Dual Xeon 60TB Dedicated Plex Media Server - Meet Zeus

if you've been following my channel for the last couple months you know that I have been working on a new plex media server called Zeus with cliche names aside it has been a long project of mine that has taken some time to get perfected and get launched in this final Zeus build video I'm going to dive into more details about the build and explain some of the things that I did to make it the server that I desired I'll cover the total cost and even further talk more about some of the pros and cons of my decisions some of it might be a recap and this video might be a little long for that I apologize to start off I have to say that this build popped my cherry to the world of enterprise class hardware I say this because even though I have a decent knowledge of computers in general all of that came from consumer grade components so while that did help me this was still a good learning experience for me so just keep that in mind before you judge me all right without further delay meet Zeus housed inside a 4u Shin bro rack chassis Zeus comes loaded with dual Xeon e5 2650 processors these are the v1 Sandy Bridge CPUs clocked at two gigahertz each supporting hyper threading giving Zeus a total of 16 cores and 32 threads on Pathmark comm it pulls a whopping score of 15,000 217 to give you an idea of that kind of power my ex 99 59 60 ex has a score of 15,000 972 backing this abundance of speed is 128 gigabytes of ddr3 ECC memory and a 1200 watt power supply to serve the 24 hard drive bays in the front it has three PCI Express LSI sass cards each controlling 8 Bay's with a transfer limit of 6 gigabits per second for cooling each CPU has its own heatsink with attached fans accompanied by kind of a rather crude solution to a noisy problem but more on that later the motherboard behind it all is a ZT systems dual 2011 sandy bridge-e socket with 16 slots for ram running on american megatrends BIOS and I know who makes it along with the model and serial number for the life of me I cannot find any kind of support or upgrades for the BIOS like anywhere moving on for storage it currently has 15 hard drives 2 SSDs with an immediate plan to add a third SSD once ups decides to show up this includes to a terabyte Western Digital red drives 1/4 terabyte Western Digital black to 4 terabyte WD greens and 10 4 terabyte WD red drives it also has 2 SanDisk 480 gigabyte SSDs with another 160 gig SSD just waiting to be installed excluding the SSDs this gives me a total of 68 terabytes of raw storage installed on the server however eight of that is going to be lost due to parity in the system but still 60 terabytes the operating system of my choice to power it all is unrated this allowed me to maximize my harddrive space while giving me an easy way to expand the array anytime that I wanted to this leads into my use of the 3 SSDs one 480 gigabyte SSD is being used as a cache drive that allows me to move files to my server quickly without the bottleneck of the array this has been an amazing experience because Zeus came with 2 10 gigabit SFP ports and most of my data is being dumped off of my main pcs SSD that is directly connected to the server in full 10 gigabit speeds via one of those ports the other 480 gig SSD is used solely as a side mounted drive hosting the Plex data and transcode folders this gives me the best speeds in browsing and playing media files without taking up space on my cache Drive finally the last 160 gig SSD will be used as a dedicated virtual machine disk this allow me to test and run multiple operating systems for a number of different reasons most of which I don't actually know yet but hey it's there or it will be soon circling back to the Unrated so far I have installed a few key plugins and Dockers that I have found to be completely useful and simple to use the first and most obvious being plex media server aside from that though was easily able to install Plex PI to monitor users and content on my system I also installed CrashPlan to make regular backups of my Plex data folder along with you know a few other things and then I even installed Doug DNS for an easy dynamic DNS solution this is net data which gives me detailed readouts on everything involving with my system and I also have zone minder here as a placeholder for a future project now I'll try not to bore you with every single thing I installed here in fact I covered a lot of the software in previous videos but I do want to cover a few more plugins that really proved to be useful to me the two most useful ones being the nerd pack and the community applications plug-in with nerd pack you can easily install a ton of basic however useful applications that will make your life easier even further the community applications plug-in will expand on this giving you most of the same options but also adding just about anything available for under 8 and yes these two do overlap just a little bit but I still wanted to mention them both because the nerd pack seems to give you a lot of the necessities any server might need all in the one screen three of which I feel is very important to just about any server the first being the pre-clear plugin with this you can easily pre-clear multiple drives without the use of SSH or any command line an absolute requirement for anybody who prefers simple interfaces over the boring old white text and black backgrounds and in case you don't know pre-clearing a drive is where you write all zeros to a drive so it's ready to be added to the array at any given moment this also serves as a method to stress test to drive while looking for errors I in fact found out a couple of my drives had errors on them and I was able to send them off for warranty exchanges with Western Digital before I added them to my pool gotta love warranty ii plugin i love is ransomware protection with this you can add bait files to each of your shares that has variations in name size and extension the purpose of which is to wait for those files to be altered in any way and in reaction lock down your server to avoid further infection it can automatically set your shares to read-only stop the array or run a custom ripped all of which claims to be done within a tenth of a second for obvious reasons this is an amazing concept to protect your data from anybody on your network who might download and run the wrong file sure you can lock down your shares with username and passwords but that's not going to stop ransomware from infecting machines that are already authorized to access that data my third favorite plug-in is called dynamics cache directories this is because unread likes to spin down drives when not being used to save power and where however the fault of this is that when you want to browse your folders you're going to end up waiting for each Drive to spin up as you navigate through your directories just to see what's inside and believe me this can be a little aggravating with cache directories all of that is stored into memory and immediately accessible without needing to spin up any drives which is amazing but hey you all are here to find out what this server can do in relation to plex so let's move on for testing I used an 11 megabit 1080p movie file with surround sound audio hosted on my servers cache drive to avoid any bottleneck or limitations with hard drives then I played that file on the plex TV web interface on my main PC transcoded down to 2 megabits and multiple windows until I had issues which as it turns out meant that I could have a total of 11 transcoded streams at the same time without much slow down or buffering I was able to get 12 streams to play but it may cause some buffering on start up with my other