Christopher (Drashna)

It's more resource intensive, but it gets the job done quicker/faster during scanning which is more important to me with a big library.  But during scanning Plex gets done faster and doesn't put any hurt on my machines so I'd never consider this a reason to switch. I myself would say Emby is far more resource intensive overall when it doesn't need to be then Plex is.  read on
 
As a "power user", I too prefer the user management style of Emby over Plex.  To the "average" system op, this probably isn't as important as plex.tv gets the job done (I prefer the user control myself).
 
Not sure about your "quality comment".  Quality of what? ie Server, Clients, etc?   How do you quantify that?
 
Without core work, Emby isn't going to be able to take advantage of GPU offloading in a way to make a lot of difference across the board.  Plex could still serve up the videos to more clients even without using this offloading. Take for example the following:  In Plex land you can pre-transcode all your videos to MP4 using h.264 (4.0 comp) with an AAC audio track.  This will natively playback via Plex on every device assuming it has the bandwidth.  So if you aren't bandwidth bound (clients or server) you can direct play to many clients via Plex just by have pre-transcoded/remuxed your media to this "common/universal" format.
 
Now take this same media and playback from Emby and it's hit or miss.  For example if a user plays the same video back from Chrome web browser that they just direct played via Plex it will transcode via Emby as it will want to transcode to Webm format which isn't needed. It also needlessly downgraded the quality.  So there is really no such thing as a "universal" format for Emby as there can be for Plex.  This limits the amount of clients Emby can stream to compared to Plex with a well thought out library format.
 
This ALSO hinders the use off GPU offloading.  What good does it do to have the ability to offload up to 2 QS streams if not all clients can use 264?  The hardware offloading would be easier right now to incorporate into Plex then Emby.
 
Plex has a much better thought out "engine" for transcoding then Emby does.  You can really see the differences when you know what to look for and what are common problems.  For example how each handles transcoding when you have subtitles turned on (depends on device doing playback).  voice/audio sync problems are much more a problem with Emby than Plex, etc...  CPU use during transcoding, number of simultaneous transcodes, etc...
 
Emby right now can't compete with Plex in this department.  This to me is the "heart" of a media streaming solution.  I've got family/friends who have iPads, Androids, PS4, ChromeCasts, Samsung TVs, Xbox, Rokus, web browsers.   IMHO, when you get right down to it, you NEED to have the proper clients and a "transcode" engine that is well thought out and fully functional.  Everything else is "eye candy".
 
With that said there are other things I truly love about Emby and wish Plex would do.  I have a "love/hate" relationship both both programs!
 
Carlo

Just recently went through the pain of trying to run 5 3TB drives in RAID5 off of my Intel ICH10R controller. This proved to be very painful and left me with about a 15MB/s write speed. A friend recommended DrivePool to me, I am an old WHS user and had previously been using the Windows Storage Spaces so I thought it sounded good. The only thing It was missing for me was Parity as I didn't want full duplication. Here is my setup, I went with DisParity and I was very happy with how easy it was to setup. 
 
When I first created the DrivePool I put all 5 drives in and turned on duplication, so I had to remove duplication the remove one of the drives for parity. DisParity was a very easy point and click setup, just make sure when you add a drive that the "Ignore Hidden Files and Folders" option is unchecked. I know SnapRAID is another option but for those that would rather have a GUI, this is a nice freeware alternative.
 
 
 

Part of the reason I got the Intel server board.

Yus, I got the (reluctant) "OK" . Chris, could you please double-check this LSI card for me:
16x PCIe LSI 3WARE 9650SE-16ML
The price seems too good, I hope I'm not missing anything. This will be the first thing I want to order, since it'll coming from Germany.
 
EDIT: I had another read through the forums and found a thread (which I had read earlier) talking about a similar card, looks like it will do the job fine. So, I've ordered it and the case. I can pick up most of the other bits locally, so I will be mostly waiting on the card. I'll let you know how it all goes. Cheers

Oh! The US Robotics 14k4 and 28k8 modems! These were simply unaffordable over here for me, prices were not as alingned as they are today and even in the US they cost a lot of money. I was rarely jealous but for those..!

