Motherboard and CPU for media server

Calibos

About to purchase the parts for my media server build finally. All that Game streaming server malarkey has been shelved. Simple Win10 based server with Flexraid that will only really be running Kodi related apps, Shared library database, Kodi instance etc

Thus all the old spanners that I threw into the works that had me looking at mobo's with loads of built in Sata ports and ruling out Sas/Sata PCI-e cards are no longer there.

I want to use 2 or 3 of these:

Supermicro-AOC-SAS2LP-MV8-8-Channel-Adapter

AM I correct that x8 PCI-e lanes per card is ideal to allow full bandwidth to the connected drives but that x4 will be fine also just access speeds to drives connected to a card in an x4 slot would slowed if all drives were accessed at once during a parity check etc? Or is Sata 2 speeds enough regardless?

Anyway. Can anyone recommend the cheapest mobo and CPU combo to run Win 10, Flexraid, Kodi and associated apps that'll take 3 of those Sas/Sata add in cards?

Lu Tze

Calibos wrote: »

About to purchase the parts for my media server build finally. All that Game streaming server malarkey has been shelved. Simple Win10 based server with Flexraid that will only really be running Kodi related apps, Shared library database, Kodi instance etc

Thus all the old spanners that I threw into the works that had me looking at mobo's with loads of built in Sata ports and ruling out Sas/Sata PCI-e cards are no longer there.

I want to use 2 or 3 of these:

Supermicro-AOC-SAS2LP-MV8-8-Channel-Adapter

AM I correct that x8 PCI-e lanes per card is ideal to allow full bandwidth to the connected drives but that x4 will be fine also just access speeds to drives connected to a card in an x4 slot would slowed if all drives were accessed at once during a parity check etc? Or is Sata 2 speeds enough regardless?

Anyway. Can anyone recommend the cheapest mobo and CPU combo to run Win 10, Flexraid, Kodi and associated apps that'll take 3 of those Sas/Sata add in cards?

You need to focus on just one project!

ED E

TBH I'm not super happy with Flexraid, its OK, but its more time consuming than its worth. Sees corruption where there's none (MD5 confirms) and the dev isnt super interested. Also file locks vs updates can be a pain. Its meant to be a normal NTFS mount but some programs see through that, Google Drive for example.

Spend the money for a flex licence on a basic raid card then add a little more for a UPS IMO.

Serephucus

Yeah, as someone who's using FlexRAID as well, I'm moving my server to unRAID in the next week or so.

It's supposed to be a "yay RAID redundancy, but regular drive so nothing changes" type thing, and it does these things... most of the time, but it being a one man show has me a little worried for long-term support. unRAID on the other hand has a massive community behind it.

Calibos

Lu Tze wrote: »

You need to focus on just one project!

I'm a multitasker . Parts for the VR build to be ordered at the same time.

ED E. Those are the same kind of things I used to hear about unraid. Another one man show. Seemingly thats come on in leaps and bounds and I haven't read anything negative about unraid in a while. However I really would prefer to stick with a Windows based storage pool with parity protection.

Based on your research what are your thoughts on Snapraid in combination with Stablebit Drivepool? Heck, what about Windows Storage spaces?

ED E

If I were to change it up I'd probably look to BTRFS, but thats leaving the windowze environment. I quickly looked at SS before but that was the 08R2 version so not at all current.

Another bugbear I have with Flex is it benchmarks fine but if you actually try to write out multiple files at once it tends to fall over. It seems its really poor with non-sequential writes. Mine is used 50/50 for backup & as a media server so I'm not really doing much but still see issues.