How to build a quiet 117TB Plex media server (Part 2)

after recording part one I realized I kind of glossed over a few things so I wanted to elaborate on some of the reasoning behind the decisions I made upgrade and hardware wise before I migrated everything to my current single server solution I was running two separate rack mount servers I had the 4u Isilon NL 400 running Windows 10 Pro as my storage server and a 1u Intel s 2600 GZ plex media server also running Windows 10 Pro the reason I had a separate transcode server was simply because I wasn't using Hardware transcoding yet and I needed to have those CPU cycles available for plex without interference from other tasks or virtual machines running in the background Plex can be very CPU hungry if you have multiple transcodes happening simultaneously I think the advent of Hardware transcoding really changed the game when it comes to running a media server at home I think it's the best way to share with friends and family and it can now be done fairly inexpensively the 4u Isilon I had was running stable bits drive pool for both data redundancy and the drive pooling software itself it worked great like I said previously I don't have anything against raid 1 or stable bits drive pool the selling point for stable bits drive pool really is that it's a software raid and unlike raid 1 *FACEPALM* I MEANT RAID 5 :( your data is still accessible even if you pull a drive out and put it in another computer it copies every file in the pool to two disks the only reason I continued using this product with 20 plush drives was out of necessity in order to migrate away from it I would need an array or pool large enough to house all of the data I already had in order to migrate it over when I first installed the software I only had two drives it made sense back then as I didn't see my storage addiction getting out of control like it did as I continued adding drives the ease of use and ability to add drives on an ad-hoc basis regardless of size was great but the hidden cost of this was getting vendor locked into a piece of software I personally think FreeNAS and unrated are better solutions because the way they work is fundamentally different and at a high level this allows you to get the most bang for your buck by sacrificing fewer disks to get the same data recovery ability take on rate for instance sure you sacrifice at least one drive as a parity drive to have single failure protection but that can essentially protect you from any single Drive failing and still being able to recover your data if you lose a day to drive a nun raid you simply rebuild the entire thing by having one dedicated parity drive in my opinion this is a very elegant solution and it skills incredibly well if you have four discs for instance and they are all eight terabytes in size you can sacrifice one eight terabyte drive and have twenty four terabytes of usable space in your array hell you don't even have to have equal size drives with sunray so you can have a mixture of eight five four or whatever size drives you want as long as your parity disk is equal or larger than any of your data drives and you end up with single drive failure protection at a minimum FreeNAS uses ZFS and while I don't want to turn this into a comparison video between the two FreeNAS requires you to have equally sized disks for each array or you have to create separate v-dubs to use different size discs in a single pool that also means sacrificing one drive from each vida for drive failure protection if this isn't a deal-breaker for you free nas does offer better read and write performance than done raid albeit with different pool slash vida of disk requirements but with MDOT two drives being as cheap as they are you can just add an MDOT to drive as a cache and unrated and get pretty good performance out of it and this is how I ended up where I am today it had both to do with the desire for a more reliable storage solution as well as the advent of Hardware transcoding migrating from the loudest hell one us 2600 GZ Intel server and before you dyson vacuum cleaner had to a dual-purpose storage an Plex transcode server really was a no-brainer an unread you can run virtual machines and pass a GPU through directly to a VM which allows you to use Hardware transcoding inside of a virtual machine on your storage server which really lets you get the most out of a single machine this is my current server the foundation of my server is a gigabyte GA 7 PS h2 dual socket LGA 2011 motherboard with dual a 526 9 TV 2 CPUs 2 PCI Express LSI SAS 2008 expansion cards flash 2 IT mode 256 gigabytes of ddr3 ECC memory and an NVIDIA GTX 1074 Plex transcoding and a total of about a hundred and seventeen terabytes of storage of which about 96 terabytes of that is usable I built this in a slightly modified Thermaltake tower 900 case I removed the plastic om feet and added casters on the bottom so that I could wheel it around when I need to move it I mounted the GPU in the front of the case due to heat as well as some space issues overall the case makes very little noise runs fairly cool stores lots of data and is capable of roughly 46 h.265 transcodes as a plex server all while housing 117 terabytes of storage i