Yeremyah777

Sadly just a TV, phone and desktop HTPC app

I know this topic has come about occasionally, but I have yet to see anyone actually try to do this and post the results. I am a 4k plex WHORE. Because of this, I have to transcode on the regular, and it takes a TON of processing power. Since I don't have a dedicated GPU to offload the transcode, and my servers are pretty old, I am thinking about "building" a cluster box to handle all of the processing. My question is, would this be worth the time and energy to do so? Currently, I have no electric bill, and have a lot of time since I became disabled. Unfortunately, I am VERY budget limited now. In the past, I was able to obtain a decent amount of older equipment as listed below. I Included devices: 1x - Dell Poweredge r410 with dual Xeon e5620 Procs and 8GB 1866 ECC-DDR3 1x - HP Proliant ml350 g5 with dual Xeon e5620 procs and 48GB 1866 ECC-DDR3 and an Nvidia gt 1030 1x - HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 with dual Xeon E5-2650 v2 procs and 64GB 1866 ECC-DDR3 HP Smart Memory. Altogether I have 17 different HDDs/SSDs I'm not concerned with the storage solution, as I have plenty of HBAs and Raid controller cards. I DO wish I could pool all these devices together to make the processing capabilities even stronger. I am running OpnSense on the r410 right now, which is complete overkill. The ml350 is nothing more than a download Server, and the DL380 is running unRaid with plex, and some Game servers on it. Plex alone will tax the system to 80 or even 90% transcoding just one or two 4k streams. I cannot afford a new GPU; the 1030 cannot transcode, and my 1070 in my gaming rig is used constantly for streaming to Twitch, gaming, and whatever else. The gaming rig has a 5950X, and only 16GB or 3600-DDR4. So between everything, I would like to have my gaming machine, and have the ability to run all 3 Servers under a cluster OS like Proxmox, and feed all of the cores/threads/RAM and storage to unRaid, so I can run OpnSense as a VM, and all of the dockers. It'd also be nice to have the processing leftover to run some experimental VMs, an IOS box, and some more docker containers. Is this a bad idea? Should I consider something else? Should I leave everything as is? Does anyone have good advice for testing to see if this would work as a cluster. I understand that mis-matching CPU eras in a cluster is not the best idea, but I'm not sure if there's a better alternative. I will be making some money over the summer, and upgrading the CPUs in the DL380p to dual Xeon E5-2697 V2 procs, but I'd like to add that processing power to the mix, instead of relying entirely on a single machine to do the transcodes when it'll still tax the crap out of them transcoding 4k to 1080p and 2k videos. I do have direct play enabled, but even then, It kicks the crap out of the system resources. Any ideas, or advice would be sincerely appreciated.

Okay... here I am a week later, $100 spent on some newer tech, flashing the Mobo SAS to IT mode as well. and now I have the same issue. It's now 5.9MB/s and hits as high as 8MB/s, but I think this is still too low. I openly admit that I am VERY new to this, bu love this software solution and appreciate any advice I can obtain to tune this system to perform at peak performance. dunham-server-diagnostics-20190511-0436.zip

Oh lame... I didn't even see that. Are there any HBA cards that you would recommend since i have 2-10TB drives, 1-8TB drive, 4-4TB drives and a 3TB drive?

I have 2 of these (Gigabyte GC-RLE086-RH LSI 1068E HBA card 8-port SAS /SATA PCI-E array card=3081e) enroute to me. will these be good enough, or should I go for something like this? (LSI SAS 9211-8i 8-port 6Gb/s PCIe HBA RAID SATA Controller card=M1015)

Okay... so I had a drive start to go bad. I was running on an old AMD FX 9590 CPU on a Sabertooth Motherboard. I have 10 drives with 2 Parity Drives. I moved the whole system over to a dual Xeon x5670 system with 32GB of ECC Memory on a SuperMicro X8DTH Motherboard. I have a 1070 and a 1070ti GPU. All of this just to run Plex and a VM. I also have 2-240GB SSDs for cache. All of this power, and when I started the new system, it detected an error on disk 1. So I bought a new 8TB HDD and replaced the disk and started the parity/sync rebuild. All of this information and diagnostics info to ask why the heck my rebuild is this slow? I have more than enough processing power, and the speeds of all of the drives should be fast enough. So what's the issue? server-diagnostics-20190503-0217.zip