Help To Build A Movie Pc/Server Or Suggestions

mr gothic

hi
im looking at building a server which i can add expaned storage over the years,ive looked at nas from synology and qnap which look very expensive,i dont need it to be on 24 hours.
i will be streaming to a zidoo streaming box.
i need plenty of storage and at the moment i have 5 6tb external harddrives with my 4k and 1080p bluray rips on and need to cut space to one case.
i would like to build a cost effective pc server around a fractal case or similar with maybe 8 internal bays a motherboard with 8 sata ports,windows o/s on a m.2 and using windows storage spaces for grouping the drives together.
would this sort of build be ok for streaming 4k and 1080p films? what sort of parts/recomendations should i be looking at ie type of motherboard,ram,processor.
or should i be going the nas route all input welcome my budget is around £600.
hope this all makes sense cheers

maf1970

Think you need to reconsider your budget for this due to the huge amount of storage you currently have. £600 would only cover the cost of drives for storage for a NAS or server. A suitable NAS box could set you back £500 . To build a server, I wouldn't like to guess but you would have to find a suitable case that can take 8 drives and you almost certainly would need a RAID card. Not forgetting a motherboard, CPU, RAM, CPU Cooler and PSU.

So what Zidoo box do you have ? Their site shows as many as a dozen options.

How did you rip your blu-rays,DVDs etc. Do you still have the originals ?

mushii

I have to agree with @maf1970 for what you want your budget is way too small. Personally I would buy a NAS like a Synology DS1618  (as long as you don’t need transcoding) as everything is built and ready to go.
For a media server you would ideally want a decent 8 channel raid card, which would cost between £200 -£500 alone. Motherboard and i3 processor, £300, 32 Gb RAM -£400, case £200, 500w PSU £100. SSD for OS - £50.

mr gothic

hi thank you for the replys,looks like a very expensive self build if i went that route the budget didnt include the drives which i was going to add over time,i still have my discs just incase i have to rip them again,ive got the zidoo z9s coming to replace the egreat a5, i will have to have a think about my options and maybe start saving some more funds.
cheers

mickevh

I wouldn't get too hung up on whether hardware X is "good enough" for format Y, especially in a SOHO environment with very few clients pulling data simultaneously. Compared to the bit rate requirements for media formats, even HD & 4K, modern discs and bus systems are much faster and can easily "handle" it for a few clients.

Even 100mbps ethernet (which is now a bit old school) could handle 1-2 high bit rate HD video streams, though since 1000mbps (Gigabit) ethernet is so cheap now, you really ought to be buying that as it is widely available at little or no additional cost and can easily handle multiple HD video streams.

It's real time transcoding where the hardware (CPU) power is required - if you avoid the need to have to do that, you'll saved some money and have a happier life.

spinaltap

Investigate QNAP NAS’ as they also offer several add-on expansion drives.

mushii

The one advantage that a pc based NAS has over an appliance like Synology or QNAP is that you can put a decent graphics card into it, to offload transcoding tasks to the GPU, meaning you can get away with a smaller main processor. It’s swings and roundabouts though, cost wise. As a rule of thumb for NAS memory, (came from an OCUK thread on movie NAS) you want 1Gb of RAM for every Tb of storage.

mickevh

Serving files requires practically no RAM - back in the day we used to build servers that serviced hundreds of users with megabytes let alone gigabytes of RAM and they worked perfectly well.

I suggest the idea that X amount of storage requires Y amount of RAM might stem from things like the ZFS file system which has a deduplication technology that does require a certain amount of RAM per terabyte of (deduplicated) storage due to some stuff it caches to effect deduplication.

If you are not implementing such technologies and have few users, for a basic file server, then I suspect huge amounts of RAM are not required. My microserver hosts 4TB of disc and despite running a full fat llinux OS, it ticks over at bearly 750MB RAM utilisation.

To be sure, one would be well advised to check out the requirements of one's chosen OS rather than rely on Internet Myth.

mushii

I think that the requirement comes from using FreeNAS which is what a lot of the media builds seem to run on.

maf1970

So does Synology.