sub $100 atom board w/ 1) 16gb mem and either 10+ drive ports or 1 x8 PCIe 2.0?

[raj89]

I have been through the 2017 and 2014 hardware recommendations and am havent found a good fit yet. I am really hoping to spend less than say $150 total (mem/proc/mobo) and am hoping such specs for less than $150 isnt a pipe dream.

I am not looking for something fancy, this will be for a 1-2 user home server that will pretty much be for streaming 4k videos and FLAC music for the next 5 years or so?

What is turning out to be a bigger caveat than i thought was supported number of drives. While the workload would be fairly small the storage size would be on the larger side of things (50+TB, all relative i know) and I have drives already so really dont want to go out and buy more.

A board with 10+ drive ports for less than a fortune seems unlikely but I was hoping I could pop in a used ServeRaid M1015 on an older board.

I mentioned the atom board only because, if possible, I'd like to keep it as low power as (realistically) possible but that is not a must, if there is some regular ATX board out there that will be good enough for the next few years/upgrades then I am ok with that.

with that in mind, anyone have any helpful suggestions? please? :)

 

[CraigD]

with that in mind, anyone have any helpful suggestions? please? :)

Read the recommended hardware resource, and follow it, you may think you know better, you don't! (Gambling with you data is not smart)

Spinning the number of drives you need is trivial, Streaming 4K video requires a powerful CPU

The Guideline

Very roughly speaking, for a single full-transcode of a video, the following PassMark score requirements are a good guideline for the following average source file:

• 4K HDR (50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC) file: 17000 PassMark score (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
• 4K SDR (40Mbps, 8-bit HEVC) file: 12000 PassMark score (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
• 1080p (10Mbps, H.264) file: 2000 PassMark score
• 720p (4Mbps, H.264) file: 1500 PassMark score

The CPU Benchmark website is a good resource to see what sort of PassMark score a particular processor received.

Have Fun

 

[raj89]

Read the recommended hardware resource, and follow it, you may think you know better, you don't! (Gambling with you data is not smart)

Spinning the number of drives you need is trivial, Streaming 4K video requires a powerful CPU




Have Fun

Hmmmm, yeah, I shouldn't have said "streaming", I have a little minix HTPC box that would be doing all the "processing/playing" as it supports hevc hardware decoding.

As for reading the recommended hardware source, at the risk of sounding flippant, i did mention that I have "been through the 2017 and 2014 hardware recommendations" and "havent found a good fit yet".

I do agree about not gambling and I certainly _dont_ think I know better, I want to be sure i get something that has been "tested", most of the suggestions in the 2017 list are out of my price range, and at least for Atom setups the 2014 list really didnt recommend much, just 2 boards. I'd love to get something nicer but thats just not realistic in terms of what I can afford.