores don’t provide direct stream apps like Kodi.
Jellyfish, lol. I’m certain I wrote jellyfin. To quote a user, you can just highlight the whole text you want quoted, and then click the “Quote” button.
If you highlight less text, then highlight more, discourse will only quote the original part, so you have to unselect and then highlight all you want quoted
Right. I forgot proprietary platforms exist, where you lack control over your hardware… I live in a really comfy bubble, what can I say? Alright, that makes sense.
Kind of a nitpick, but kodi isn’t really a direct stream software, but a media player. It just reads media from a file system (local or remote). Kodi has plugins to play remote media (and even jellyfin plugins, one which syncs your media locally from a jellyfin server, another that acts like classic kodi remote add-ons).
I somewhat like the kodi experience, although I haven’t used it in years. When I did, I used it on windows and android, mostly for the youtube add-on (before it started requiring your own dev api key).
I also like the idea of doing transcoding beforehand and having 2 streaming options, but use a low-powered device as the server. It has its pros and cons tho’, like a big initial power usage (which you don’t know if you’re going to watch all your media, or even parts of it more than once) and storage utilization. On-the-fly conversion requires better hardware, but less storage. If I was into hollyweird movies, or any non-youtube entertainment, I would’ve probably went the initial transcoding route.
Thank you all for your valuable input. I would have never thought about all these options myself.
In the end, I think I will go for the following:
Minisforum AR900i - I also considered the Ryzen 7700X, but that option would probably cost more while having fewer features on board (like 2.5G LAN, 4 M.2 slots). Note: This applies to the ITX form factor.
4x4TB Gen4 NVMEs (Crucial P3 Plus). Enterprise U.2 drives would come in cheaper while offering more storage, but as @jode said, they also consume much more power. And yes, they will back up to my main NAS as well as to cloud storage, and they will be mirrored.
FX600 PSU from Silverstone.
2x 16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from Crucial (since the mainboard contains a laptop CPU).
All packed inside the 2U mini chassis from myelectronics.nl, as @bryan_v mentioned.
All of that should make a nice little machine that is efficient but also has the power to, for example, transcode something if needed. But of course, I am open to further feedback.
TIL TrueNAS + Portainer is a thing. Thank you, I will look into this.
I would love to move away from Plex. I tried Jellyfin for over two months, but there are still some quirks that keep me from switching. However, I have it running alongside Plex, testing out new releases from time to time.
Me neither. But in this case, it’s fine for me. It’s not like a lot of people will be connecting to this server, nor will my house burn down if, for example, the CPU fails (wink, wink - Intel). Would it be inconvenient? Yes. But a total nightmare? No. Even if my smart home system goes down, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, since all my devices are essentially dumb. That means I could still control them using their physical buttons if necessary.
I’ve thought about this option as well. It sounds like a good idea to have some limited space for current audiobooks, music, movies, etc., that can be accessed directly without having to wait 15 minutes for the NAS to boot up.
Have you considered just streaming your media via a network share using something like Kodi rather than transcading with plex? Of course, that might not work if you want to stream your media from outside of your local network… That would reduce power consumption.
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