Suggest a build for a quiet zfs Plex server on a budget

[gigatexal]

This could be fun:

I’m looking for a setup that is quiet but powerful enough to handle a few streams (hw transcoding?) and a handful of simultaneous um peer to peer downloads

I plan to also use ZFS to handle the file storage and when not being used for Plex it could store backups for my VMs and such

But I’m torn between a Ryzen 2400G and an i3 8100

I would also be open to case recommendations one that could maintain a small form factor but also say 3 to 5 spindles?

 

[gigatexal]

I3 8100 and a random motherboard that supports ECC or a 2400G that can also do ECC? Or would lower speed ECC hurt encoding speeds?

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Only the 2400G Pro can utilise ECC memory; the regular 2400G doesn't have an ECC-capable controller as far as I can tell. When I was looking at least they were as common as rocking horse poo.

I've not tried using the VCE block of my 2400G under linux yet, and I know next to nothing about Plex's support for hardware transcoding, but there are people who've been using it with ffmpeg with varying degrees of success. However I'm just using it for my HTPC, and XBMC doesn't support the VAAPI of the Raven Ridge chips yet, so I've not had any occasion to try it.

Using ECC shouldn't have any noticeable bearing on encoding speed; typically ECC will mean higher latency/timings on the modules themselves which can technically mean slower encodes, but for CPU-encoding at least you're normally never memory bound so there shouldn't be more than a 2% decrease, if that. Most of the memory scaling articles I've seen show less than half a percent of variance.

 

[gigatexal]

sounding more and more like the i3 8100 is better supported in terms of doing hardware encoding and such -- there's just something luring me to the AMD side -- likely just want to support them given their new found resurgence

i do get more cores with the 2400G though... hmm, maybe i could add a used GTX 1050ti but that would blow the budget for no reason

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Well I've only ever really used CPU encoding since all the encodes I do are just for archival purposes (i.e. not time critical) and the quality of the HW encoders frankly sucks compared to a good dose of x264 or similar. I've never really fully understood why plex users have to transcode anything TBH...!

However, of all the hardware encodeers, QSV/MSS seems to be the least worst option, and from reading a couple of pages looks to be the one best supported by Plex in any case.

 

[SwanRonson]

This could be fun:

I’m looking for a setup that is quiet but powerful enough to handle a few streams (hw transcoding?) and a handful of simultaneous um peer to peer downloads

I plan to also use ZFS to handle the file storage and when not being used for Plex it could store backups for my VMs and such

But I’m torn between a Ryzen 2400G and an i3 8100

I would also be open to case recommendations one that could maintain a small form factor but also say 3 to 5 spindles?

for the case you could go bitfenix phenom m-itx. i bought a cooler master elite 110 because it was on sale and... i should've gone with the bitfenix



Ryzen has very limited ECC support, and i believe the G-series (Ryzen APUs) have next to zero ECC support. i currently have a ryzen 3 1200 and again i really should've gone with something else.

 

[gigatexal]

for the case you could go bitfenix phenom m-itx. i bought a cooler master elite 110 because it was on sale and... i should've gone with the bitfenix



Ryzen has very limited ECC support, and i believe the G-series (Ryzen APUs) have next to zero ECC support. i currently have a ryzen 3 1200 and again i really should've gone with something else.

and gone with the 1400, 1500, 1600.. etc or intel?

I've thrown ECC out the window I won't need it.

 

[SwanRonson]

Really I'm just nitpicking here; the Ryzen does everything I want it to, but hindsight is 20/20.

At least with 350/370 chipsets, I believe all the AMD AM4 ITX boards were limited to 4x SATA ports so if you wanted more you had to add a PCI-E card or go micro-ATX.

There's Intel boards with 6x SATA that support Pentiums and ECC support that I could have gone with instead. Of course, that would be much less horsepower.

 

[gigatexal]

I’m thinking of springing for a 2700 non X just for the insane amount of cores. I could setup a VM for downloads and arm it with the VPN and such. Say 2 cores. 4-6 maybe for Plex. Should be plenty for the single 1 or 2 streams at a time that I have and another VM of 4 threads for ZFS. I could then have 4 more threads for other workloads!

This way instead of two setups I could save some space, cash, and power on just one bigger box. I’m planning on it hosting some zpools with dedup so I’ll need at least 16GB of ram but I’ll try to break the bank and spring for 32GB but DDR4 being so expensive

 

[gigatexal]

Everything I have read says XFR on the new AMD chips makes overclocking almost irrelevan which is a shame since I love getting more out of my chips than I paid for