Plex NAS Build Questions

[bjurewicz21]

Background:
I'm new to FreeNAS but have spent just over a month reading through all of the information and trying to educate myself, this means I will probably still have some pretty stupid questions and maybe enough knowledge to do damage to my system.

Reasoning:
The reason behind this is that I currently have an external HDD that I use to store my movie/tv series collection. Initially this was a great setup for my college years where I was the only one using it, and I would just run an HDMI cable from my computer to the TV. Then I moved into a house and found out about PLEX and started using that. However in order for PLEX to be effective I needed to leave my laptop on all the time, and my laptop was tending to overheat when multiple streams were required (my laptop already runs pretty hot). So I started researching about a solution and in my brief search decided that FreeNAS would be a good solution, as it could not only be my PLEX server but also used as a back-up storage for all the stuff my parents and wife want saved (great cost justification to the wife). Parents don’t trust technology, they want all of their pictures printed on good old 4x6 prints and put into giant photo books.

Current Purpose:
1- Plex Media Server
2- Local Back-up of pictures & files
3- Offsite back-up of pictures & files for parents

Future Purpose Possibilities:
1- Couch Potato
2- Sick Beard
3- SABnzbd

Build:
MOTHERBOARD: ASRock C2750D4I Mini ITX Server Motherboard FCBGA1283
CPU: Intel Atom C2750 (Passmark 3929)
MEMORY: Whichever approved ECC memory goes on sale when the purchase is made
(Unless someone has a specific recommendation)
HDD: Seagate NAS or WD Red 3TB or 4TB (whichever goes on sale at purchase date)
CASE: TBD based on HDD configuration (question 2)
PSU: TBD based on case (open to recommendations to keep in mind, I know seasonic is the recommended brand from the community)

Questions/Concerns:

1- In terms of use as a Plex server, how many transcodes can this handle? My current minimum is 2 but would like to future proof this to when I start to allow others to use it as well. The Plex documentation stated between 1800-2000 passmark per 1080p transcode, which would only put this at 2 concurrent transcodes. But other posts have said that they are capable of 4 or more on this atom cpu. Based on this should I be ok with the Atom C2750 or will I need to upgrade to a Xeon E3 processor?

2- HDD size, I have seen the Blackblaze report about the 3TB drives being the least reliable, but those seem to always be the size that goes on sale. Is it still recommended to avoid the 3TB drive size and step up to the 4TB size or will the benefit of a quicker resilver time and sale prices be worth the added risk? I have been tracking the prices for about a month and the 3tb drive always seem to have the better price/tb unless you consider the Seagate desktop 4tb drive (ST4000DM000).

3- For HDD and vdev setup, I am aiming to future proof this as I am unsure as to how much information will end up being put on here. Currently I have 3TB of movies and tv shows which has lasted me 5years, but if more space is available everyone knows that somehow it will get filled. Would I be better aiming to set up one 6 drive raidz2 vdev for my current use and then when the time comes add a second 6 drive raidz2 vdev, or should I just opt to put in one 12 drive raid z2 vdev and upgrade the hdds when the time arises? I was leaning towards the 2 separate 6 drive vdevs since that is less money upfront and provides more redundancy when I start to expand. I also considered a 8 drive raidz2 vdev (theoretically a happy medium between the two options), but am unsure since it wasn’t a recommended amount of disks in cyberjocks guide.

4- Security wise do I need to be concerned about using the plex plugin? Also what is the most secure way to give access to my parents in order to allow automated back-ups of particular folders from their computer?

5- Would I see any benefit of using a cheap ssd for plugins? I have seen people say that their hdd won’t spin down unless they moved their jail, and since this wouldn’t be used all that often I would save quite a bit by spinning down the disks. I also remember reading that plex performance increases if it’s on a ssd since it can use the free space as a cache.

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY RESPONSES!

 

[depasseg]

Welcome!

1 - It depends on what the clients are doing, but I'd say 2-4 is a fair guess. If doing a straight stream (no transcoding) to a local client, there is less CPU power needed, so you could handle more streams. Unless you got a great deal on an Atom, I'd step up.

