New to the site, looking to do a new build.

General Introductions
1

Good Afternoon,

I am new to the site found this through stumbling via reddit / google.

Currently I have media automation, and NAS duties being served by a venerable T320 and Plex duties including transcoding being handled by a ODROID H2.

Long story short. Man meets girl, man falls in love with girl, man and girl move in together. Girl finds out man has 8 computers that came with him. (I work in devops I need a home lab.) And quickly asks if I can downsize. (I heard downsize but my brain thought upgrade.)

Now this setup has served me well but I am sharing media with more friends and family. And that little J4105 is getting taxed. (It was my first attempt at quicksync and I am truly amazed at what that little box can do. I think it will get setup somewhere with DDNS at work and tailscale and I can have it do something else.)

Ok so that is my long winded situation. So my plan is to downsize and make my office quieter.

So two things I have settled on.

  1. I need a new plex box. ( I know with QSV you can have your NAS do this I just want a dedicated box to do this and mount shares like I have it setup now I just want something with a bit more CPU than what I have now.)

I want to build a small plex box that is asthetically pleasing and tiny I can hide it under a desk or somewhere. HP Elitebooks seem to check those boxes.

  1. New NAS

I need a new NAS. This is the big issue. I need something relatively quiet smaller, less proprietary crap than the dell unit I have. I want to have a HBA and a one of those slick V-NAND PCI SSD for cache.

But then I have other questions. What CPU, What memory (Do I need ECC or not) how much memory. I do run and plan on running dockerized DB’s for apps and I think right there that makes ECC a requirement.

Do I buy new or used for these?

And to add more issues I have a tower that could fit this bill but I need a CPU and RAM but its not a MicroATX its a ATX (Tomahawk MAX B450)

So do I just get a meshify case.Toss in the MOBO (The Mobo and PSU in this case are brand new) get a cheap am4 cpu some ECC ram and call it a day?

I have struggled with how to make this work for the past 2 months and I don’t know which way to go.

2 Likes
2

ah. my wife enjoys complaining about my computer crap. I have to do periodic purges.

Actually I had a thing where a cousin moved into my basement aka former computer room, and so I had to save space. I tried really hard to virtualize one box and use it as both a local workstation/gaming PC but also have a server running 24/7. It came really close, but I hit unsolvable problems with GPU and also optical drives.

So the existing B450 board could work. get like a fractal define case, they can hold a lot of drives and are failry quiet. but are large. Another thing is that even if you get an AMD CPU (like a “G” series) the transcoding is just not nearly as good as intel. i don’t think it’s supported on plex at all. You can configure it on emby and jellyfin but when I last tried a few years ago it was barely faster than CPU. So in other words you’d need to add a transcode GPU. a new option for that might be a little intel Arc A310 or A380 which can be bought new under $100. (I realize you may get a separate QSV machine, which would make that redundant… although girlfriend acceptance factor might be higher if you can combine in one box).

if you want a little cute low power system this other new user has something that definitely seems to meet the cute and low power needs in a mini itx case.

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