Introduction & 112TB Server Build

[Chris Solo]

First time poster, long time lurker....  WAY TOO VERBOSE I know.  And I admit the 112TB in the title is not what I am going to have initially but the server I end up with should be capable of 112TB usable.

 

The adjective noob does not even begin to describe what I am when it comes to anything related to actually building a computer/server.  I have the "general" gist of what is involved, needed, etc.  My goal is to serve all of my media (BD rips, HDDVD rips, DVD rips as well as home movies and family pics) to all of the TVs in my home.  Most likely, not counting the dedicated home theater room, I would need capability of transcoding to four devices but that would be an extreme case.  This is going to be Plex based.  I downloaded Plex and played around with it on my editing workstation and was able to successfully stream content from a USB drive to a smart TV and a couple of Roku boxes with Plex apps so I like the interface and ease of use.  I am not sure how I will be handling media playback in my dedicated home theater room.  Building a server has been a top priority but a health scare derailed me. Currently, I have 14 1.5TB Western Digital green drives and 7 3TB Western Digital green drives that are backups of the 1.5 drives.  I use a Plugable USB dock connected to a DUNE Smart D1 media player and am able to feed 1080/23.976 to my processor, projector etc.  There is a Plex app for DUNE called EmPlexer but I have no experience with it so can't speak to it's reliability.  Ideally, I would like content passed unmolested to my Lumagen Processor which does an excellent job of deinterlacing and scaling SD content.  I was going to order a system from Lime Technology but I am confident I can DIY this and for less investment (might be wrong on BOTH counts).  Aside from the DUNE as a Plex client, the only other option for the home theater is a new HTPC or. and this is totally above my comprehension, XBMC running on the actual server with virtualization whereby the server would spit out all media over HDMI.  I don't care how I get the video onto the screen as long as my HD content is pure 1080/23.976 (or 24p or 30p depending on what the file contains) and I have support for all of the lossless audio codecs.

 

I have ordered a Rosewill RSV-L4500 case and if it ends up being filled with 8TB drives, I would have 112TB of usable storage.  Obviously I'm not starting that way.  I have no idea what I am getting in the way of Mobo, video card, cache drive, etc... You know the stuff that actually MAKES it a server.  But, I was planning on an 8TB or at the very minimum a 6TB drive for parity then use the 7 3TB drives I have to start with.  I would populate the rest of the server with 4 or 6TB drives as needed.  4TB are just the most cost effection option at this time it seems.  If I take all the media that is ripped so far (my entire HDDVD collection, majority of my BD collection) we are almost at 21TB.  I still have about 400 blu rays to rip and I do not reencode because I am watching this material on a sixteen foot wide 2.35 aspect ratio screen.  I am also ripping any DVDs that have not been replaced with blu ray, and some that I don't care about as much.  My rough math, estimating each BD at 30 gigs on average and each DVD at 5 gigs on average I am going to need to be at around 40TB here and now.  Then I need to account for growth.  I am going to update this thread as my build progresses, including pics of all of my triumphs and failures but in the mean time, (and yes I am using the search feature religiously) if any of you have any thoughts or suggestions, by all means chime in.  I will also edit as I decide on components.  The thing I am most curious about is how I should handle my home theater.  Thanks all.

 

CASE: Rosewill RSV-L4500 OR Norco 4220

 

HDDs: 7x 3TB Western Digital green drives to begin with

[interwebtech]

I am running Plex through a Dune HD too as well as 2 Plex clients. I have run EmPlexer but have recently switched to the newcomer on the Plex Forum for "Other Players" aka the Dune thread. This one is called "Dune Plex Catalog" or DPC and is in my opinion a superior implementation. The problem with either of these is they are developed my hobbyists who disappear for long periods.

 

Anyway, you won't need any CPU horsepower for playing via the Dune as it does direct access to the movie with no transcoding by Plex. The Rokus on the other hand, will need transcoding for almost all your titles due to its limited support for various HD content. So my point is you will need "some" CPU horsepower for the Rokus and should probably scale for a worst case scenario as in 4 streams transcoding at the same time. The experts will tell you that is Intel i7 or Xeon country and I would tend to agree (I went with AMD which is adequate for what I need now). At least 8 GBs RAM. An SSD (or 2) to run as cache drive for Plex to run on.

