Hi all
my apologies for another help thread, but i am getting myself caught in circles trying to settle on specs. I am looking to build a home Plex server which can transcode/stream to me when travelling away from home. I am aiming for a ZFS-3 set up over 8 x HDD with potential for an SSD cache if it would be of use.
Current rig
At the moment I have an HPE Prolient ml10 gen9 with 4Gb Ram and an Intel G4400 running Xpenology. This was bought as an experiment to see how much use I would make out of a NAS. And the answer was I like it all a lot and have slowly expanded it to 4 x 8Tb Seagate Ironwolf (RAID5).
Looking for
The main day to day use is data storage. With having a pc, laptop, tablet and phone and travelling a lot with work I use the server to keep all data synced between them plus as a back up. I also like to remote in to download files if i am at a friends house without my laptop. This is the usual documents, images and music coming up to about 300Gb currently.
Additionally I am storing a lot of media ranging from SD quality up to 1080p and now some 4K in 5.1 audio. I would like to run Plex to stream this around my home (Gigabit LAN) and also to my laptop when travelling (currently 8Mb upload speed on my internet). I would largely be the only user, but would like space for a couple more to allow for future expansion or ocassionally friends logging in from their homes.
The questions
1) Where I am largely getting stuck is what CPU will best suit my needs, is it cores or clock here? I am currently looking at an Xeon E3 1240V6
2) With RAM I am planning for the 1Gb per 1Tb. But is this based on total HDD capacity or usable ZFS-3? For 8 x 8Tb Ironwolf in ZFS-3 this would be 64Tb total but 40Tb usuable, so 64Gb or 32Gb of RAM?
3) How best to store my data? Currently I have everything stored in 1 volume of 4 x 8Tb in RAID5 and organised into folders. Is this ok, or would multiple volumes be better? For example
Volume 1 - 8 x 8Tb HDD (Media, big files)
Volume 2 - 4 x 1Tb HDD (Documents and stuff, small files)
4) Would an SSD Cache be any use?
5) Is hardware transcoding in FreeNAS and Plex working? Does this need to be an integrated GPU or can any old 3d card do the trick?
Thanks for your help!
my apologies for another help thread, but i am getting myself caught in circles trying to settle on specs. I am looking to build a home Plex server which can transcode/stream to me when travelling away from home. I am aiming for a ZFS-3 set up over 8 x HDD with potential for an SSD cache if it would be of use.
Current rig
At the moment I have an HPE Prolient ml10 gen9 with 4Gb Ram and an Intel G4400 running Xpenology. This was bought as an experiment to see how much use I would make out of a NAS. And the answer was I like it all a lot and have slowly expanded it to 4 x 8Tb Seagate Ironwolf (RAID5).
Looking for
The main day to day use is data storage. With having a pc, laptop, tablet and phone and travelling a lot with work I use the server to keep all data synced between them plus as a back up. I also like to remote in to download files if i am at a friends house without my laptop. This is the usual documents, images and music coming up to about 300Gb currently.
Additionally I am storing a lot of media ranging from SD quality up to 1080p and now some 4K in 5.1 audio. I would like to run Plex to stream this around my home (Gigabit LAN) and also to my laptop when travelling (currently 8Mb upload speed on my internet). I would largely be the only user, but would like space for a couple more to allow for future expansion or ocassionally friends logging in from their homes.
The questions
1) Where I am largely getting stuck is what CPU will best suit my needs, is it cores or clock here? I am currently looking at an Xeon E3 1240V6
2) With RAM I am planning for the 1Gb per 1Tb. But is this based on total HDD capacity or usable ZFS-3? For 8 x 8Tb Ironwolf in ZFS-3 this would be 64Tb total but 40Tb usuable, so 64Gb or 32Gb of RAM?
3) How best to store my data? Currently I have everything stored in 1 volume of 4 x 8Tb in RAID5 and organised into folders. Is this ok, or would multiple volumes be better? For example
Volume 1 - 8 x 8Tb HDD (Media, big files)
Volume 2 - 4 x 1Tb HDD (Documents and stuff, small files)
4) Would an SSD Cache be any use?
5) Is hardware transcoding in FreeNAS and Plex working? Does this need to be an integrated GPU or can any old 3d card do the trick?
Thanks for your help!
