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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.
I see a lot of drives there, all presumably connected via SATA. If you’re looking to add more drives in the future I recommend a SAS card or two, specifically a Dell PERC H310 flashed in IT mode. I picked one up on eBay for $20 a while back and it gives me 8 drive connectivity. Also snag some mini SAS to SATA cables to connect the drives.
I’ve got 44TB running in my Plex server using it and have had 0 issues with the card. Even had a friend 3D print a fan housing and attached a small Noctua fan to the heatsink for some peace of mind when doing large data transfers to make sure the card doesn’t overheat.
Edit: Like so
That’s interesting. I’m running a software raid since I’ve been warned of dying raid controllers making your data irretrievable unless you buy an exact replacement. I guess the enterprise folks have that figured out.
Having a little trouble finding details online. Do those two cables going off to the right split off into a bunch of SATA connections?
I use ZFS for this exact reason. I didn’t want to be stuck using a specific controller or have problems if I needed to migrate my storage to another server. It’s a lot more flexible than a hardware RAID too and has some nice benefits like snapshotting.
My raid is software as well, through TrueNAS Scale.
Yes, it breaks off to 4 SATA connectors, here’s a link on Amazon for an example.