Need help in choosing a Home Media Server

[wolfrumble4398]

Hey friends,

I have seen a few people suggest using a Mini-PC as a Home Media server due to the supposed power efficiency and small form factor. However, when it comes to storage expansion, the most I've seen a Mini PC have is 1 internal 2.5" drive slot. This would mean that if I were to expand my storage with more drives, I would have to connect a drive bay to it right?

Regardless, I am planning to build a Media Server from scratch and I would love some help. This Media Server should be able to play up to 4k Videos for roughly 6-10 people (for now). It should have minimal transcoding needed but if it does, maybe 2-4 transcoding streams only (for now). Right now, I only have about 2TB worth of media but it is steadily growing.

Additionally, I might look into expanding the use case of this server to be used as cloud storage since I am slowly creeping into the rabbit hole of self-hosting.

All in all, I am primarily seeking advice on the build for this server. For example, if I should actually use a Mini PC and eventually invest in a drive bay when expanding storage. The components of the server as well, like what kind of drives I should use for the boot drive, storage etc.

I would greatly appreciate any advice that you can give me. If there's any more information needed, please let me know. Thank you!

FYI, I am currently using my laptop as a temporary media server but soon, I would need to migrate the use of a media server away from this laptop.

[bitmap]

TDP and I each just bought a Fractal Meshify 2 which has 11 bays and 13 total mounts for drives. I believe there are even 1-2 additional 2.5" locations. No complaints so far, easiest re-case I've ever done and allowed me to consolidate my hardware. The lower power usage is great on mini-PCs but they're a one-and-done kind of machine. You can find a chip with lower power consumption if that's a concern.

CPU: Intel 12th-gen+ i3 or i5* (EDIT: i4 doesn't exist....whoops) depending on additional plans for the server
GPU: Arc A380 is cheap and an absolute beast. Would recommend this for concerns around 4K transcoding or if you want to encode your own media. You will definitely up your power consumption with this, but enabling ASPM for BIOS/OS has lowered mine quite a bit.
RAM: 16+ GB of anything decent. You can add more if you want to do RAM drives for transcoding or other tasks to speed them up.
OS Drive: Get an SSD or NVMe drive, doesn't need to be screaming fast, but faster is definitely better.
OS: I would highly recommend Linux. Choose your flavor, but I have gone with Ubuntu Server Minimal and been very happy. I run the LTS version now that there is built-in support for the A380. Ditch the GUI, as the overhead is entirely unnecessary.
Mobo: I have a Gigabyte B660M DS3H DDR4 that has been great, no complaints. Look toward the future of what you might want and what makes sense. For now, good networking, support for the right socket, at least 4 RAM sockets, PCIe for everything you need, plenty of SATA connections for your drives, USB 3.1 if you care...this one is a laundry list of what you might want to get.

Buy your HDDs in pairs so you can backup/mirror. Buy more than you think you need (if you want +4 TB, see if you can afford 8+ TB drives) to fend off repeated spending and outgrowing your smallest drives. Get a Bluray burner if you rip any of your own media (or want to).

[34626]

Is there any space related limitations? I started with a Raspberry pi 4, but thats not a good usecase, especially due to missing support for transcoding, so i upgraded to Intel NUC N5105 which handles stuff fine, the drives is in external bays, but i am looking for a multi drive bay solution that also have a fan. My limitation is space for the setup.
But the most important thing is to consider if you wanna use QSV (Intel CPUs) or GPU (Nvidia/Intel)

I use Linux Debian on a headless server, i dont know how much heavier Windows is, but i would never use Windows for a task that requires 24/7/365 usage and Jellyfin with docker-compose - thats easy to backup, restore, upgrade and downgrade if needed

[wolfrumble4398]

TDP and I each just bought a Fractal Meshify 2 which has 11 bays and 13 total mounts for drives. I believe there are even 1-2 additional 2.5" locations. No complaints so far, easiest re-case I've ever done and allowed me to consolidate my hardware. The lower power usage is great on mini-PCs but they're a one-and-done kind of machine. You can find a chip with lower power consumption if that's a concern.

