As small as possible Plex box I plan to build

[JeffMD]

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/243TQ7

Had to ditch using my older c2d laptop when it crashed and burned while trying to transcode both 1080p AND DTS. Currently I am using an older pc with a q6600 in it but its big, it has lotsa fans, and just not something I can keep running 24/7. My goal design is a small box that my USB 3.0 drives containing my movies can plug into and will remain on 24/7 and can stream everything to an internal network client (1080p chromecast max) as well as over the internet to any of my mobile devices.

The g4400 seems plenty powerful for transcoding anything for one client, and maybe 2 when the demand is put on it. Also being skylake I will have lots of things to upgrade it to in the future if need. I am also hoping the asus motherboard will be able to keep things low powered and cool enough to keep the fan off when the box is not in use. The less moving parts the better.

Parts picker list all at $290, it will be a little cheaper then that in cost but shipping will prolly bring it back up there. I was originaly going to cut some corners on ram and the motherboard, but a) cant beat twice as much ram for half the cost, and b) most of the cheaper motherboards were Asrock, and I didn't want to chance the reliability on those with something that is going to run 24/7 and may need to deal with some hot temps the entire time. Also I know asus has some good fan and power controls so It can hopefully get the power and temps down way low when not in use.

 

[slag]

You'd be much better off buying something like an Asus BEEBOX, chromebox, or intel NUC. It will be cheaper, smaller, more energy efficient. Some have an IR header built in already. I did not see that in your list.

The case you selected only had 2 internal 2.5 inch bays, so I assume you are going to go with an external enclosure for your hard drives anyway?

 

[JeffMD]

Slag, none of those seem to have a big enough cpu to handle fully transcoding 1080p with headroom. Intel NUC has some high end offerings but they are more expensive. The Intel NUC with a Intel Core i3-5010U 3000 CPU mark processor is the same price as my g4400 with a CPU mark of 3800.

I also considered the fact that if something blows up on those self contained boxes, I am kind of screwed on repairing it. With this, the pieces are all off the shelf and can be replaced easily.

And yea I have a 60gb 2.5 drive from an old laptop upgrade to hold the OS, and then my movie drives are 2 gig externals.

Also you mentioned the ir header, this is a plex SERVER, not a client. It will sit in a corner and vegetate.

 

[slag]

I use my NUC as a plex server and kodi server/front end with the celeron processor but I only limit my stream to 4 mb and not 10 mb. Very small difference. Obviously this won't work for you with your requirements.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Slag, none of those seem to have a big enough cpu to handle fully transcoding 1080p with headroom. Intel NUC has some high end offerings but they are more expensive. The Intel NUC with a Intel Core i3-5010U 3000 CPU mark processor is the same price as my g4400 with a CPU mark of 3800.

I also considered the fact that if something blows up on those self contained boxes, I am kind of screwed on repairing it. With this, the pieces are all off the shelf and can be replaced easily.

And yea I have a 60gb 2.5 drive from an old laptop upgrade to hold the OS, and then my movie drives are 2 gig externals.

Also you mentioned the ir header, this is a plex SERVER, not a client. It will sit in a corner and vegetate.

Honestly I think you are right on the money in your overall philosophy. Only thing I am so-so on is the case and the fact you want to run external drives ragged like that. Those external HD enclosures aren't meant to deal with the stress of media serving (they don't dissipate heat that well unless you have a premium model with a fan), so I would shift to a Mini ITX mobo and case that way you can go small but still have the drives internal where a fan is.

How many hard drives do you ever plan to have? Once that is known case hunting is easy.

 

[JeffMD]

poof, the heat is fine, and while I won't say that plastic is the best heat transfer materiel I don't think it is any worse then many of the places you find it attached to inside a case, on the back of the motherboard plate with no airflow and only 4 points of contact. And I actually have yet to have them die on me (I have a 130gb WD from ages ago). Having them on external drives make it much more versatile and protected. Just sacrifices the access speeds, not an issue for video files. Also much like the fans in this thing, it will spend most of its time dormant. Only I am accessing the server, so it is only spinning when I am playing back movies. That is no stress for these drives. Keep in mind these drives are actually designed to be backup drives, large data transfers daily.

I did change the case back to a silverstone ml05. Going back to my stay modular philosophy, the antec with its built in power supply would have been faced with the "what if the psu dies..I'll need to replace the whole case" question. And Part picker says my system is close to 80 watts total, so close to the systems limits. Would have loved to used a lower powered cpu but those ULV processors just arnt available to us, and require a mobo with a M socket.

