Hi guys, I'm looking forward to all of the insight and help you have to offer and I'm really excited to build my system!
Brief intro, I'm a Cisco network engineer and haven't been a serious player in the server side of things for over 10 years. This project is growing out of a need to support a large Plex Media server I started last year and basically had spiral out of control.
I built the Plex system on my gaming rig, which was the only serious (i.e non-tablet) computer in the house. It is fairly robust with a Core I7 4770 and 32G of RAM. I dropped a JBOD of 4x 3GB hard drives in and spun up Plex. I created a download drone behind a NO-IP VPN on an old I5 Laptop a family member retired. It is running Sickbeard, NZBGet, and Couchpotato and dropping files on the JBOD for the Plex. After about a year, I am running out of room, and not happy with the idea that one dead drive means I can lose 700+ movies and 100+ series. I am also maxing out the Plex computer as soon as I hit 4 transcoding streams. Did I mention that my entire family and about 6 friends now use this as a Netflix alternative?
Cut to my new system:
Supermicro 2U 8 Bay server
Motherboard: X9DR3-LN4F+
CPU: 2 X Xeon E5-2650 8 core
RAM: 96GB DDR3 ECC
HD: 8 X 4TB WD Red 5400RPM
As I get into the build (all the components are showing up now) I am sure I will have lots of questions. If I stumble onto anything cool or have some great insight on how to build this thing better, I will post it up and try to give back.
See you in the forums!
Brief intro, I'm a Cisco network engineer and haven't been a serious player in the server side of things for over 10 years. This project is growing out of a need to support a large Plex Media server I started last year and basically had spiral out of control.
I built the Plex system on my gaming rig, which was the only serious (i.e non-tablet) computer in the house. It is fairly robust with a Core I7 4770 and 32G of RAM. I dropped a JBOD of 4x 3GB hard drives in and spun up Plex. I created a download drone behind a NO-IP VPN on an old I5 Laptop a family member retired. It is running Sickbeard, NZBGet, and Couchpotato and dropping files on the JBOD for the Plex. After about a year, I am running out of room, and not happy with the idea that one dead drive means I can lose 700+ movies and 100+ series. I am also maxing out the Plex computer as soon as I hit 4 transcoding streams. Did I mention that my entire family and about 6 friends now use this as a Netflix alternative?
Cut to my new system:
Supermicro 2U 8 Bay server
Motherboard: X9DR3-LN4F+
CPU: 2 X Xeon E5-2650 8 core
RAM: 96GB DDR3 ECC
HD: 8 X 4TB WD Red 5400RPM
As I get into the build (all the components are showing up now) I am sure I will have lots of questions. If I stumble onto anything cool or have some great insight on how to build this thing better, I will post it up and try to give back.
See you in the forums!