2 - I would worry more about cost/TB. I wouldn't really worry about the reliability differences between 3 and 4TB. Just plan for them to eventually crap out and have data protection in place. I'm not sure how much room you have, but something like a Supermicro SC846 is pretty cheap and has a lot of expandability. So you could get 12 3 TB drives, but put them in 2 separate pools - Production and backup. You could work out of your 6 drive RAID Z2 Production Pool, and replicate to the other 6 Drive RAID Z1 (or Z2) Backup pool. The as you upgrade your Production drives, you could add them to your backup pool (once all 6 are avaialble).

3- See my comments in #2. Keep in mind that you won't be able to take advantage of your larger hard drives until all the drives in that vdev are upgraded. So the 12 drive option might take a while to expand, hence the 6 drive might be beneficial.

4 - As long as you have a relatively strong Plew PW, you should be fine. As for backups, look into Crashplan. Once you get the plugin installed and running on your FreeNAS, it makes it very easy for you, friends, parent, or whomever you want to backup to your machine.

5 - If you've got one, then you could use it, but I'm not sure I'd worry about it. Also, if you only have 1 SSD for your jails, then you will absolutely want to configure replication of your jails to another dataset for when your SSD dies. I'm running all my jails from my production pool and they all run fine.

Greg

 

[bjurewicz21]

Greg thanks for the reply.

1- Well I know that currently one stream would be over the internet and one would be to a local client. I was unaware that a local client would require less cpu power, but I would like to just assume that both require transcoding as my current files have all sorts of mixed codecs, and would rather be on the safe side. With that in mind, I pretty much assume that every stream I will be doing on plex will be transcoding, although I know that this is probably not how it will be in reality I like to have the possibility. So I think then I would say that I would like to be able to have 2 transcoding streams at this time, and then in the near future be able to open it up to have 4 or 5 streams (only 2 of which would be local). With that should I still step up to the Xeon processor, and do you have any recommendations on the Xeon processors? My main reason for going Atom was the cost (both upfront and assumed cooling costs) and thinking I could get away with it, but you seem to point out that the future use would be better to spend the money on a Xeon. (From my brief research the Atom Motherboard combo is about half the price of a Xeon plus Motherboard)

2- I don't think I can afford to spend that much on only the case/psu (saw that they were $1800 on amazon) although it would seem like a great future proof idea. I had been looking more at tower setups to just put on a shelf in the basement, and hadn't really considered the rackmount unites but I will now have to look into them. Is it an acceptable practice to just set a rackmount unit on a shelf?

As far as the HDD/zpool setup I see what you are saying I think, with the production vdev being for use in plex and the backup vdev being used to back up all of the pictures & files. However my thought would have been to create two 6 drive raidz2 vdevs and then combine them into the same zpool, giving me the capacity of all 12 drives. Correct me if I am wrong, but this would allow me to upgrade each vdev seperately and see the results once I upgrade 6 disks on the same vdev while still treating the seperate vdevs as a single zpool to write data to.

3- Yes that was one of my main concerns about doing the larger 12drive array.

4- I assume you meant Plex Password, and I will have to look into Crashplan. One quick question about crashplan, does it give them access to read/view the files on the NAS or only to backup files from their computer to the NAS.

5- That was my initial plan until I started reading about all sorts of people moving their jails to an SSD. Do your drives still spin down with the plugins on the production zpool, my reasoning for this is that there may be weeks where the NAS is not accessed so it would be beneficial to spin down the drives.

 

[depasseg]

1. I don't know the best CPU and board combos. Someone else will have to chime in on that (or try searching for some E3 or E5 posts).

2. Look on ebay. Should be in the $200-$300 range. I believe Mr Rackables has an ebay store and is well respected. No issue putting it on a shelf (except noise).
Correct, you could upgrade each drive in a vdev. I just didn't think you had that much data yet.

3- cool

4- yep. typo. No, Crashplan is only backup. For access, look into OwnCloud.