BTW this IS a mini itx case and motherboard. The antec case is what is referred to as a fanless case design, or Slim/Thin mini ITX. Cases design to run mini itx without worry of expansion card use and usually follow the 2 port height rule. Other Thin mini ITX cases had no internal power supplies, but I couldn't find any good pentium motherboards that had one. Especially since I think Slim mini ITX is abandoned on skylake (ie it wasn't successful) and now intel has a 5x5 format out, something new egg sells nothing for.

 

[poofyhairguy]

poof, the heat is fine, and while I won't say that plastic is the best heat transfer materiel I don't think it is any worse then many of the places you find it attached to inside a case, on the back of the motherboard plate with no airflow and only 4 points of contact.

I wouldn't do that either though. The only acceptable option in my eyes with hard drives in a server is a setup where a fan blows across it always. Completely enclosed plastic has terrible heat transfer compared to any decent case with good airflow. And that doesn't even consider the benefit of actually protecting the drive (the guest accidentally knocks it over while it's running? bye bye data).

And I actually have yet to have them die on me (I have a 130gb WD from ages ago).

I mean if you and only you are only watching something for 30 minutes or an hour a few times a week on a single client at a time almost any setup is fine. I normally don't advise people based on that though, I advise people based on daily use and maybe multiple clients/users down the road. It's always better to plan for your ceiling.

Scale matters. I personally have over 45TB of data between two servers. One has 16 drives and one has 10. Even with incredible cooling I lose an average of two drives a year to failure because consumer drives are made like crap, but my wife probably uses my setup on average three hours a day between three client tvs so my drives are running hours each day. For my heavy use I need the best cooling and setup possible, but a lot of Plex users are like me (except maybe at a smaller scale) so I tend to assume similar needs.

Having them on external drives make it much more versatile and protected.

Um, not really. Versatile is having all the drives load into a single array so you can have a single directory for all your media. Versatile is always knowing that the drive is available for Plex, and not having to worry that some USB cable went bad or got unplugged requiring troubleshooting.

Protection is much better when the drives are inside a metal case instead of hanging out in the open connected via a USB wire. Plus that doesn't even consider the protection of data, an external drive has no backup or parity. I can lose any single drive in my array and I don't lose a single byte because of parity protection in my server. Unless you have two externals that are a mirror of each other you risk all your data every time you play anything.

You are sacrificing a lot using external drives.

Only I am accessing the server, so it is only spinning when I am playing back movies. That is no stress for these drives.

Unless you are talking about low quality SD movies that can be buffered like crazy then the act of playing them causes a LOT of sustained stress on the drive. The sustained reading of data and spinning of the drive is all that is needed to get the drive hot, and if it sit at 45+c for too long (which could easily happen with external drives unless you live in Alaska) you are greatly shortening the life of a drive that has no parity or backup protection.

But again scale matters. If your total amount of data ever will be under a few TBs, and you only plan to use it occasionally with files under 4GB, then who cares how it's done. Full steam ahead on the externals. But if you are planning on having 2+ drives and a total storage space over say 6tb with a bunch of Blu Ray rips then you are playing a fools game only using external drives.

Keep in mind these drives are actually designed to be backup drives, large data transfers daily.

There are two kinds of external hard drives, consumer and enterprise. The consumers drives (aka the ones they sell in Office Depot so mom can backup her PC) are often the cheapest and crappiest drives they make. The "large" data transfers they are designed to handle is moms hundred megs of pictures she took over vacation last week. Using them to store and stream 10+GB Blu Ray rips (if that is the intention) is so far past the intended use it's not even funny.

But again, scale matters. If the point is to steam like 50 DVD rips a few times a week then full steam ahead. When I see Plex use I assume a decent size library and maybe family members using it. If I am wrong with my assumptions ignore me.

 

[JeffMD]

Uhmm... I think your kinda of missing the point. This isn't a project to handle anything even close to what you think it is handling. Fansubs, and 9gb movie dumps.. and only about 20ish of those for now. It is simply me (for now) with my collection of movies and anime, and my goal is to make it accessible by as many devices and as many locations as possible. Clearly if demand outstrips the hardware, I will go bigger. I currently have the hard drives hooked up to my router, works great for laptops and portables, but useless for cases like streaming to chromecast's and also over the internet when I am away from home. And I generally need to recompress the stream down when going over the internet.

I think you watch to much tv.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Uhmm... I think your kinda of missing the point. This isn't a project to handle anything even close to what you think it is handling. Fansubs, and 9gb movie dumps.. and only about 20ish of those for now. It is simply me (for now) with my collection of movies and anime, and my goal is to make it accessible by as many devices and as many locations as possible. Clearly if demand outstrips the hardware, I will go bigger. I currently have the hard drives hooked up to my router, works great for laptops and portables, but useless for cases like streaming to chromecast's and also over the internet when I am away from home. And I generally need to recompress the stream down when going over the internet.

