GreyKatana
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2015
- Messages
- 31
Hi guys, I'm building my first NAS and would appreciate your counsel.
Main goal is file storage and I have not that many files anyway. I barely have any music or videos, just basically family pictures and some documents accumulated through the years. I might start looking at Plex also, but that would be mostly to rip some of our DVDs and stream them instead of fetching the disc and putting it in the player.
Keeping the cost down of the NAS and the power consumption low are also goals as long as still having quality components allow it.
Here's the kind of hardware I had in mind:
CPU-Motherboard Combo: SuperMicro A1SAM-2550F
or
CPU: Pentium G3450
Motherboard: SuperMicro X10SLL-F-O or X10SLM-F-O
+ (in both cases)
RAM: 1x8GB Corsair ECC 1.35v RAM (precise model number depending on motherboard)
OS Drive: 3.5" Seagate 500GB (but heard that FreeNAS is actually more at home on a USB stick) ALREADY PURCHASED
Storage Drives: 2x WD Red 1TB in Raid Mirror ALREADY PURCHASED
PSU: Recycled from an old machine cheapo Orion (?!) 400W PSU with 20+4 mainboard connector and 3 SATA power connectors ALREADY PURCHASED of course.
Case: Deep Cool Tesseract. Well ventilated, 4 x 3.5" bays + 3 x 2.5" bays. Cheap in the multiple meanings of the word but it's perfect at 30$! ALREADY PURCHASED
--
So you see, pretty modest in comparison to most of what you guys are building, but the storage capacity will fit me just fine to start with. Additional drives can always be purchased later.
So originally I was about to purchase the A1SAM-2550F. In general I heard good things about Avoton, I really like the power consumption, it has AESNI and I like the 4 Intel NICs as I could recycle that board in 3-5 years as a really really neat router. However, I've seen around this place and the Plex forums that its transcoding and scaling capabilities are subpar in single-threaded scenarios (VC-1).
The Pentium is not a Xeon of course, but its daddy the G3220 has a really good rep around here. And all in all, both mobos plus CPU come down to around the same price.
The main thing that's stopping me from going the Pentium way is the power consumption. The Avoton as a TDP of 14W and the Pentium of 53W. But as the Intel ARK tells us, TDP is an average consumption under an Intel-defined high complexity workload. I want the machine to stay constantly ON, meaning it'll idle most of the time. Sadly I don't have idle consumption figures for both processors. If the Pentium idles at 15W and the Avoton at 6W, well I don't mind the 9W difference.
Also, from what I can gather, apart from the fancy menus and all; Plex's main use is for transcoding and scaling up or down your video stream. If my videos are already in a format my receiver will understand, would exposing the file through a standard CIFS share do the job?
Any advice is welcomed and appreciated.
Thanks.
Main goal is file storage and I have not that many files anyway. I barely have any music or videos, just basically family pictures and some documents accumulated through the years. I might start looking at Plex also, but that would be mostly to rip some of our DVDs and stream them instead of fetching the disc and putting it in the player.
Keeping the cost down of the NAS and the power consumption low are also goals as long as still having quality components allow it.
Here's the kind of hardware I had in mind:
CPU-Motherboard Combo: SuperMicro A1SAM-2550F
or
CPU: Pentium G3450
Motherboard: SuperMicro X10SLL-F-O or X10SLM-F-O
+ (in both cases)
RAM: 1x8GB Corsair ECC 1.35v RAM (precise model number depending on motherboard)
OS Drive: 3.5" Seagate 500GB (but heard that FreeNAS is actually more at home on a USB stick) ALREADY PURCHASED
Storage Drives: 2x WD Red 1TB in Raid Mirror ALREADY PURCHASED
PSU: Recycled from an old machine cheapo Orion (?!) 400W PSU with 20+4 mainboard connector and 3 SATA power connectors ALREADY PURCHASED of course.
Case: Deep Cool Tesseract. Well ventilated, 4 x 3.5" bays + 3 x 2.5" bays. Cheap in the multiple meanings of the word but it's perfect at 30$! ALREADY PURCHASED
--
So you see, pretty modest in comparison to most of what you guys are building, but the storage capacity will fit me just fine to start with. Additional drives can always be purchased later.
So originally I was about to purchase the A1SAM-2550F. In general I heard good things about Avoton, I really like the power consumption, it has AESNI and I like the 4 Intel NICs as I could recycle that board in 3-5 years as a really really neat router. However, I've seen around this place and the Plex forums that its transcoding and scaling capabilities are subpar in single-threaded scenarios (VC-1).
The Pentium is not a Xeon of course, but its daddy the G3220 has a really good rep around here. And all in all, both mobos plus CPU come down to around the same price.
The main thing that's stopping me from going the Pentium way is the power consumption. The Avoton as a TDP of 14W and the Pentium of 53W. But as the Intel ARK tells us, TDP is an average consumption under an Intel-defined high complexity workload. I want the machine to stay constantly ON, meaning it'll idle most of the time. Sadly I don't have idle consumption figures for both processors. If the Pentium idles at 15W and the Avoton at 6W, well I don't mind the 9W difference.
Also, from what I can gather, apart from the fancy menus and all; Plex's main use is for transcoding and scaling up or down your video stream. If my videos are already in a format my receiver will understand, would exposing the file through a standard CIFS share do the job?
Any advice is welcomed and appreciated.
Thanks.