mounted most of the disks back here I also added fans in the back to bring more air into the back of the case as well as to create positive pressure which helps exhaust the heat out through the top of the case and through the hard drives I think it looks good and it is a practical enough solution to run in a house modifying the Tower 900 case to fit an SSI EBE ATX motherboard like the gigabyte 7 pêche to required drilling and tapping a few extra holes to add three motherboard standoffs the entire process was pretty easy the motherboard would have fit without these extra holes but in my opinion these extra standoffs here give it the necessary support for adding and removing or memory later after this as I mentioned previously I installed the drive cages and the back of the case along with extra fans if you aren't already familiar with the LSI SAS 2008 cards they allow you to add eight drives with each card by using these breakout cables which I also link to in the description SAS to SATA breakout cables are what I ran to the back of the case to get a total of 15 3.5 inch drives into this case as I mentioned in my previous video this is my 4u Isilon server as you can probably imagine the noise this thing creates makes it almost unbearable to run inside your house when I wanted to move it out of my garage due to humidity concerns I needed to build something quiet that could house all of my disks and that is how I ended up here as I stated previously I used to have two servers one for Plex and one for storage this allowed me to have dedicated CPU cycles and hardware for Plex but due to the advent of Hardware transcoding passing a GPU through to a virtual machine inside of unread allows me to run a single server which helped me lower my power bill each month well I don't need the dual 2690 v2 CPUs to get the most out of this gtx 1070 I ended up buying them for the extra bit of headroom and to be able to spin up and teardown different virtual machines for lab purposes here is my unread dashboard with all of my docker containers VM storage and hardware stats as you can see I'm running quite a few docker containers most of these are spun up on an as-needed basis while a few docker containers are part of a graph on a dashboard that I use to monitor my server here are the VMS running on my server as of today I have a primary Ubuntu plex media server where I pass the gtx 1070 through to the operating system this configuration allows me to get about 46 h.265 to h.264 transcodes as you can see the utilization on average is nowhere near that but it's fun to have all that extra Headroom I think you would be hard-pressed to build something equivalent to this performance wise with just CPUs today I also run a Windows 10 Pro virtual machine I use that for various applications and just to have a Windows host that's always up here is my main graph on a dashboard this is running inside of a docker container a nun raid there is a great tutorial on how to build this in the description below at the top of this dashboard you can see my summarized UPS 2 six where I have the current load battery charge daily yearly costs as well as load versus time charts below that I monitor each individual 2690 v2 CPU the Ubuntu and Windows VM CPU utilization x' and the NVE NC and GPU utilization inside of Ubuntu to keep track and if necessary help correlate any performance issues the total CPU package as well as the temperatures of my seat GPU and CPU are on the right and a current UPS runtime and GPU fan speed graph are below that I track current transcodes and flex sessions as well as overall data consumption growth and free space some of the more useful statistics are the drive temperatures cache and array read/write speeds as well as a disk latency and write times that about sums up my primary dashboard I have a few others as well but the more interesting and relevant to this video would be the Ubuntu dashboard here I monitor current transcode speed number of transcodes PCIe receive and transmit data rates GPU fan speed and vram used as well as the overall utilization of the NVE NC chip this dashboard really makes it easy to monitor plex to sum all of this up the tower 900 case really allowed me to run my Plex and storage servers inside my house and out of my garage away from the humidity which kills hard drives it also allowed me to virtualize my plex server and lower my electricity bill thank you for watching please like and subscribe let me know what your build is in the comments below where it lives in your house what the specs are maybe take a photo and upload it I'm really curious to know what others are doing out there

Channel: Sloth Tech TV

Views: 74,138

Rating: 4.8833508 out of 5

Keywords: plex, plex media server, Rack mount plex server, Rack mount server, history of my plex server, Quiet storage server, rack mounted plex, rack mount plex, my rack mounted plex server, my rack mounted plex server 2019, 2019 rack mounted plex server, my rack mount plex server 2019, my rack mount plex server, rack mount plex server, rack mount server, unraid plex, how to setup plex, how to plex, bytemybits, byte my bits, emby storage, emby

Id: 2nr4o4wyG0c

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2019