DIY NAS & Plex Home Server With Hardware Transcoding Build

Building a DIY NAS + PLEX home server with hardware transcoding using the nvidia quadro P400.

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Don Hui
PO BOX 765
Farmingville, NY 11738

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From Epidemic Sounds



DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission.

[TheTinkerDad]

I fully agree with you about budget builds! Buying random expensive stuff and putting it together provides no challenge at all.

[Spike.SpiegeI]

even though I've had a plex server for years I always love watching build videos... not sure what it is but they never get old :) Great budget build, that case has a unique layout

[Colin_Ames]

Nice build video. I miss MicroCenter, it was my “toy store” when I lived in Michigan.

[robertcrowther]

Busy doing (serious) pricing and investigations into many different types of plex servers (PC, NAS Bays, etc) and this has proved extremely useful and given me plenty of food for thought...


Great video!

[Bandicoot]

I have the same case. Looks pretty neat, doesn't have some fancy add-on junk, and with only two 120mm fans running at low RPM the case itself is whisper quiet. 4 WD Red drives also operate silently.

[chickenonaraft]

Jesus I wish there was a store like that where I live

[beauregardslim]

Well done. This is very well thought-out for a practical home NAS. 4c/8t gives you spare threads for containers and small vms. Since it is small and quiet, you can put Kodi on it and plug it into your TV.
Don't worry about ECC RAM and ZFS. The people who insist on it are talking about enterprise servers with hundreds of TB of storage and mission critical data. It's not like ZFS corrupts your files without ECC. I run ZFS all over the place, from my media server to my laptop (ZFS is amazing for dual boot macOS and Linux), and even on a Pi4. I've never had a problem.
If you don't mind the command line, a minimalist Debian or Ubuntu server install with a ZFS root and services in Docker is really easy to maintain. Docker and ZFS work really well together.

[itathome]

New to Plex, just invested in a HDHomeRun, now looking to build a private Plex cloud from my house with my family in 'Rona lockdown so we can all save a fortune on Netflix etc. Very informative channel. I love the fact the older legacy cards can be re-purposed to such good use. Subscribed.

[Phil-D]

Upgraded my pfsense box to a 3200g, gigabyte b450d3h, and 16gb ddr4. Carried over the ssd, case, psu, intel lan card, etc. Works like a chano for gigabit internet.

[sosurim]

I have couple of ZFS (8 and 16TB) NAS's that's been running 24/7 for almost 10 years now -- w/o ECC memory, just regular non-ECC RAM. One of them is down, but only due to a PSU fail. Not one data corruption during all that time. Of course, your mileage may differ, but from chatting with some of the developers, I think that requiring ECC mem is one of the many myths surrounding ZFS. Another being requiring 1GB RAM/1TB storage (or some such nonsense). From my experience, just get the fastest SSD for cache and ZIL, turn off dedup, and give it plenty of memory (ZFS will put it all to good use).


I can't think of using anything else than ZFS for a NAS. Don't let some of the myths detract you from using it. Might have to brush up on your Solaris or *BSD. But say what you will about *BSD's, but they're damn stable -- never a crash on those NAS's. Not sure about the Linux port of ZFS. Heard it's gotten pretty good, but not sure if I trust it, since Linux itself is less stable.

[cultureoverall]

I actually did this same thing! My otd total was about 570 bucks.
12GB DDR4
A ryzen 5 (2nd gens were on sale)
MATX build!
1650 super (bought it for emby because I provide for like 7 people) andnused the patched drive for unlimited transcode streams)
Salvaged Toshiba drives from my old powerade servers

That CPU peg you're seeing is because the proc is still being used for audio transcoding. I wish I had known this when I was building.

Also for best results stream at 1.5mps on mobile to eliminate buffering
I've been slowly upgrading my drives, working my way to 12TB drives for a huge bluray collection.

Great video!

[BrianThomas]

You're right man. The Chenbro SR30169 Tower Case SR30169T2-250 seems to be a pretty decent case for the money. I did some digging and I was pretty shocked at what I found.

[TechU]

Cable management was fine bro. I'm doing a build like this soon to connect all the PC's in the house (network) so my kids and myself can unload saves to the NAS I'm building. I like this case a lot!

[dangoldbach]

Been rocking freenas 11 on an old Lenovo with 2 6gb hgst deskstars and 4 GB of non-ECC Samsung ram for two years, CPU is an I5-3330 and I have about 500 movies on it, I can honestly say that I have had zero issues with zfs and non ecc ram. Buy good sticks with Samsung chips and I don't think you will ever have to worry about errors corrupting your data when freenas scrubs the drive pools. Just my two cents!!

[lukaszk.]

Thanks buddy! The part about using cheap GPU and save money on CPU really opened my eyes!

[weatherchaser]

I love the Microcenter down the street from me. They usually have the best CPU prices, and you get discounted motherboards when you bundle up

[UselessDuckCompany]

That case looks perfect, but I can't find it anywhere.

[GRBtutorials]

If you're looking for higher capacities (meaning 6+ TB, ideally 8+ TB), there are external HDDs which are actually WD Red (or whichever equivalent of another brand), just with different label and guarantee. Of course, the guarantee isn't as good, but many people who are in the home server market "shuck" the drives out of these external HDDs because they're significantly cheaper.
Also, the ECC RAM in ZFS is kind of a myth, non-ECC RAM is just as bad in ZFS as in any other file system. It's just that it's usually chosen because of its reliability and not using ECC RAM makes it less reliable, so it kinda defeats the point of using ZFS.

[marchettejw]

I ran just a bare bones install of Ubuntu server for years on a Celeron j1800, it worked well for many years. At the time I was only driving gigabit ethernet so it worked out very well. It sounds like you know what you're doing with a bare metal install of Linux so personally I'd just roll your favorite distro and install Plex on top of that for simplicity.

[Shvmadogg]

That is a good and reliable PSU. Just to let you know, after 4-5 years they have a disease that the 4 pin will not push enough power and the fans will work on full speed and you won't have a display. But, they won't explode or something like that :)