Home Media Server Build finally starting.

Calibos

Some of ye lads might remember the renders I posted of my planned media server several years ago. I actually bought the case and HDD caddies for this in late 2013 or early 2014 IIRC. Some might also remember the Sketchup models I posted of my planned Ikea-Hack to turn two hand me down/up Ikea Malm Desks into one large fancier desk.





Anyway, both plans are about to be done. All parts I needed for the desk ordered and delivered by Ikea. Just need to order a PSU, Cheap PCIe Sata Controller card some WD Reds or Seagate Ironwolfs for the Media server (Downscaled to a Max of 12 drives) and I just got a hand me down/up Mobo, Ram and CPU which leads to my main question.

Kid Brothers GF upgraded her PC to an 8700K based system and gave me her Msi Z87i m-ITX Mobo, 16gb DDR3 and i5 4670K. For some reason I had thought she had a non K Ivybridge.

So first question. This is too good to accept it for free from my kid brothers girlfriend. What is a fair price to give her for the mobo, ram and CPU.

This is going to turn out to be a very powerful Media Server. Looked up the specs of the mobo and it has dual Realtek Nics. When researching what those are used for I came across reference to pfSense. An idea formed in my head. Retire my non AC Asus RT-N66U Router.

The Media Server will run Windows Storage Spaces. Is it a good idea to run pfsense on the same Windows 10 PC? I could use the second NIC for a future Security cam IP network I'll eventually install myself for my home and business with the media server storing the camera footage and running the security cam software. I'll also need to replace the Wireless N mini-pcie card on the Msi Z87i mobo. Would this be a good choice? Intel-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC-7260? Is it possible to buy antenna extension cables to take the antenna about 5m from the Media Server/pfSense box in my attic bedroom to the top of the attic in the centre of the house which will clear the thick brick internal walls and hopefully make the 5ghz band actually viable? Will I be able to setup a VPN for the media server which won't impact traffic on the rest of the home network. Does using the Media Server as the firewall box for the network complicate the use of a VPN?

Hope some can answer a few or all of my questions.

ED E

I've a self built NAS, thread on here in case you're interested (8 Bay, octa core mini ITX, ECC, Triple NIC, 12 SATA ports).


PF Sense? Yes. Use a dedicated box IMO. There are lots of small things that'll do just fine. When it comes to connectivity KISS.

Storage Spaces? Why? And you seem confused, if you want PFSense on the same box as Storage spaces then you need a hypervisor install but you've no mention of what you'd use for that or requirements?


Software RAID/Pooling is nice, but from my experience I'm not sure I'd do it again. Do you have the budget for a decent RAID10 card?

PS: Even if you use PFSense for routing don't use your tower as an AP, buy some actual infrastructure not use a PC's pitiful little NIC.

Calibos

How much is fair for the brothers GF's i5 4670K, 16gb DDR3 and mITX MSI Z87i?

Serephucus

I'd use a separate box for network. You could run it in a VM or something, but I wouldn't. Your server goes down because something failed, and your network is borked. Better to just leave it alone on its own hardware.


Some stuff, based on my own experience:

I had a similar build to ED for my home server, That was running Server 2012 R2, if memory serves, and I was using FlexRAID for storage. I did look at Storage Spaces at the time as well, and decided against it. If it did all the things it promised it would be great, but I've heard a lot of bad things, mostly around reliability. It's pretty out of date information though, to be fair.

I've since upgraded to a Threadripper system, running unRAID, and I'm really happy with it. The way it does storage is ideal for home media: Disk pooling, with assigned parity disks (1 or 2). No striping. This means you don't get the performance of a striped array (single disk performance is completely fine for media though), but you gain a lot. You can expand the array with whatever the hell disk you want at any time (as long as it's the same size or smaller than the parity), and you can mix and match speeds, sizes, etc.

unRAID also handles VMs very nicely, as well as Docker. This is a killer feature, and once you understand how to use them, they become really useful. I use them much more than VMs now, and pretty much only use a VM when I can't use a Docker container.

tl;dr - Have a look at other options, before you commit to Windows (don't be scared off by Linux!). unRAID, FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, and Proxmox, are all really nice options, and have different stuff depending on what you're after.

K.O.Kiki

Calibos wrote: »

How much is fair for the brothers GF's i5 4670K, 16gb DDR3 and mITX MSI Z87i?

€300-333

Calibos

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

€300-333

Jaysus!:eek:

tazzzZ

+1 for unRaid. been running it for a few years now and can not recommend it enough. particularly for home situation where you dont need to be uber cautious about the data. you get your 2 parity drives which should be plenty of redundancy. Serephucus nailed the main details there. if you do go this route thought consider an ssd to use as a cache drive. just to keep the speeds up on any transfers to the system.