Sounds good. You are right on the money then.

I think you watch to much tv.

Actually I don't watch that much, it is my family that really utilizes my media library. Now my Steam game library on the other hand...

 

[Face2Face]

I have a big ole' Dell XPS 720 with an Phenom II X6 1035T on Plex transcoding duty. I'm soon retiring the build though, moving my main PC motherboard over with a 3470S Core i5.

Anyway, If I was to buy new, I would wait for the Core i5 Skylake NUC with the 6300u. It's passmark score is nearly as fast as my Six core Phenom II, which has no problem handling up to 3 - 10mbps 1080p transcodes. I would also buy an external HDD enclosure with a built-in Raid controller.

 

[Binky]

If you build a tiny computer, but then place it next to an ugly stack of external drive cases, aren't you really building something just as large as a case that can hold everything? It would probably also be a lot uglier with all the cables on the outside rather than the inside.

 

[Mushkins]

If you're doing 1080p, settle for nothing less than an i3. I made that mistake once already, the second anything has to be transcoded you're hosed if the processor can't keep up, and anime is notorious for needing to be transcoded because of the common containers and subtitle support.

 

[ControlD]

If you're doing 1080p, settle for nothing less than an i3. I made that mistake once already, the second anything has to be transcoded you're hosed if the processor can't keep up, and anime is notorious for needing to be transcoded because of the common containers and subtitle support.

My unRAID server is build around a G530 and it can handle a single 1080p transcode stream fine. I seriously doubt if it could handle two though. I don't watch any anime though, so perhaps that puts an extra strain on things.

Once my family fully embraces Plex I have a feeling I will be making a processor upgrade

 

[Aikouka]

My unRAID server is build around a G530 and it can handle a single 1080p transcode stream fine. I seriously doubt if it could handle two though. I don't watch any anime though, so perhaps that puts an extra strain on things.

Once my family fully embraces Plex I have a feeling I will be making a processor upgrade

What makes anime hard is the subtitles. For a long time, fansubbers have been using fancier methods of presenting subtitles. This allows them to do things like multiple colors, karaoke effects, or angled text overlays. Multiple colors can be good for handling multiple speakers or helping to indicate where the speaker is coming from. For example, I used to do QC for a fansubber, and one rule was that anyone speaking off-screen must have a specific color for their subtitles. If a character ever disappeared from view while speaking a line, the subtitle had to change color, and part of my job was to make sure that it changed at the right time. Angled overlays is probably the nicest thing, because it's usually used for translating text that's on the screen (signs, etc.). In the past, you used to just get a subtitle at the top that said something like "SIGN: Ramen Shop".

Anyway, long story short, these fancy subs aren't handled by most non-PC end devices, which means that you have to burn the subs in. Unfortunately, that means transcoding rather than something simpler like a container swap (e.g. MKV to MP4). Dealing with subs in anime has always been the hardest part. I remember trying to use PS3MediaServer in the past, and it just never handled them well.

 

[Homerboy]

You can cut the RAM down if you want. 4GB is enough.

I run a Plex sever on an old Q9550 with 4GB of RAM. It runs a hole bunch of other services too and RAM usage never dips under 2.5GB used.

 

[truckerCLOCK]

You should really consider what poofyhairguy and others are saying. Get yourself a server setup. Unraid, FreeNAS or whatever that can hold all of your drives and media. Run Plex, Emby or some sort of media software that will handle the transcoding then just get something like a Fire TV, or Roku, Apple Tv. I have three cheap chinese KODI boxes I found on FLebay hooked up to an UNRAID server running Emby and I can play 1080p files no problem. They are all hardwired so no problems with lag/studder.

 

[adamantine.me]

You should really consider what poofyhairguy and others are saying. Get yourself a server setup. Unraid, FreeNAS or whatever that can hold all of your drives and media. Run Plex, Emby or some sort of media software that will handle the transcoding then just get something like a Fire TV, or Roku, Apple Tv. I have three cheap chinese KODI boxes I found on FLebay hooked up to an UNRAID server running Emby and I can play 1080p files no problem. They are all hardwired so no problems with lag/studder.

That's what I did (NAS4Free instead, though). I ran Emby in a jail and mounted the FS there. But since the jails get their own IP address too, everything went to hell with the new ISP mandated router. I ditched the Plex/Emby jail idea altogether and enabled a NFS share and added the location to a R Pi 2 running OSMC. Everything up to 1080p streams fine. The Pi doesn't even get hot and the graphs on my NAS4Free machine (i5) show hardly any CPU or memory usage.