New here with New build

[xerox445]

Hi all,

 

After lurking around on the FreeNas forum for a few days, I've become so disgusted with the people over there, acting like the data they have contains the "meaning of life", or the human genome project...if you dont have a supermicro server your an idiot, nothing else compares. Its so offputting that I am changing the OS/software I am going with, and looking to get some info and input on my build for my use case.  

 

I am looking to basically build a better nas then out of the box systems, at the same price point, and have some fun building the server at the same time. My requirements are to be able to transcode 4k video, run plex, and have storage.  I've been using a old dlink 2 bay nas for years with 2 500g drives in raid0 for basically all of my storage, so my requirements for disk space are relatively small. 

 

Most of the parts are already intransit, so I have to work with what I have, but for the money i paid for it, I think I got some great deals.

 

Here is the build as follows: (this has some freenas terminology, sry)

 

Dell R720 Dual E5 - 2620 (looking to get a deal on some 26xx V2 to upgrade if this can't handle the transcoding 4k with plex)
Memory Installed 32gig 8 x 4
Hard Drives TBD I am open to suggestions I was thinking 6 2.5" 1tb drives with 1 or 2 SLOG SSDs?  The term SLOG is basiclly like a protected cache drive.  You can use NVME for this, I asssume you can do something similar with unraid.

 

 Im planning on installing a PCI to M.2 NVME card with a 128 or 256 NVME drive.  I don't know if you can use this cashe drive as the boot drive also, or I need a seperate SSD/ SD card.  I have the option of getting a Dual SD card module for about 50 bucks to load an OS onto that, but I dont know if that is viable with unraid/windows. Im thinking of going with 6 SAS drives, as from what I can tell and what I have read, the wiring on the backplane of my 720 will not allow sata drives to run in 6GB, I have to look into this still since I ordered a different raid controller.

Drive Bays 8 drive bays
Riser Board 2 x Riser Board with 2x PCI-e G2 x8 Slots Per Riser Board
Power Supply Dual Platinum 720W PS
Backplane Backplane for 8 x 2.5" SAS or SATA Drives
Ethernet Dell 2 Port gigabit / 2 port sfp+ (I have access to 1 gig copper sfps at work for free)
RAID Controller Dell H310 6Gbps SAS HBA w/ LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID
Remote Access Card Dell iDRAC7 Express Included

???Hardware transcoding via PLEX? if so I have a few vid cards laying around like RX550, 1050ti, 960 i can use if that is compatible 

 

Thanks in advance, hope to learn about this software in a much more positive environment

 

Dan

 

 

 

[Hoopster]

4 hours ago, xerox445 said:

 

Dell R720 Dual E5 - 2620 (looking to get a deal on some 26xx V2 to upgrade if this can't handle the transcoding 4k with plex)

At this point in time, hardware transcoding with Plex in a Linux docker requires the use of an Intel CPU with an iGPU and Quick Sync Video support.  If you want to transcode 4K/HEVC 10-bit (UHD)/H.265 you are going to to need at least a Kaby Lake generation CPU with iGPU (gen 7) or a Coffee Lake (gen. 8 ) CPU with iGPU.

 

In the Xeon family that is an E3 12x5 V6 (Kaby Lake) or an E-21xxG (Coffee Lake)

 

If your CPU can't do hardware transcoding of 4K video it can due brute strength transcoding in software, but, that is likely to heavliy tax the CPUs you mentioned.  4K transcoding requires a lot of CPU if not transcoding in hardware.  For example to do 4K on my Xeon E3 1245 V5 (Skylake) CPU it utilizes all core/threads (4/8) at a continuous 85-95%.  The dual E5 setup you mentioned may handle it better, but, it is limited to software transcoding and it will put a heavy load on your CPU(s).

 

Hardware transcoding offloads much of the work to the iGPU so the CPU is only utilized at about 10-20%, sometimes, even less.

 

Since you are limited with what you can do with Plex hardware transcoding under Linux/Docker, another option is to run Plex in a Windows VM under unRAID and pass through an NVIDIA or AMD GPU to do the transcoding.

 

Assuming this is still accurate (and some say it is out of date), it's the Plex hardware transcoding guide.

Edited October 22, 2018 by Hoopster

[Hoopster]

4 hours ago, xerox445 said:

Hard Drives TBD I am open to suggestions I was thinking 6 2.5" 1tb drives with 1 or 2 SLOG SSDs?  The term SLOG is basiclly like a protected cache drive.  You can use NVME for this, I asssume you can do something similar with unraid.

Yes, you can set up a single cache drive or a cache pool of multiple SSDs (SATA, MVMe, PCIe, etc). 

 

A cache drive in unRAID used to be exclusively for caching writes to the parity-protected array (You can have one, two or zero parity drives).  Now, however, it is also generally used for appdata which is the share usually assigned for use by Docker applications.  Some use the cache drive for VM configurations as well.  You can also have unassigned devices which are drives that are not part of the unRAID array.  Often external drives used for backup purposes or additional SSDs for VMs are setup as unassigned devices.

 

Cache pools provide redundacy for the cache content.