I have the same problem. Weird how they think that way. "what's wrong with playon" or "why isn't plex working". Less of an issue these days since I went to a dedicated VM for each of them, but in the beginning.
 
Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk

Awesome, well thank you and I think I have everything I need to know hardware-wise now, just got to start gathering components. All up, I am a little over budget, but for what I'm getting I think it's well worth it. No doubt I'll end up spending a bit more (always forget that I need this cable or that adapter plus not being able to actually get some of the parts that I sourced prices for).
 
Now, I've just got to convince my girlfriend that this is more important than a house deposit . Wish me luck!

I like to hear the BBS stuff. I hosted a C=64/Amiga user group BBS in the Fort Knox area for a few years, off a Amiga 2000 tower system, my personal computer was a home built 3000T [i had only the motherboard, I had to hack it into a generic case].  We ran Cnet BBS software. It was the wild west, I had callers from all over the world. The mainstreaming of the internet killed all that. Nice reading about your past stuff, man my wife hated me buying all that gear.
 
I left my last job about a year ago, was there 6 years administering and maintaining [as part of a team] EMC SANs in two plants connected by private dark fiber, 15 miles apart, we had two server rooms with about 400 servers of various ages, G1 to current. Saw ten year old HDD still chugging along, turn the server off, turn it back on and the drive is dead. We cancelled maintenance on the EMC stuff, so we had to go in 24/7 if a drive failed. I would guess we had one drive fail a month on average. 15K drives.
 
Anyway, I wouldn't blame any particular brand, it really didn't seem to matter.

Gringott, don't fee "weak" at all.  A modular strategy definitely isn't a bad one, at all. It just depends on your needs.
 
I also got the rackmount case for really cheap.
And as for the experience, I'll second that.
I've not really had any one brand do significantly different from the others.  And I  think that every manufacturer has had large batches of "duds", as well. 

Yup. It's done at a volume level, and can be done with any sort of files. 
 
And I have a bunch of VMs (Windows XP, WHSv1, and up of each different architecture, as well as a "work" vm and a few linux VMs).  I get roughtly 65% savings. In fact, I couldn't host all of my VMs on my 500GB SSD if I wasn't using deduplication. 

Just be aware that the stock M1015 does *not* come with IR or IT Firmware, it comes with a "true" RAID card firmware.
Flashing it with the IT/IR firmware is a "cross flash"....there is a risk that you can produce a brick during that process.
 
The M1015 is a true, low-end IBM Raid Controller, but technically identical to the 9210 HBA, only sold to OEMs,
There is another HBA model, the 9211 and luckily its firmare is compatible with the 9210.
You can force the 9211 Firmware to be flashed to the M1015, creating a 9210 (or 9211 respectively), hence.
 
If you buy a M1015 from a dealer "at the bay", some do offer it cross flashed already.
 
I own a couple, crossed flashed myself.
Since this "trick" was made public, prices for the M1015 have risen a lot.
If you want to play save, buy a "real" LSI HBA or a pre-cross flashed M1015.
Note: once cross flashed, you can swap IR/IT firmware anytime, just like with a normal 9211 HBA, using the normal flash method advertised by LSI.

I never did get into the BBS world at the time. Simply did not have the money to make it work or pay the phonebills (i.e., my parents did not). My first HDD was actually (1988?) a 20MB ST-506 in a A590 HDD and memory expansion kit which was connected to my (well, my brothers' but he did not do anything with it) A-1000. It also had a SCSI controller but those 42MB Quantum HDDs were simply way out of budget. I seem to remember that at the time there were both MFM as RLL HDDs but it's all a bit gray in my memory (sortof like the Samsung EVO-drives I guess). Good times but had I had some funds at the time, it would have been me who did google, facebook and youtube.

I have just migrated from DriveBender and back to DrivePool. I tried DriveBender for a period, but it was just slower than DrivePool. When copying many files to DriveBender (ie starting FileHistory from Windows 8), it just stopped working and I had to restart the server. TV-recordings stored in DriveBender was also very slow and uresponsive in VMC. I never had that kind of problems with DrivePool. I do think that the interface in DriveBender is a little more "fancy" but stability is just more important.
 