Calibos

Anyone know where I can pick up a Z87 matx mobo for this i5 4670K?

Sticking with Windows Storage Spaces because I want this to be a Steam Link Game server by 2019 at the latest and need to run Windows 10. I'll be upgrading the GTX1080 in my Main VR rig next year and will put it into the media server for Steam Link gaming around the house. Seeing as I need a Sata PCIe card for the extra Sata ports the mitx board that I got with the CPU is a no go with its single PCIe slot, so I want to pick up a Z87 or z97 Mobo.

ED E

Buy a RAID card TBH. SS is really not advised outside of a SAN environment.

tazzzZ

I don't know much about ss but I'd still go with unRAID. You can pass through all hardware to a w10 vm and have it run as a steam server just as your looking for but at the same time you have the option to shut that down while leaving your other storage and dockers running and unaffected.

Calibos

tazzzZ wrote: »

I don't know much about ss but I'd still go with unRAID. You can pass through all hardware to a w10 vm and have it run as a steam server just as your looking for but at the same time you have the option to shut that down while leaving your other storage and dockers running and unaffected.

Yep, I just looked at unraid again and checked to see if the 4670K supported VT-d and it does.

So what are the benefits of unraid over Storage spaces again? Is the read/writes better? Does it waste less space on parity etc?

BTW, I found a S/H Good Condition Z97 on Amazon Warehouse so thats ordered.

tazzzZ

Calibos wrote: »

Yep, I just looked at unraid again and checked to see if the 4670K supported VT-d and it does.

So what are the benefits of unraid over Storage spaces again? Is the read/writes better? Does it waste less space on parity etc?

BTW, I found a S/H Good Condition Z97 on Amazon Warehouse so thats ordered.

I think the main thing is the flexibility of it. If you read as posted above... You can have 1 or 2 parity drives for redundancy and then any amount of drives can be added as and when you need them as long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity drive. You can change parity drives for bigger drives at any point too if that's an issue. Speed used to be an issue as writing to the drive and parity drive ment you were kinda capped around 60MB/s but you can add an SSD as a cache drive to get your full speeds. You have full vm support with gpu pass through etc. Then dockers for any programs you might use in the back ground... Plex server etc. Honestly I'm not even doing it justice but go to YouTube or their website and check it out. Plenty of very informative stuff on both about it.

Also the support on their forums is excellent. I've had no problems getting answers to any issues I might have had with dockers etc.

Serephucus

Storage Spaces does storage, and Windows can do Windows stuff. In terms of storage, they're functionally pretty similar. Both will allow you to mix drives (Storage Spaces more-so, but don't kid yourself; if you're throwing in random USB drives as well, your performance will be pretty bad), and both offer parity protection.

I'm having a hard time finding info on what SS does under the hood though. The nice thing about unRAID is that because it's a file level parity, you can pull any random drive you want out of the server, and its data can be read on another machine (you can get it to work on Windows, but it's handier if the machine is Linux, as it's native). It also means that if you do somehow suffer an array failure, only the data on the failed drive is lost.


The two big things for me with unRAID: Docker, and VMs.

Initially, I pretty much just wanted a box I could put files on and access around the house, so I was using a Win7 box, and it was fine, but then I went to unRAID, and I don't think I'll ever be going back.

Pure storage uses basically no resources, and could be run on a potato (although the monthly parity check would probably make a potato protest).

I initially thought VMs and Docker were too 'servery' and that I wouldn't need them, but they're just so handy. Once everything is setup (which can take a bit to wrap your head around how they work) they auto-update if you want them to, use the bare minimum of resources, and have a really nicely centralised UI to access stuff.

VMs are great, and as I've been learning more stuff at work, I've started creating Windows and ESXi clusters to play around with high availability services. This is probably outside the scope of what you're planning, but you could for Example have a Windows VM with a GPU passed through to it. Whenever you want you can boot that up for a visitor to play games on, and if you find it's not powerful enough for what you're doing, you can just turn it off, give it more RAM and CPU cores, and start it back up! It also makes backups piss-easy, as it's just a one-liner copy.


You can get a trial license of unRAID and play around with it, if you have some spare drives. It boots of a USB stick, the you can use an existing machine and any spare disks you have and see what you think. If you need help with it, I'm happy to walk you through some stuff. There is a bit of a learning curve if you've only ever really used Windows, but it's really not that bad at all. You should never really have to see the command line interface; everything can be done through the webUI.

Calibos

Thanks guys. In the distant past in 2013/14 when I was looking at this seriously and in fact bought some of the hardware like the case and HDD caddies, I had looked into Games server as well and Hypervisors and esxi etc and there was no GPU passthrough back then iirc so thats what had me set on a windows storage spaces setup but seeing as what I want is now possible on Unraid that seems like the way to go now.

Thanks for the prompt replies btw!