March 18, 201610 yr I'm looking for advice and thinking a bit out loud here hoping for some other opinions: I currently have a UNRAID setup that's getting a bit long in the tooth: Supermicro X8sil-f Intel G6950 8GB ECC 20-bay Norco ~42TB available (across 20 drives) 40% free space Historically for the past 5-6years I've used this for nothing more than storage but over the past year I've discovered how powerful Plex and dockers are so I'm now running the following: Plex Owncloud OpenVPN-AS Crashplan (with intention to offer service to my parents/inlaws) I've just started looking at KVM and playing around with that (I have a separate server that houses my home/work labs). Also looking at adding other dockers such as SABnzbd etc. I've finally got my media organized and have been doing a fair amount of syncing to mobile devices but last night was the first time I streamed to my roku3 and it caused some buffering issues during transcoding at first (eventually it was fine but it was a rough first 10-15 minutes). Passmark for the G6950 is right under the 2k mark. I've considered buying a $70.00 xeon x3470 which would get me to 5k passmark and allow (according to plex) 2-streams which is the most I can see my family using right now. Also considering buying new MB/proc and buying a separate system as well to migrate to as most of my drives are of the 1.5-2TB variety and are well past their warranty period (replaced 2x 4TB in the past 3 weeks). Curious if anyone has been down this road before and what route you went? Assuming I did upgrade to a new MB/proc what should I look at--the one feature I absolutely will not give up is IPMI 2.0. Thanks for any/all advice!
March 18, 201610 yr If your G6950 struggled that much with a single stream then it's possible that either a) your other Dockers are using a fair amount of CPU, or b) you have high bit-rate source material and the 2,000 Passmark rule of thumb may not be working for you. Plex transcodes to disk - it sounds like it couldn't keep up in real time and only struggled until you got to a lower bit rate passage and it got a little ahead. In either case a) or b), a 5,000 Passmark CPU would help a lot but it wouldn't give you a lot of headroom for other Dockers or VMs. Current generation Xeon's have a lot more horsepower, as do Core i5 and i7 processors. I assume given your desire for IPMI you want to stay with server level components like ECC RAM? Supermicro and ASRock Rack motherboards are popular. Would you stay in the Norco?
March 18, 201610 yr Might want to check that plex is transcoding to unraid temp in ram and not to disk... PS: that chip is only 1800 pass mark and only 1000 single thread. Id get 2000 per thread min for 1080p.
March 19, 201610 yr Author Thanks for the feeback-- I read where transcoding to RAM wasn't recommended with the new versions of Plex. Yes server level components--big fan of Supermicro motherboards and have never owned an ASRock motherboard. My primary search has pointed me to the Intel E3-v5 as a potential option in a C236 motherboard? Thoughts? If I do upgrade I'm pretty sure I'll move to the Norco 4224 with the extra bays unless there's a better option out there? Don't really have a budget--if I do upgrade I'll upgrade to last me another several years and not worry about it.
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