I’ve been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It’s a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 “maxed out” with 16BG of RAM.

Since then it’s ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I’m planning on moving my server closet, and I’ll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I’m at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware.

I’ve built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I’ve never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It’d be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.

  • @ch00fOP
    4•3 months ago

    Thanks for the tips!

    To clarify, by “x99,” do you mean LGA2011-3? That’s the socket wikipedia associates with the hardware.

    And as for Arc, it looks like they’re a great option for video encoding. I’m actually using QuickSync already on my Celeron processor which has helped. From what I can understand, it looks like QuickSync is basically the same processor on all of the Arc cards, so I can just go with the cheapest card if I don’t plan to use much of the other features? Looking like an A380 can be had for $100 or so.

    • Lettuce eat lettuce
      2•3 months ago

      Sorry for the slow reply. Yes, I mixed the chipset up with the socket lol.

      The A380 is the same I’ve been looking at for my own home Media setup, should be plenty of encoding power for your use case.

      Good luck!