This is my first post, so any issues with formatting or the questions please let me know and I’ll fix them as soon as I can.
I’ve done a bit of research into the prebuilt synology systems and whilst I’m sure they’re good, I’d love to go my own way and make sure I spend my money in the right way. I don’t have a set budget as I want to go for fairly new parts
I have lots of experience building PCs but this is my first server build and want to get a feel of the right hardware for the job as well as software.
My main requirements are as follows:
Access the media from anywhere, be it a phone, console or anywhere in between
Capable of up to 10 concurrent streams (this is not that important but is a nice to have)
Be able to host ~my own webserver and~ gitlab
EDIT:
Be able to use my vpn provider (express vpn) or another provider if need be
For personal / internal use or to put out on the web? My general rule is never host a website from within your home network, especially not on a server hosting personal data. Not worth the risk.
Do you have a budget for the rest of the kit? Yu would do fine with a used server or brand new ryzen system but it helps to understand what your price range is.
Don’t forget to budget for backup disks and power bills
Noted, I currently have a webserver that I am paying for but would ideally like to cut the cost of it.
As for a budget, I would be happy to go for a brand new ryzen system along with 12TB of storage with backup, so perhaps 2x12TB drives. I don’t have much media currently on my home PC, it’s roughly around 6TB.
If you do really want a locally hosted website consider setting up a secure DMZ at home with a firewall and a couple of virtual machines to separate off the web facing stuff from your home network. You can always set up a tunnel for content you want access to over the other side (ie, setting up a personal cloud).
We have different definitions of modest
For this investment definitely go new, you will enjoy the experience more. I’d suggest Ryzen 3000, with a x570 board for good iommu and plenty of ports. At least 16GB ram.
12TiB of data can be hosted on a pair of drives but I’d you want high resilience consider RAIDZ1 with 3 drives, if you go Linux or freenas that is. Therefore look at the options for both two 12TiB or three 8TIB. They should be cost neutral and performance identical.
For OS, either freenas with Plex, openmedia vault or just plain Linux with SMB. The deciding factor is whether you want to transcode in real time or if you have patience to store only transcoded copies of things. I prefer this model as it means I use less disk space and can play all my media with Kodi.
Don’t waste money on cache SSDs but consider your future growth and data needs. You may want to look at fast networking which will eat into your budget.
So I think I’ve found what I want for the board and CPU, was thinking an Asus Strix X570-E paired with a Ryzen 7 3800x. As for RAM I was wondering if I need ECC memory or just regular memory will do?
I’ll take a proper look into the 2x12 vs 3x8 I would probably go Linux/FreeNAS
As for the other factors you mentioned I’ll consider them strongly, I was thinking perhaps a small nvme drive just as a boot drive instead of as a caching drive
Are you actually sure that motherboard will actually use ECC memory as intended? I looked through the documentation and saw no mention of ECC anywhere, either in the manual or memory qualification list. Even if the motherboard works with ECC memory, how can you be sure it actually is correcting errors?
As for a media server, I’ve never had an issue I could attribute to not having ECC memory but maybe your mileage may vary. I keep backups of my media files separately though so I’m not sure how useful it would be for such a server. Its not like you are dealing with mission critical data here…
