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My current "file/media server" is a crappy old falling apart windows box with a stupid mismash of internal and external drives with no redundancy. That sucks for a number of reasons, so planning on dropping around a grand or so (including drives) on doing it properly.

Space requirement would be around 20TB-ish of usable space, with 1 disk's worth of redundancy. That can include a newish 5TB drive I have lying around however. Would also run either Plex / Jellyfin, so some horsepower for transcoding would be nice (but no need for more than a single 1080 stream at once.) 24/7 operation, so don't want anything too power hungry.

Current (loose) thinking on the hardware side is an AM4 board and a reasonably low end CPU, 3x8TB WD golds. Software side, probably CentOS, then mergerfs + snapraid. Anyone got any insight as to other options? Hardware not my speciality in particular, so open to suggestions.

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  • 1
    Why the FUCK do you need 20TB for media ?
    Really, I’m interested.
    Let’s resume :
    Porn : No need storage, all online
    Music : No need storage, all online. (I made exception for about 100 GB of flac music I like)
    Movies/tv shows : A single folder where every night I have a script deleting everything older than 45 days. If I want to rewatch it > Just redownload.
    What else ?
    Personal photos ? OneDrive sync with NO hard drive sync (Only links)
    I honestly can’t see how you can need 20TB
  • 3
    @NoToJavaScript private (the *actual* home-made) porn library I guess..
  • 1
    @netikras That make sense.

    In this case, my small 3TB config for my home server is like that :
    Core I5 from about 7 years ago
    Ram : 16GB DDR 3
    Windows Server 2012 R2 (Sue me! I had a legit key for it !)
    Nvidia GTX 770 (Sometimes a friend wants to play on it. I will not bother you with how much effort it took me to make directX work on a server and… via RDP ! I have 45 FPS in World of Warcraft through remote desktop lol)
    3x1TB hard drives. Didn’t invest in a SSD because. it is a server. I don’t mind it takes 5 minutes to boot. It’s never off.
    Plex
    DNS Server
    Web Server in Hyper V (For testing)
    SQL Server in hyper V
    A custom task scheduler (c#) where I add some code from time to time, like : “Delete all files older than 45 days in plex”
  • 2
    @NoToJavaScript

    First 2 - N/A

    Movies / TV shows - This is the bulk. I've got a large collection of stuff I want available on-demand, and I'm prepared to run a large amount of storage to get it. Downloading isn't always practical, or isn't always possible in a whole bunch of cases. Plus I rip most of my own stuff from blu-ray or 4k blu-ray, I use reasonably high quality rips and take the time to put all the audio tracks / subs in the right place - I'm not losing that and trying to find a random copy online that may or may not be ok every time I want to watch it again.

    Personal photos - I do a lot of photography, and I generally keep a RAW + high quality JPEG of everything I take. That adds up quickly.
  • 0
    @AlmondSauce

    Me : Why do you keep 40GB blue rays ?
    Also me : (See image)

    Yeah I get it. But honestly for me it's faster to just use sodaplayer and stream a torrent than to find i on plex. Thier XboX app is so shitty, I use phone as remote lol
  • 0
    I often end up with 10GB rips ish for 4k, about half that for 1080.

    For me it's less about the raw file quality (though that does play some part) and more about knowing I've sorted any forced subtitles out so they always display at the right time, translated any subtitles to SRT (or more recently WebVTT), kept decent surround sound audio, etc.

    At the moment everything totals ~8TB ish, but obviously want plenty of room to expand. Server will also be running various bits and pieces like home automation stuff, but space isn't a concern for that.
  • 0
    @AlmondSauce 10G for 4k ? hevc ?
    Because in x264 i would call it very low quality.

    Even in 1080p, x264, 10GB is a bare minimum for a 2H film

    Edit : A fucking TV serie takes around 5GB per episode of 50 minutesin a good x264
  • 1
    10GB per hour for 4k HEVC. Usually about 5GB per hour for h264 1080p in decent quality.

    Ballpark of course. Varies enormously.
  • 0
    @AlmondSauce That seems good !
    Too bad there almost no content in hevc.
    4k, I do not care so much. My PC screen is 4k, my TV is still 1080p and I decided to NOT switch it until it dies.

    One of the last Plasma ever made. That black, only OLED can do the same
  • 2
    If you don’t have more than one 1080p stream at once you can use a raspberrypi. I am running up to 10 simultaneous streams on a xeon e5-1630 v3 with 64 GB RAM with no problems. And that cpu is not a top-notch cpu.
  • 0
    @NoToJavaScript A good chunk of my content is in hevc. I've been ripping my own stuff to hevc for years now - was a bit of an early adopter!
  • 0
    @dsteiner Is that one transcoded stream on the pi? I couldn't manage it when I tried, but it was a previous generation pi.

    (Wouldn't be able to get the number of drives needed on the pi anyway, but curious.)
  • 1
    It's not imaginative, but I love my synology NAS. Great UI, command line if I want it, and great performance with hardware acceleration for transcoding.
  • 0
    @bahua that's a fair point, thanks - I've had the internal debate of buy vs build before. I'll keep it in mind :-)
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