Is this hardware any good?

[mediaserver2021]

I'm looking to get rid of my Qnap NAS and build my own NAS and Mediaserver. I would like to be able to run Plex Media Server.

So came across the following system, that I can get my hands on:

HP proliant ML 350 G6
64 gb DDR3 Memory
2 x processor intel Xeon E5620
8x 300gb sas
raid controller

I'm mainly looking at the CPU. Is it powerful enough for transcoding?

 

[sretalla]

I'm mainly looking at the CPU. Is it powerful enough for transcoding?

Maybe, but that's not your biggest problem...

raid controller

This is the biggest concern.

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

 

[jgreco]

powerful enough for transcoding

Yes, no, and maybe are all correct answers. This is so incredibly dependent on your actual transcoding needs. You should probably check out the Plex forums for better details. This is going to depend on the format of your content, what clients you're using, what bandwidth you have, etc.

 

[Aviatorpaal]

The server and CPU does not perform well when transcoding video, even 1080 content. 4K is unplayable when software transcoding (I even tried upgrading to dual X5660 CPUs. The CPUs supported by that chipset lacks support for Intel Quick Sync, which is a dealbreaker for me.

I recommend running Plex off of another (Linux) machine, then mount volumes from your HP ML 350 G6 TrueNAS via NFS shares for a much better experience.

 

[jgreco]

The server and CPU does not perform well when transcoding video, even 1080 content. 4K is unplayable when software transcoding (I even tried upgrading to dual X5660 CPUs.

Take this in the lighthearted and amusing manner in which it's intended, but software transcoding is very much like driving around in a Ford Flex, it sounds good at first glance but it's pretty awful in practice. You can safely transcode a stream or two of standard definition television on pre-Sandy CPU's just thru sheer CPU grunt, but it is kinda like driving around in a Ford Pinto (or trying to run your Plex transcoding on ARM) when you start getting more demanding on the bitrates. Running a well performing Plex server with transcoding requires more than just buying some janky old eBay gear, especially since Intel has not graced the higher end server CPU's with iGPU or QuickSync. That kinda sucks, but I understand Intel's strategy of expecting big servers to need big real GPU.

For me, a lot of my company operations and a lot of my "hobby" activities run out of colocation data centers, one's 800 miles away and another is 2400, and the cost to visit and deploy gear is pretty substantial. I've picked up a Supermicro X12STW-TF and Intel E-2388G CPU to give me a platform that could function as a low end hypervisor; with 128GB RAM and 8 cores, it's large enough to be useful, but not that big. We have a bunch of dual E5-2697v2's with 512GB RAM. But the price to just buy a dedicated QuickSync host was "only" a few thousand. Overall it's probably cheaper to just find a somewhat old desktop with QuickSync and NFS mount your video fileshare.

 

[Aviatorpaal]

Take this in the lighthearted and amusing manner in which it's intended, but software transcoding is very much like driving around in a Ford Flex, it sounds good at first glance but it's pretty awful in practice. You can safely transcode a stream or two of standard definition television on pre-Sandy CPU's just thru sheer CPU grunt, but it is kinda like driving around in a Ford Pinto (or trying to run your Plex transcoding on ARM) when you start getting more demanding on the bitrates. Running a well performing Plex server with transcoding requires more than just buying some janky old eBay gear, especially since Intel has not graced the higher end server CPU's with iGPU or QuickSync. That kinda sucks, but I understand Intel's strategy of expecting big servers to need big real GPU.

For me, a lot of my company operations and a lot of my "hobby" activities run out of colocation data centers, one's 800 miles away and another is 2400, and the cost to visit and deploy gear is pretty substantial. I've picked up a Supermicro X12STW-TF and Intel E-2388G CPU to give me a platform that could function as a low end hypervisor; with 128GB RAM and 8 cores, it's large enough to be useful, but not that big. We have a bunch of dual E5-2697v2's with 512GB RAM. But the price to just buy a dedicated QuickSync host was "only" a few thousand. Overall it's probably cheaper to just find a somewhat old desktop with QuickSync and NFS mount your video fileshare.

That´s a pretty good metaphor I certainly agree, after lots of tinkering and tweaking with 10-15 year old second-hand enterprise gear.

Slightly offtopic: do you NFS mount your NFS shares over VPN, does that work well with Plex streaming? I feel there might just be too many single points of failure for me to even dare go that route

 

[Volts]

My argument against an ML350 G6 is demonstrated here:

HP ProLient ML350 G6 | Sound like Roar |

In this video you can see how server stating with huge sounds and noise.and taking time to boot .If you love this video then please like and share this video...

youtu.be

HP ProLiant ML350 G6 Power-up

How does an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 sound while powering up? Pretty loud.This is in the midst of some upgrades I'm doing, therefore the charging battery notific...

www.youtube.com

 

[ChrisRJ]

Startup duration and noise are not something that speaks against a particular server. Neither are comparable with a desktop. I would not recommend this server, but the reason would be the CPU age and therefore power consumption (and not the startup noise).

Frankly, the noise that a proper server makes right after powering it up, is a rather dumb argument. The server turns up the fans simply as a precaution until the thermal situation is clear. That is a good thing! Once things are clear, the fans will go down again. From then on, it depends on the server load and its overall thermal design, how loud things are.

It is ok to decide that the average(!) noise is too loud for having the server in a private environment. But, again, the startup noise is by no means a reasonable criterion.

 

[jgreco]

do you NFS mount your NFS shares over VPN, does that work well with Plex streaming?

No. Plex can run media analysis at multigigabit rates, and one of the big reasons I started to look at a transcoding-optimized platform was that even clients who theoretically have sufficient bandwidth to watch content at 50-100Mbps data rates often need to be transcoded to a lower speed to get a watchable experience. The content being pulled off of NFS is going to be requested at full bitrate AT LEAST via NFS, and then has to be squirted over the net to a user. Trying to add VPN access (presumably at a somewhat less than Gbps bitrate) to this sounds like a recipe for disaster. Just my opinion. You could probably get it to work if you had high speed VPN concentrators and gigabit uplink internet, I'll concede that much.

On the other hand, at one time we did ghettoVCB backups from one of the data centers to a backup host over a VPN link that traversed a 100Mbps residential broadband connection... wasn't fast, but we didn't expect fast. Just trying to cost optimize a strategy for disaster recovery.

 

[Volts]

It is ok to decide that the average(!) noise is too loud for having the server in a private environment. But, again, the startup noise is by no means a reasonable criterion.

Hah, we agree. I think it's a rite of passage to buy a "server", bring it home, and then regret that decision. Baseline noise on these is pretty significant too, and I made the assumption that the OP might not be familiar.

do you NFS mount your NFS shares over VPN

It's often ~better to host a Plex server closer to the media, instead of closer to the clients.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Hah, we agree. I think it's a rite of passage to buy a "server", bring it home, and then regret that decision.

I have literally seen someone go pale/white in the face, when witnessing (unpreparedly) the startup of a hyper-converged server