5- My drives never spin down, so it doesn't really matter to me. If there are going to be weeks, then mirrored SSD's (which could be in two of the 16 drive slots in the SC846), for the jails and .system might be worth it.

 

[bjurewicz21]

1- I will try looking around at the Xeon E3, not sure I would need all the power in the E5 (starting with cyberjocks hardware recommendations). Hopefully someone can chime in an give me a headstart :)

2- I will look into that and noise isn't too much of an issue as this will be in the basement, however dust contamination is. My basement is very dusty even though there is a air filter running 24x7 down there. for that reason I had been only considering cases that had removable dust filters over all the intakes that I could periodically clean easily.
No I don't have that much data yet, but planning for the future is easier to do then troubleshooting when you need to make changes :)

4- good to know thanks

5- ok so I might want to look into cheap ssds. Could you run these off a larger flashdrive (with mirror) if you don't have enough sata ports?

 

[depasseg]

2- Mine is in my dusty basement as well. Just keep an eye on it and the temps.

5 - I wouldn't try to run the jails off a flash drive. Much too slow and you would likely wear out the flash drive.

 

[bjurewicz21]

Good to note not to run jails off the flashdrive.

Thanks Greg

 

[brando56894]

I have this exact board with 16 GB ECC RAM (will be upgrading to 64 GB soon) and I use plex in it's own jail, SickRage/NZBget/nzbToMedia/nzbMegaSearch/CouchPotato/Headphones/HTPC Manager running in another jail, and Apache 2.4 w/PHP and MariaDB in another jail, along with an 9 TB RAIDZ array and a 2 TB striped array as my pools. I share my plex with about 4 friends that use it randomly (streaming remotely) and I use Kodi to play things locally. I have absolutely no performance issues with Plex on this board and I have a massive library (150+ HD movies, 7,000+ HD TV Episodes), I even set the transcoding to "make my cpu hurt". Just to give you an idea: I've been streaming "300" in 1080P over T-Mobile's LTE at 8Mbps and my cpu "user" usage is averaging about 20% load over the past 15 minutes.

 

[bjurewicz21]

I'm still looking into the Xeon processors since I'm attempting to give myself some future cushion.

Good to hear from someone who has it, for how many builds I see posted with the board there are few posts about number of streams so thank you. So with that you could theoretically do 5 transcoding streams since one only take 20% for a single transcoding stream.

Gives me some hope that I won't have to spend all that money on the Xeon processor.

 

[brando56894]

You're welcome! I thought it was going to be underpowered also but this little thing is an absolute beast. I will probably upgrade to an ATX board with a Xeon in it sometime down the road, but as of right now it suits my needs. I plan on dump all my money into HDDs and RAM :D

 

[bjurewicz21]

Alright so after doing some research I think I will be making the initial investment into the Xeon E3, but I'm not sure which one would be the better purchase.
Xeon E3 1231 v3 (Passmark 9590) or Xeon E3 1241 v3 (Passmark 10056)
There is only a $30 difference between the two processors. And as far as I can tell the only difference is clock speed, which in turn yields a better passmark.

I am also open to other suggestions that people might have, as I am not a Xeon expert or FreeNAS expert.

 

[Darren Myers]

Alright so after doing some research I think I will be making the initial investment into the Xeon E3, but I'm not sure which one would be the better purchase.
Xeon E3 1231 v3 (Passmark 9590) or Xeon E3 1241 v3 (Passmark 10056)
There is only a $30 difference between the two processors. And as far as I can tell the only difference is clock speed, which in turn yields a better passmark.

I am also open to other suggestions that people might have, as I am not a Xeon expert or FreeNAS expert.

For the 30$ i much rather have the higher clock, since youll be transcoding and possibly doing SMB/CIFS shares too, since SMB is single threaded a higher clock speed would be better

 

[bjurewicz21]

Thanks Darren. I was unaware SMB was only a single core operation. So I definitely think that in the end paying the $30 now will be better to help future proof the system.