Anyway. To migrate back to DrivePool i did the following (on a window server 2012 essential):
 
1. Installed DrivePool alongside DriveBender. 
2. Release your DriveBender license before uninstalling
3. Set up a duplicate DrivePool on the same disks that DriveBender used.
4. Stopped DriveBender and DrivePool services from services.msc
5. Moved alle folders on physical disks from DriveBender root folder to DrivePool root folder.
6. Used the script below to move the duplicate files from DriveBenders location til DrivePools location (DriveBender stores the duplicate in a subfolder named FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER, so you will have to move all the content in that folder to the folder below).
7. Started DrivePool and uninstalled DriveBender.
8. Used computer management to give DrivePool the same disksletter that DriveBender had.
 
Bat file to move files stored in FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER to the directory below (hidden files will no longer be hidden as move doesn't move hidden files). This script has to be run on all the physical disks. Stand in the \poolpart.* folder. To try  it out, stand in a subfolder where you can't do much harm.
 
Please note that I give ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEE that the script will work for you. Try it out first, and if it seem to work, remove the echo
 
@echo off for /r %%f in (FOLDER.DUPLICATE.$DRIVEBENDER) do if exist %%f (   echo %%f   cd "%%f" echo  attrib -h *.*   if exist *.* ( echo    move *.* ..   )   cd .. echo  rd "%%f" )  
All in all it took just 1 hour to set up and migrate from DriveBender to DrivePool and I did not have to duplicate 6 tb.

At first I only used an AMD 610e in my server (45w TDP quad core, it was a good choice at the time). I was running Windows Home Server v1 (and later upgraded to 2011) to perform some server tasks, back up workstations, etc.
 
Then, I discovered BlueIris surveillance software. OK, the 610e is still keeping up at this point...
 
Then I added Subsonic, Sickbeard, etc. Still keeping up, but really starting to max out the system
 
Then, I discovered I could do things with my TV recordings such as pre-transcode and commercial removal using MCE Buddy.
 
And then I found Plex (I was still on Media Browser 2 at this time). Cool, I can watch my shows on the road!
 
And lately I upgraded to Emby, and I have started playing with Rokus and Amazon Fire TVs, and doing more tablet based stuff. As you can guess, my little 610e is now completely pegged and I'm nowhere near the necessary horsepower required to do all this. So, I bought a server grade motherboard, ECC RAM, Xeon 1246v3 processor, new case, and I repurposed my Green drives and switched out to WD Red drives (longer warranty, no load cycle issues).
 
Point is, Christopher's recommendation of a board you can upgrade is valid. Those of us that have been down this road can attest to many dollars spent retiring substandard hardware, and many hours spent reinstalling or recovering from failures. Start with a low power CPU if you don't plan on doing a bunch of processor intensive stuff. BUT, get a board you can upgrade to a Xeon later so that you don't have to reinvest time or money on the system. 
 
At first you'll kind of tinker around and use it as a server, but a lot of people start realizing what they can do with a system that is on 24/7 and doesn't affect performance at the workstation level, and start adding on, just as I did.

Quite honestly, all of it was a way to learn more about my love for computers, and to tinker. I went to college to major in chemistry, and ended up with an IT job. I'm still in IT to this day. 

All of us who used to run BBS systems were basically pack rats who liked to have full collections of software and media from the times.  We could have just access this info from other BBSs but wanted it on our own systems.
 
Not to different really than today.  We could watch video on Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.. but we STILL prefer to be in control and manage our own collections.
 
Guess we haven't changed much.  We're still media pack rats!!!
 
We've went from measuring storage in KB to MB, then GB and now in TB of data.
Won't be long before we'll be talking PB of data.  Many of us already have 10%-15% of a PB already.

Thanks for your feedback and the evaluation.
I will follow some ebay auctions and buy my lovely HBA  

A fact which made me extremely wary of the newer Hitachi/HGST drives. WD was my least favorite until this run of luck on Seagate, but so far I haven't gotten burnt on the newer HGST/WD drives. As you say, all the manufacturers have had their share of issues. I just try to keep a mixture of drives and make sure to scatter my purchases across multiple manufacturing lots to hedge my bets. That and make liberal use of data duplication on my pool to save me when something goes sideways!

