UK Options from ServerCase

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi,

Not a lot of people sell prebuilt FreeNAS systems in the UK, but one of them, ServerCase UK has two options that are pretty well priced:

https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/quick/PN-FN-BASE/ (Pentium dual core G3220)

https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/quick/SC-FREENAS/ (Quad core embedded Celeron)

They will also do custom upgrades (eg the PowerNAS one does any Haswell 1150 CPU).

Main use cases are Plex (rip at DVD quality usually and play back at 1080p), and some home server tasks like running a small ownCloud instance and some cron jobs like backing up a remote Flickr account.

What would you go for?

Martin

 

[INCSlayer]

is this an ad? i dont really see the point here?

or what the support question is?

 

[Martin Aspeli]

is this an ad? i dont really see the point here?

or what the support question is?

To quote myself:

"What would you go for"?

The point of the question is to ask for opinions about the specs of those systems and whether they are adequate.

I've seen reports in this forum that suggests Celerons are too under-powered, for instance, but I've also seen reports of people using them successfully. I'm also curious whether the higher power consumption of the Pentium is a concern, and whether it'd be advisable to pay a bit more to upgrade to another Haswell CPU instead.

 

[tvsjr]

Well, both boxes have the absolute minimum recommended RAM. Why wouldn't you just build your own system, so you can tune it to your specific use case?

I admit to being a bit mystified about why you would rip to DVD quality, then play back at 1080p...

 

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi,

Sorry, scratch the thing about DVD quality, sloppy language. The point I was trying to make was there will be some transcoding required for some devices.

I would consider building. When I looked at the recommended hardware thread and tried to add up the numbers, it was coming out £200 more expensive than the Servercase pre-built option, but that wasn't comparing like-for-like spec. It is a bit tricky trying to work out what may be a good balance between performance, power, noise and cost without trial-and-error buying components that may not work well in a particular setup.

Upping the RAM even if I go for the pre-built one is definitely an option though, so that's good advice. Thanks!

Martin

 

[Ericloewe]

Huh, looks like a knockoff FreeNAS mini with somewhat different internals.

I still think that four bays is rather limiting.