Just joined the HP 290 club. I upgraded it with Western Digital SN730 256gb NVMe drive, 8gb of DDR4 memory, and put in HDMI dummy plug. I loaded up Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop and Plex with the hardware transcoding active. Working great!
I also tried adding a Nvidia Quadro P400 low profile video card that I had laying around. I was getting artifacts and freezes in Ubuntu. Either the card is faulty or the power supply is not powerful enough.
My NAS is currently serving my videos in Proxmox with a TrueNAS VM using NFS.
The recommendation is for a dedicated HW transcoding box, as stated in the post. The CPU isn’t fast, so it’s really only useful in processes where QS can be leveraged. Linux is the recommended OS.
File management operations should take place on the NAS.
I really do not recommend making the HP 290 as your primary server, as it has no room for HDD expansion. Build an extremely cheap NAS Killer 4.0 and use that for all of your storage and file management needs. It’s plenty overkill.
What’s under “normal/average” use and what’s the peak draw from the socket? The savings in power bill could well be worth the extra cost for the 8500T so I just wanted to check before spending a lot more money
I am really interested in seeing how far we can take some cheap, low power devices.
Yes, this is with the 290 and these specs. I have since switched from 2 sticks into 1 stick RAM, but haven’t checked to see if it dropped further. If I transcode or Plex is scanning files, it jumps into the teens.
Ubuntu 20 dual boot with Windows 10 (separate partitions)
Intel® Core™ i5-8500T Processor with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Thermal Paste
Intel 665p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D3, QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW010T9X1
Long time first time. Just started my HP 290 build for plex to replace my wife’s 10 year old mac mini that finally died and was a PITA for years. I haven’t opened up a PC in… 19 years since middle school.
So far I successfully put in this 500gb NVME SSD, I then updated the BIOS through windows, downloaded ubuntu desktop to a flash drive, went through that whole process of installing ubuntu to the SSD. I then erased the 500GB HDD (with plans to replace it).
I replaced the RAM with this 4GB x2 & foolishly took a day to realize that i didn’t push it in hard enough to seat them.
Ubuntu is working well as a first timer, I did the minimal install and then downloaded PMS, which i think is on the SSD and nothing is on the stock drive.
I have had serious HD format & permission issues from the external HDs that hold all my media & just went through the process of changing my 3 TB external from HFS+ to NFTS as my exFAT external is also permission locked but at least has read capabilities.
Needless to say that headache will hopefully no longer be an issue once the 10TB WD shuccable drive arrives and I replace the stock HD with that.
My question is, do i format the drive as an external before i shuck it or just shuck, replace the HD internally, +/- formatting in ubuntu, and then transfer over my collection all within ubuntu? Sorry for the noob questions. I read through this thread multiple times and feel like i learned a lot of advanced things but still have some basic deficiencies.
Yes, contrary to the documentation, it can support up to 32GB with 2 sticks of 16GB.
Yes, upgraded the CPU so it could do more than just Plex when I needed it to. No regrets and I may do it with another HP290 I own. 4 watts idle with Ubuntu isn’t too shabby.