After watching a few things with Emby...transcoding and access via DLNA appears a  bit "wonky".  I had two large MKV's that would stop part way through in Emby but play fine in Plex. It appears there isn't a PS3 client, which is an issue now that I've been spoiled by the Plex client..but one of the neighbors using a 360 txt'd me asking me "What this Emby thing was" and to leave it on...so... still playing with it, trying the other clients, etc.  Most certainly a nice piece of software.
 
Hey, in 1996 I had a DOS 6.22 box running a HTTP server, POP3 server, SMTP server, IRC server, FTP server, NNTP server, SMTP server, NTP server, RADIUS server while running a multi-node BBS.. All on a Pentium 60 w/ 16 megs of ram -- and it did it without flinching. Now THAT was amazing.    
 
I had friends who ran Media Center boxes..2005 me thinks. It was an actual whole O/S, they had dedicated machines and cable cards. I'm guessing it was then baked into WHS. IIRC I avoided it because I had Direc-TV which meant no tuner card support. So for my use, with TVersity and the DLNA access via XBMC on original XBOX (still a damn useful machine) at the time I didn't see any reason to run it. 
 
Thanks for the GPU link. Very interesting to say the least.
 
This is obviously a stupid question and yes I could Google but doesn't there have to be logon for Task Scheduler to run something?  
 
Sonarr will take ya five minutes  Just do it.
 
Woot.. just popped the motherboard and PS in the 4224!  She'll be fired up tomorrow.  Things take me so long because I'm so damn indecisive... I'll sit and procrastinate on the configuration rather than just plowing forward and then think about.....I need to do more plowing and less thinking!

I was tempted by the intel one as it uses an LSI chip (and my card is LSi too)

160 megs in 82/83??  That is insane for an individual at that time.
 
I'm guessing it was the biggest Public Domain repository in the country.  
 
-T

+1 for the HBAs based on M1015...these are great.
And you can grow later by adding an expander, instead more HBAs.
 
But...what drive sizes do you employ at the moment?
With drive capacity rising fast the money per TB ratio is falling.
There is as well the solution to just replace drives with larger ones and even sell the used ones afterwards.
Saving on the controller and the energy, too.

He absolutely hit the nail on the end and my professional experience mirrors his, specifically with Seagate Cheetah 15k's being the drive majority in most all my large data center experience in the last 10 years.
 
For the C64, I had the first hard drive ever available.  A 20 MEG Xetec Lt. Kernal...which contained a 20MB Seagate SCSI drive. That was 1985.  Fun Times...I was 11 years old and man did I have to beg for that.  It was a Christmas/Birthday present.
 
Here's one I think about quite frequently: Drive Orientation for longevity - horizontal or vertical. 
 
Physics tells me horizontal.. Drive manufacturers say "no matter."
 
I'll mount mine flat, thank you... just because it makes me feel better I suppose....
 
~RF

That explains some of it -- I have avoided everything "Microsoft Media Center" since day one and I didn't think people actually used Windows Home Server was a real thing up until a couple of years ago. 
 
You just made me chuckle...
 
"Check out the Emby Service" -- The first day I installed Plex I was combing through the options and was perplexed that I couldn't find the "Start As Service" option on a "SERVER" piece of software. Back in the NT days I used SRVANY in situations like this and I planned to do the same for Plex but just haven't gotten around to it.  Amazes me it's still not an option. 
 
I recently switched from Sickbeard to Sonarr.  I don't think I'll be headed back.  I did however find the option in Emby to store all of the metadata in a specified directory so that problem is solved.
 
As for my thoughts?  Well, I can't be definitive until I run Emby for a bit longer but right off the bat they are so close it's ridiculous and it's nice having the choice --  but I will say this: 
 
Emby is free. (Doesn't really matter, I'd donate anyways)
Emby is more my speed. (Multiple meanings)
 
I'll probably switch permanently to whichever one gets the GPU acceleration implementation working correctly....my bet is on Emby.
 
~RF

ah thx!
Indeed, the drive removed correctly and I can now access the pool again.
I will do it the other way next time.