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NfiniteZERO

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    Recycling old PC for Home Server/NAS duty

    in Hardware

    Posted

    Thanks Chris!

    I've lived too many horror stories of builds gone wrong, so I've decided to keep it simple.  I know my way around a Linux system, but at the end of the day I use Windows.  Given my job, the mandatory overtime, 9mo baby, exhausted wife, and the endlessly dirty house - I simply don't have time to play sysadmin anymore!

    I did some testing with Plex.  With the Realtek GbE in Direct Steam 480p, I was hitting about 30%-45% CPU while having a few desktop apps open and running.  Intel NIC will help with that a little bit.  While that was happening, I tried a stream to my iPhone and peaked at 100% CPU as it was actually transcoding the 480p - honestly, no issues with playback as long as I didn't do anything on the computer. By this, I'm thinking 2 streams is my limit, which works for now.  I'm planning on making iPhone-capable M4Vs to mitigate this, as well as for travel purposes.  Do note that my library is more DVDs than Blu-Ray right now.

     

    I'm planning on a fair bit of reading for DrivePool to make sure I know the ins and outs before committing to building this thing.  I've also got to wait for my laptop to be returned from Mythlogic (hopefully they can fix the chassis or I'll have to build a new tower, which puts this plan on hold.)

     

    The only thing I cannot seem to find is a guide to configure Win10 Pro to run headless, which either tells me that it "just works" or I'm not putting the right stuff in when I'm searching the web.
     

    Recycling old PC for Home Server/NAS duty

    in Hardware

    Posted

    Yep it should work fine as you describe

     

    Only thing that will not work that well is the Plex server for any transcoding thats needed - you dont mention you clients to play any media as they dictate what does and does not need transcoding

     

    You can overcome this by making sure your media is in a format that the clients can play natively so your server streams the media directly

     

    If it were mine i would increase the Ram to give windows and plex room to breath say 8gb or 16gb but you could do that after you have it running to see if it needs it and its a cheap upgrade :)

     

    Have fun

     

    Thanks for the reply, Spider99.

     

    I've done a couple of trial runs with Plex and it should be up for what I need it to do.  As it's currently the wife, me, and the little one - probably isn't going to be too much streaming going on (2 streams max).  Since I have to rebuild the media library anyway, I'll just put everything into h.264/AAC/M4V and call it a day.  Blu-Ray will probably get an SD version too just to make things easier.

     

    I'll price out some more RAM while I'm shopping for a new case and Intel GbE NIC.

    Recycling old PC for Home Server/NAS duty

    in Hardware

    Posted

    Hi all.

    I'm currently researching into the feasibility of using my old tower PC for home server duty.  Knowing that there are a lot of ways to currently do that (Linux, FreeNAS, etc etc), I would rather try it my preferred way - which is running a copy of Windows 10 Pro with DrivePool and Scanner.

    First off, the hardware (prepare to cringe!)

    • AMD Phenom II x3 710
    • ASUS M4A780 uATX w/ Realtek GbE on board
    • 4GB DDR2-800, 2 open slots. (ASUS board is ECC compatible)
    • Corsair Force 120GB SSD for boot
    • 2x WD Black 1TB to start off with
    • OCZ ModXstream 600W power supply

    Main goals for this rig are:

    • Plex
    • File Sharing within home
    • iTunes Server
    • Local backup for 1-2 PCs & 2 iPhones' worth of photos
    • BackBlaze to backup

    The main reason I want to stick with Windows since that's what I'm most familiar with.  I plan on using RDP on Win10 Pro to manage the machine headless from my laptop.  While not the most power efficient, I do not plan to have it up 24/7 - more like "as needed, when needed" for a few hours at a time.  After burning my brain out with RAID-this, along with RAID-that...I don't really want anything to do with RAID on this which is why DrivePool is perfect.

    I don't think it's too far-fetched of an idea, but I've never really done anything like this before.  What do you folks think?

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