 

I could make a shopping list but truthfully there are many many options as far as what hardware to use.

[Helmonder]

Succes on your build, looks like a nice project !

[Chris Solo]

Thanks for the well wishes @Helmonder.  And @interwebtech, I had not heard about the other option for Plex on Dune.  I get you about making a shopping list.  The choices are truly mind boggling and everyone has their own opinion as to what is best, obviously.  I am going with a worst case scenario as far as transcoding even though the chance that everyone will be watching a different TV simultaneously is remote (pardon the pun).  And I am now wavering on the case.  I ordered the Rosewill but last night also ordered a Norco 4220.  I am reading pros and cons of both not counting price and drive capacity so I will end up returning one of them.

[TooManyMovies]

Very similar to what I'm trying to do.  When you figure it all out let me know lol

 

[switchman]

I would keep the Norco 4220.  Cages are great.  As far as the motherboard, if you can afford it, I would go with the Supermicro X10SL7-F, which I understand is used by LT in their server.  Maybe a Xeon E3-1276 v3 and 16Gb, 2x8Gb, of ECC memory.  That way you can expand to 32Gb if you ever need to.

 

The mother board will give you 14 SATA ports day one.  You could then add a SAS expander for another 8 when needed.  You should be able to cram a couple of SSDs in the case if you wanted to to use the extra 2 sata ports.

 

 

 

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c220/x10sl7-f.cfm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117317

[TooManyMovies]

Hijacking.... Sorry Mr Solo Switchman would you mind taking a look at my list for my new build?  I'm using a 4220.  It's actually right below this thread.

 

[Chris Solo]

Actually @TooManyMovies, I welcome your hijack After looking at your parts list it looks as though we are after similar things in our builds.  You should check out the Dune players for your home theater.  My has played everything I've thrown at it except for frame packed 3D.  Best of luck and I just may copy your build exactly haha.

 

[TooManyMovies]

Thanks for understanding.  A sixteen foot wide screen?  That's awesome. We are building a new home and with it a new theater.  I have actually planned to look into a b stock digital cinema projector and believe it or not, I'm planning to do a constant image height screen as well and pushing the size from 12 foot wide, which I have now, to 20 foot wide in the new theater.  No joke.  It's my dream.  Seems ludicrous but I have seen an Epson 6030, hope I'm correct on that model, at 20 foot wide on an outdoor screen just for kicks and have to say it was bright enough to watch.  I can imagine on a high gain screen in a light controlled room it would be great.  And that's a $3000 projector.

 

[1stRaven]

Sounds like a similar build to mine.

 

I am using a 24 bay rack mount server case with dual Opteron 2212 processors (6 cores @ 1.8ghz each) and 24Gb of ECC ram. Server cost me $200 (and $400 to ship it to the UK), with an additional £50 to add the 2nd processor and increase the ram. With this, I have been able to stream out to 7 devices so far, including 2 surface tablets, 2 mobile phones, a samsung TV, the WD box and a friends pc via the web app. Worked well but was more bottled necked via the cache drive's write speed via the cpu power in the end.

 

I use Plex DNLA Service for streaming out to a projector (an Epson TW-5900 in my case) but went down the WD Tv-live box to act as a simple player. This use to connect direct to my unraid server shares but due to issues scrolling through the large lists of folders, I switched it over to the DNLA stream from Plex. Still waiting on a Plex app for it so wouldn't recommend it at the moment unless you are happy with text only lists.

 

Total space is at 24Tb at the moment, with a 3Tb parity drive, a 2Tb cache drive and a mix of 1tb, 2tb and a single 3tb data drives. The plan will be to upgrade the 1Tb drives up to 3Tb drives as they fail, giving me around 60+Tb of storage in the end.

 

Hope that helps.