Hi Guys,

 

I built my first unraid server a few years ago and love it. 

 

Model: Custom

M/B: Supermicro - X10SRi-F

CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-1650 v3 @ 3.50GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 384 kB, 1536 kB, 15360 kB

Memory: 32 GB (max. installable capacity 512 GB)

 

 

This is what I am running now and it works amazing. It hosts my plex, sonarr,radarr,freepbx, 2 vms and a buch of other dockers and plugins. I have a pretty heavy plex load and it is starting to finally bog down. I am usualy transcoding 7-10 plex streams and running the other stuff. I was thinking of building a new "server" most likely 1u that I could move most of this off to. I would keep plex on the first machine and let the knew one handle all the other stuff.

 

Thinking about running dual cpu but not sure if dual cpu (older cheaper cpu) vs newer single cpu higher core count would be better. I really would like something fast. Can you please make suggestions as I would like to start narrowing down my choices and getting the build started

 

thinking somethine like this : Intel Xeon E5-1650 v4 @ 3.60GHz

for single cpu setup. gives me roughly 14000 on benchmark and its around 700 bucks

motherboard I would like to stick with supermicro

 

even if I do dual cpu I dont mind staying in the 5-6 hundred dollar mark for each cpu. I would really like something fast as it will give me a little  more life before I have to upgrade

 

Thanks

 

peter

 

 

Plex transcoding is heavily multi-threaded and in my experience not overly sensitive to clock speed - it loves cores.  I'd be inclined to keep your existing setup and move Plex onto an inexpensive E5-26xx from eBay with more cores. Just an idea... 

Edited July 2, 20179 yr by tdallen

1 hour ago, tdallen said:

Plex transcoding is heavily multi-threaded and in my experience not overly sensitive to clock speed - it loves cores.  I'd be inclined to keep your existing setup and move Plex onto an inexpensive E5-26xx from eBay with more cores. Just an idea... 

 

 

 

I haved toyed with this idea alot. Concerns i had are as follows:

 

if I(sorry if idont put spaces, my space bar button is messedupand i have appointment with apple today) If i move plex to the new machine but stillhave all the data on the old then it has to pull all that data accross network before it can transcode. If it keepit on that machine then no need for that and it would have 6 core 12 thread just for it self. And the new machine can do the rest. I was thinking/looking at r710dell server which is cheap and alot of processing power for vm and downloading but not evergy efficient. 

 

Would i be better with old technology server (like dell r710) vs whitebox server build that is more expensive but more efficient?

 

I amat a loss for this answer..I can tell you one thing. A malfunctioning space bar is seriously annoying

 

Thanks againfor any help

 

Peter

I think you are right about having the data local on the Plex machine.  7-10 streams is a lot, eventually you are going to hit network limits if you are pulling the media to the Plex server as well as streaming it to clients.  Would you consider having the Plex machine run unRAID and store your media there?  I.e. two full servers with different purposes?  Or you were also considering the dual CPU path, would you simply replace what you have with a dual CPU setup?

 

Old technology servers are a mixed bag, IMO.  If you are just starting off they can be a great way to get going.  But, there are a number of considerations.  Heat, noise, power consumption, SAS vs. SATA, rack mount vs. tower, older CPUs, etc.  Since you've been doing this a while and have an idea what you want, the question is whether you can get exactly what you want.  In the case of the Dell R710 you'd have to get a high end one, the Xeon X55/X56 chips they usually came with are older and slower than the E5 you have, so you'd need two fast ones for things to add up.

I was thinking of keeping the one i have and letting it use all 12 core/threads just for plex and move downloading unrarring vms to another machine. dont know at what point overkill kicks in on a downloadf machine. I can tell you i have no patience for unrar and repairing...like to see those go fast so ssd is a must but will a newer xeon out perform an older one on this task?

 

 

I suspect it would be very difficult to tell the difference between the E5-1650v4 you're thinking about and the E5-1650v3 that you already have.  There wasn't a lot of change from Haswell to Broadwell.  Slightly faster clock speed, slightly better memory bandwidth.  Of course, with two computers splitting the load you've got a lot more resources to work with.