streams help I even try to do 13 streams but not happening so in comparison to my old server run in an i7 3770 that could do a solid 7 streams I gained 4 additional streams that I will probably never use but hey go big or go home or something now of course Zeus is going to be able to do so much more for me than just be a plex media server even though that's its primary function I plan on exploring many other options as I go along for example a security camera DVR and a cloud backup device for the many computers that I deal with just in case you missed some of my previous videos covering the build process I'll link to them in the cards above and the description below but now I want to take a quick overview of the cool that I did because it was a big hurdle for me and well honestly I'm just completely satisfied with my results when I got the new server the included fans were just absolutely terribly crazily ridiculously loud this is because they were designed to be in a server room where sound would just was not an issue welcome to my journey of ignorance step this way and I'll show you around so this was a problem that had to be solved I tried reducing the voltage to the fans but even at low rpms it was just unbearable plus it reduced a much needed amount of airflow to the passive coolers on the CPUs and the SAS cards with my previous experience using the amazing naktu of fans in my main computer I set out to create a custom fan bracket to replace the smaller 80 millimeter fans with three 140 millimeter fans some minor issues arose from the lack of PWM controls that forced me to run them at full throttle all the time more on that in previous videos however I liked the idea of them running at full speed because I wasn't just cooling the CPUs I had to think about the hard drives and the SAS controllers as well this worked great it kept my drives cool even when they were under full load and even kept me from almost burning my fingers when I touched the SAS heat sinks and as an added bonus the naktu of fans at full speed were even quieter than my old server however the processors failed my stress test and they started going over 70 degrees Celsius under load because of this I opted into buying a new set of CPU coolers that had fans directly attached to them bringing my full loaded CPU temps down to around 52 to 55 C perfect for performance the dual Zeon's were able to hit thirteen hundred and seventy eight and Cinebench only a few hundred points away from my 59 60 X see where it lacks in core speed and makes up for in threads and Plex is pretty good at handling multiple cores for storage well this is kind of a pro and con thing for me and choosing unrated as my OS I knew that going in I would lose the regular speed of ZFS Andrade file systems because with those file systems they use the combined speed of all the discs in the array with unrated uses one or two parity drives that need to be calculated and have parity written to any time you move files to your server however it only uses that drive that you're writing to and the parity drive so it basically has to write data to two separate drives with the handicap of having to calculate parity on the primary the end result is having a write speed of around 33 to 35 megabytes per second and read speeds are pretty much limited by the individual drive speed I'm reading from this of course is where the cached drive comes in to save the day what it does is allow me to dump data at much faster speeds at the capacity of the network or the single drive I love this because I have two SSDs connected with the 10g SFP port so things are super quick then automatically every night at 3 a.m. and moves those files to the array making room for the next day and yes if your cache drive fails during this move you will lose the data stored on the cache drive however you can't have dual cast drives in raid 1 to avoid this issue the good thing here is that with the unread you can stop the array and add new drives to it expanding your storage without any hassle I love that and it was pretty much the selling point for me I won't dive more into the risk of losing data with this kind of setup and it is possible of multiple drys filling on a rebuild but I can't say that this is a much better solution that I had on my old server which was basically a bunch of drives with no raid or parity or any protection at all it's a little scary but I never had a dry fill although I did find out that I had a couple that were on their way out my only wish is that I could have more than one array at the same time so I'm not throwing all of my eggs into one basket it's not really that big of a deal and I'm not even sure if I would use it right now but in the future that might be a feature that I want really though at this point that about sums up my dislikes with unread other minor issues can be solved with plugins or Dockers fairly easily as an example using the unassigned devices as a separate mounted SSD for Plex data and transcoding folders requires the unassigned devices plug-in without it you have to use your cache drive if you want that speed so installing unrated dead-simple Dockers and plugins are really easy setting up arrays are pretty much self-explanatory and everything just kind of works as intended without having to jump on Google every 5 minutes to figure something out overall I'm really star the software of course it does cost money like 130 dollars for the pro license that I needed but within the 30-day trial period that they gave me I came to really enjoy using the software and it just it seemed worth the money and that kind of brings me to the cost of Zeus as a whole you know a final number the end value for the server itself I jumped on eBay and got in contact with a seller that was willing to custom build it to fit my needs I will link to that auction in the description below but the price ended up being six hundred and fifty three dollars after shipping then I purchased some new nock to a fans CPU coolers a SATA power splitter and SFP two rj45 adapter two SSDs and a Lex our USB jump drive that was needed for the Unrated LS this all cost me right around five hundred and forty dollars bringing my grand total to one thousand one hundred and ninety three dollars give or take some change but hey now I have a server that can handle anything I can throw at it plex related without even breaking a sweat and I have a large amount of extra RAM and extra cores that I can use to play around with some VMs or plugins without slowing it down very much basically on good for like two or three years yeah so I would like to hear from you in the comments below as for some ideas for utilizing the extra horsepower this server has to offer would you run specific vm's for something maybe plugins or Dockers let me know whatever it might be I'm up for good ideas and I love exploring new things so fire away I've already taken a few ideas and tips from my viewers to get where I am now and I thank you all for the help and interaction thank you for following me on this new server journey of mine Oh some of you got a little inspired or maybe even possibly learn something new I know that I did and to me that is actually a lot of fun I still have much to learn though and I know that there are probably better or easier ways to do some of the things that I did but I look at it this way you have to start somewhere anyways as always like and subscribe below have a great day [Music]

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 145,642

Rating: 4.8379407 out of 5

Keywords: Plex, Media, Server, Dual, Xeon, unRAID, Zeus, Build, dedicated, enterprise

Id: Ur7qWYH5F-s

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 18 2016