March 8, 201313 yr So I am looking at building a server for unRAID. On said server I plan on mainly running Plex and who knows what other add ons... So far this is my build PCPartPicker part list: http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/ImP4 Price breakdown by merchant: http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/ImP4/by_merchant/ Benchmarks: http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/ImP4/benchmarks/ CPU: AMD FX-8120 3.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($159.99 @ Newegg Canada) Motherboard: Asus M5A97 R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($94.99 @ Canada Computers) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($157.19 @ DirectCanada) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($157.19 @ DirectCanada) Case: Antec Twelve Hundred ATX Full Tower Case ($158.98 @ DirectCanada) Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($59.99 @ Canada Computers) Optical Drive: LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer ($17.06 @ DirectCanada) Total: $820.39 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-03-08 13:32 EST-0500) I am not certain if it is better to go with an 8 core FX chip or a 4 cor A10 chip, if someone could offer a suggestion that would be great. The intended usage is Plex streaming 1080p high bit rate video with 5.1 audio to 3 devices at once. RAM has been omitted as I already have 4GB's to spare at home. Can anyone see anything wrong with this build or offer suggestions to make it better/cheaper? My budget is under $900
March 8, 201313 yr ...not an AMD expert on recent technology but looking at your usecase, I think a quad-core is serious overkill. Streaming native FullHD content without transcoding is not a big deal...even a single core can saturate more than a single GBit network link. ...speaking of FullHD...your plans on using the optical drive are...? You don't need it for unRAID itself but if you plan to rip some data, why not going for a bluray drive...even a bluray writer for backups, maybe?
March 8, 201313 yr Author Ha ha ha ha, good point....Bad habit, didn't even really think when I added it.... Eventually I will have a blu-ray reader in there for ripping, time to save $18! Do you run Plex at all? If so what are you running it with? EDIT: I am going to be using the onboard SATA ports for the time being, will I encounter issues with unRAID when I move it to a dedicated SATA card?
March 8, 201313 yr Do you run Plex at all? If so what are you running it with? ...installing it "as we speak" on my hackintosh (which is a VM on my ESXi build) to try it. Planning to replace my (smaller) minidlna VM to serve my audio devices and to transcode to my TV and family ipods (touch). For FullHD I am using XBMC on dedicated HTPCs. My server cpu is a small quad-core XEON with a VM for recording DVB-S.. The box can record 4-6 HD signals, strip commercials from recordings and stream two blurays concurrently....(the NAS VM inside is not unRAID though).
March 8, 201313 yr For FullHD I am using XBMC on dedicated HTPCs. My server cpu is a small quad-core XEON with a VM for recording DVB-S.. The box can record 4-6 HD signals, strip commercials from recordings and stream two blurays concurrently....(the NAS VM inside is not unRAID though). Just out of curiosity how are you stripping out the commercials? Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
March 8, 201313 yr Just out of curiosity how are you stripping out the commercials? I am using ARGUS-TV in a windoze VM for recording. ARGUS allows for calling external programs for postprocessing. Here I used comskip (donator version for HD support) but have now moved on to TSDoctor (which also can integrate comskip). TSDoctor can repair/clean recordings and can cascade different methods for commercial detecting/cutting.if the first method finds nothing, it will move on and eventually calls comskip.
March 9, 201313 yr I am using ARGUS-TV in a windoze VM for recording. ARGUS allows for calling external programs for postprocessing. Here I used comskip (donator version for HD support) but have now moved on to TSDoctor (which also can integrate comskip). TSDoctor can repair/clean recordings and can cascade different methods for commercial detecting/cutting.if the first method finds nothing, it will move on and eventually calls comskip. Thank you for that, think I can see my next project on the horizon ;-) In regard to the build, I can vouch for the case and hard drives you've selected - have them myself and have been very happy with both. Regarding your question of core count on a CPU - my understanding is that Plex will utilize all CPU resources that are available when transcoding. Therefore the trade off is (probably) power consumption & initial cost of CPU vs time you're prepared to wait for viewing of a transcoded video to start/skip forward & number of clients. However, if you're using Direct Play in Plex (playing the video on a device which has hardware and network connection capable of playing the video in its native formats and bitrate ) transcoding is not done - therefore no significant CPU usage. So CPU choice really depends to some degree on what devices you will be playing video back on, and how many of them will require transcoding. It's worth looking at the Plex forums to see if you can get some idea what has been tried and tested on servers using those CPUs, this should give you some idea of maximum client numbers and time taken to start streaming. Hopefully this will help with your choice! Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
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