Back to the drawing board

[S7ewie]

Hey everyone, I'm looking to build/buy my first ever home server, and I'm struggling a little to find the right information. I've phrased my questions various ways on reddit and got very limited response. Best response I had was here but I went straight into consumer CPUs so I want to wind it back and start again because everytime I bring up consumer grade hardware, everyone seems to suggest non-consumer..

My requirements:

• NAS
  • I have a very basic 2 bay synology NAS at home that holds my photography, videography and music. I'm very limited in terms of what I can do with this so I want to upgrade to something more expandable with more capability for 3rd party software.
• Game Servers
  • I'd like to be able to host 2-3 game servers at the same time. Typically smallish servers, unmodded minecraft for up to 10 players. Rust & DayZ up to 10.. things like that.
• Virtual Machines
  • I'm a training developer so I'd like to be able to spin up a couple of VMs to experiment with other OS, plus maybe host some websites etc (though I guess a lot of that can be done with docker containers)
• Music Streaming
  • Somewhat connected to NAS but synology has an app that allows me to connect to and listen to my music. The app is very basic and a bit finicky so i'd like to explore other options for that,
• Home Automation
  • Something I'm keen to experiment with.
• Video Streaming
  • Not a major requirement, I only have a few things on my synology drive but that had the functionality of being able to stream to my devices so I'd like to retain that option.

I'm not worrying about networking in this post, my plan is to take a Ubiquiti route with that, here I'm just focusing on the server itself.

My budget for the server is currently somewhere around £500 (I'm from the UK). I can be a bit flexible on that but I want value for money (as in, there's no point me getting hardware capable of running 10+ game servers with 100+ players as I'll never utilise it).

I was generally looking at consumer grade hardware and was recommend and i5-10400 but every time I bring that up somewhere else, I get told to look for non-consumer second hand.. which I then get told can be very loud and power hungry..

Ultimately.. It needs to be quite, and it needs to be power efficient. Ideally it also needs to take up as little depth as possible.

But rather than me list consumer grade hardware options I thought maybe I should just ask you guys what you would look for with those requirements and budget. I understanding gaming PC requirements.. but not server requirements. Honestly just feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment, not sure where to start.

 

[i386]

How much storage do you need? How much do you want?
If you're "happy" with your current 2 bay (2x 22TB ~44TB in raid 0) nas you probably won't need a 24bay chassis with "loud" fans.

For the games servers I know that minecraft needs higher clock more than cores (that's probably why people recommend consumer cpus). No idea for the other onhes what they need (more cores vs higher GHz)

What kind of vms do you want to run? Small web/application servers? Or big databases? This is important to determine how much ram slots the platform would need.

Is the music streaming just inside a lan or also outside? (not really important for the hardware choices, I'm just curious)

Are the clients inside the lan or also outside?
Do you need transcoding or will direct play suffice? Transcoding will require either a beefy cpu or a specific cpus/gpu that can be used to transcode on the fly.

Should the system be mounted in a server rack? Or a tower?

 

[S7ewie]

Hey @i386 thanks for the response!

At the moment I only have 2 x 2TB drives so at some point very soon I'll need to replace those entirely to make way for more space. 22TB drives area also hideously expensive to replace. I'd rather have more smaller drives than less bigger drives. I guess 4-8 should be plenty. I was originally looking at the Logic Case SC-43400-8HS which has 8 hot swap bays. Something like that I think would be ideal. Ultimately I'm not happy with the one I have, I'm very locked into Synology's ecosystem.

VMs would be small web/application servers (might be able to do most of this with containers). Just home experimentation stuff. Nothing enterprise level, no big databases etc.

Synologies music app allows me to stream music outside of my LAN. It kinda works like my own personal spotify (though it has its issues so I want to explore other options but I'm limited with Synology).

Clients ideally also outside but as I said, this isn't something I'm utilising that much at the moment. I basically just stream a few things that I can't get on any of the streaming services I'm subscribed to. I think the i5-10400 I was originally looking at can handle some amount of transcoding? But I guess it depends on the codecs etc?

Ideally rackmount. I'm planning to get a Ubiquiti UDM at some point to play with.

 

[bwahaha]

The reason 2nd hand enterprise is commonly recommend is you can get a 2xCPU box that will outperform the i5 for pennies on the dollar (until you get it home, and it pulls 100w at idle).

You have some options.

• Get a second nas for more storage and add a 1 Liter PC for server stuff. Use both nases (Nasses? Nassi?) for storage only.
• Get a desktop with multiple internal 3.5" bays (forgo hotswap for now), get a sas controller and breakout cables (used sas storage is cheap! I can pick up used 6tb sas locally for $25/ea right now, ymmv. Also works great with sata drives).
• Cloud services, colocation/sharing somebody else's servers, etc (maybe not. still an option)
• Get really lucky and find a mult-bay chassis (with backplane and caddies) for cheap that you can throw your own guts into
• Micro server, like an HP. Not new, but one of the newer models should work fine. Kinda like a nas, but runs a regular OS.

 

[PD_ZFS-User]

S7ewie,

I think it would help others regarding hardware recommendations if you can provide a power budget (in watts, assuming you'll run the server 24/7) and perhaps an idea of how much storage you want and what type of redundancy that storage should have.

I'll offer a couple of recommendations for music streaming and video streaming.

I currently self host 'Navidrome' in a docker container and it works well as a music streaming server over my local network. It works well whether playing music on a computer using a web browser or controlled by various phone apps which are 'subsonic' api compatible.

I would recommend 'Jellyfin' (which can also be run in a docker container) for video streaming. Jellyfin can also stream music but I found it to be a bit complex for just that use.

Best of luck