CPU: Intel 12th-gen+ i3 or i4 depending on additional plans for the server
GPU: Arc A380 is cheap and an absolute beast. Would recommend this for concerns around 4K transcoding or if you want to encode your own media. You will definitely up your power consumption with this, but enabling ASPM for BIOS/OS has lowered mine quite a bit.
RAM: 16+ GB of anything decent. You can add more if you want to do RAM drives for transcoding or other tasks to speed them up.
OS Drive: Get an SSD or NVMe drive, doesn't need to be screaming fast, but faster is definitely better.
OS: I would highly recommend Linux. Choose your flavor, but I have gone with Ubuntu Server Minimal and been very happy. I run the LTS version now that there is built-in support for the A380. Ditch the GUI, as the overhead is entirely unnecessary.
Mobo: I have a Gigabyte B660M DS3H DDR4 that has been great, no complaints. Look toward the future of what you might want and what makes sense. For now, good networking, support for the right socket, at least 4 RAM sockets, PCIe for everything you need, plenty of SATA connections for your drives, USB 3.1 if you care...this one is a laundry list of what you might want to get.

Buy your HDDs in pairs so you can backup/mirror. Buy more than you think you need (if you want +4 TB, see if you can afford 8+ TB drives) to fend off repeated spending and outgrowing your smallest drives. Get a Bluray burner if you rip any of your own media (or want to).

Ah I see, this looks like a good build. It seems quite future proof as well. Thanks bitmap, I will look into your recommendations!

[wolfrumble4398]

Is there any space related limitations? I started with a Raspberry pi 4, but thats not a good usecase, especially due to missing support for transcoding, so i upgraded to Intel NUC N5105 which handles stuff fine, the drives is in external bays, but i am looking for a multi drive bay solution that also have a fan. My limitation is space for the setup.
But the most important thing is to consider if you wanna use QSV (Intel CPUs) or GPU (Nvidia/Intel)

I use Linux Debian on a headless server, i dont know how much heavier Windows is, but i would never use Windows for a task that requires 24/7/365 usage and Jellyfin with docker-compose - thats easy to backup, restore, upgrade and downgrade if needed

I don't really have any space related limitations, my main focus is on a price-to-performance build that handles my minimum requirements. Is there a reason why you went with N5105 instead of N100 which I've seen many people recommend for a mini-pc? Do you think you could let me know what kind of external bays you used and also what kind of multi-drive bay you are looking into? I've seen stuff like TerraMaster and Orico but not sure how would you determine which one you should get.

Preferably, I would like to not have a single transcoding stream but the capability of transcoding would be a plus.

[bitmap]

I don't really have any space related limitations, my main focus is on a price-to-performance build that handles my minimum requirements. Is there a reason why you went with N5105 instead of N100 which I've seen many people recommend for a mini-pc? Do you think you could let me know what kind of external bays you used and also what kind of multi-drive bay you are looking into? I've seen stuff like TerraMaster and Orico but not sure how would you determine which one you should get.

Preferably, I would like to not have a single transcoding stream but the capability of transcoding would be a plus.

I have a 5-bay TerraMaster (the USB 3.0 version). This one is an upgrade: https://www.terra-master.com/us/products...5-300.html. They also have a few other upgrades in the D5 USB Gen 3.2 (which is what my previous post should say instead of 3.1) that are decently priced.

I have no complaints about performance other than total throughput -- I would use them as storage drives ONLY and never use them for high I/O operations or where speed is necessary. It would work just fine for storing media, as the throughput wouldn't be high enough in nearly any case to cause issues. I stupidly used one of the drives for part of my pipeline that sapped every available bit of bandwidth and it slowed everything down by a factor of ten or more. This is not unique to this model, total throughput on a DAS should be considered when planning drive locations and you shouldn't be stupid like I was.

[wolfrumble4398]

I have a 5-bay TerraMaster (the USB 3.0 version). This one is an upgrade: https://www.terra-master.com/us/products...5-300.html. They also have a few other upgrades in the D5 USB Gen 3.2 (which is what my previous post should say instead of 3.1) that are decently priced.

I have no complaints about performance other than total throughput -- I would use them as storage drives ONLY and never use them for high I/O operations or where speed is necessary. It would work just fine for storing media, as the throughput wouldn't be high enough in nearly any case to cause issues. I stupidly used one of the drives for part of my pipeline that sapped every available bit of bandwidth and it slowed everything down by a factor of ten or more. This is not unique to this model, total throughput on a DAS should be considered when planning drive locations and you shouldn't be stupid like I was.

Wow, you certainly have a collection of drives. I see, I think I will most probably still stick to your original advice of using something similar to a Fractal Meshify to help in future proofing for when I decide to start self hosting more things and I would need that performance and storage capability. Thanks bitmap for taking time out of your day to assist me