Trying to build a low cost low power server for my mom

[SDMattman 6]

I'm trying to come up with a low cost server solution for my mom - for preferable less than $150 USD.  She'll only be streaming a sing 1080p stream, and I can make sure the media is optimized so the machine wouldn't need to transcode.

A raspberry pi with a usb hard drive would work, but I can't find a nice clean solution.  I'd prefer to use a 3.5" hard drive, because I have those laying around but it seems like all the SFF PCs or NUCs use 2.5" or M.2s.

Any thoughts/ideas?

[Junglejim 352]

If you want to go low with power and use a ras pi you could use something like this..

Argon ONE M.2 Case

You would need a M.2 SSD but there fairly cheep.

[Q-Droid 653]

For low power (consumption and processing) you would want to avoid mechanical components and SSDs are so cheap that there's no need to consider HDDs.

[SDMattman 6]

3 hours ago, Q-Droid said:

...there's no need to consider HDDs.

I have multi TB 3.5" HDs that I'm looking to reuse on this project.

[RanmaCanada 346]

For $150 you're going to have to use older parts. I would recommend something like this. Yes you will be limited by what you can fit in the case, but it's something you can use to start her off. The i5-8500 has a max TDP of 65 watts (real world twice that), but does have a high idle of around 46 watts. If you are ok with having the drive as an external, you could look at the mico-pc's from Dell/Lenovo/HP that have an 8500T, which has a peak power of 35watts. You could buy the above unit and buy an 8500T processor to drop in it's place but I don't know if the HP bios will support it. Since both of these are 8th gen, they will do hardware quicksync of HEVC so the system will be in idle usage most of the time. 

If you had a larger budget I would suggest something like a low powered NAS, but they are massively overpriced. Here is a link to a site with some guides on older, used hardware that you can usually get for cheap cheap. Serverbuilds forums are fantastic and are a great resource.

I personally use a home built NAS with a e5-2670 in it, and have an i5-1235u laptop as my transcode server. NAS uses maybe 140 watts, laptop uses 12-30.

Edited April 20 by RanmaCanada

[TMCsw 122]

4 hours ago, SDMattman said:

I have multi TB 3.5" HDs that I'm looking to reuse on this project.

For a 3.5" HD  you need a 12V adapter such as this SATA->USB for 2.5" you don't need the power adapter. For the pi I use these coolers plugged into the 3.3V power the are nearly silent and keep it nice 'n cool.

Edited April 20 by TMCsw

[SDMattman 6]

Thanks everyone for the quick (and quality) responses.  You gave me a few ideas to explore.

It looks like my insistence on using 3.5" drives is hamstringing things.  I really just didn't want to get into a situation were I spend a lot of money and have her not want to use it.

[RanmaCanada 346]

5 hours ago, SDMattman said:

Thanks everyone for the quick (and quality) responses.  You gave me a few ideas to explore.

It looks like my insistence on using 3.5" drives is hamstringing things.  I really just didn't want to get into a situation were I spend a lot of money and have her not want to use it.

Oh no not at all. You aren't going to get high capacity with 2.5" drives. Believe me when I say parents can make some absurd show requests which will take up a tonne of space, all because they "might" want to watch it. Then when they do want to watch it, they will thank you and start requesting more oddball stuff, and you will quickly run out of space. I have family members that love British cop dramas, and they have not only a lot of those, but they have a lot of seasons!

[SDMattman 6]

23 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Since both of these are 8th gen, they will do hardware quicksync of HEVC so the system will be in idle usage most of the time. 

Does hardware transcoding in Emby require Emby Premiere? It looks like it does.

Edited April 21 by SDMattman

[Q-Droid 653]

29 minutes ago, SDMattman said:

Does hardware transcoding in Emby require Emby Premiere? It looks like it does.

Yes, it's a premiere feature.

 

[RanmaCanada 346]

If you don't want to do hardware transcoding as you feel the cost is not worth it, you can always just get your mom/family member a Firecube or an Nvidia Shield. Both will direct play pretty much everything. If they are going to use the embeded app in their TV, bare in mind you need a minimum passmark score of at least 2000 for 1 1080p transcode on average. The i5-8500T has a 7729 and the i3-8100T has 5276. More than enough for at least 2 1080p transcodes in software. 4k needs a mindboggling 12000 for SDR and 17000 for HDR, minimum.

[TMCsw 122]

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

If you don't want to do hardware transcoding as you feel the cost is not worth it, you can always just get your mom/family member a Firecube or an Nvidia Shield. Both will direct play pretty much everything.

Don’t you think that’s just a little nuts?  A fire tv cube or shield tv both cost more than a emby Lifetime Premier subscription! (plus Premier supports development of emby) (only people with higher end A/V equipment would benefit from these costly devices). (the firecube would also require an app unlock fee without Premier)

@SDMattmanif you are looking into/needing transcoding don’t even consider the raspberry Pi (any model).

Otherwise @RanmaCanadaadvice is great!

[RanmaCanada 346]

You can buy used Shields for about $80, and a 3rd gen FireCube regulary goes on sale for about $100 (currently one is available used for $97, new $115). Again it's all about the experience wanted, and playback compatibility. OP has more than enough information here to make an informed decision.

[TMCsw 122]

Guess we are just bickering old folks here

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

You can buy used Shields for about $80, and a 3rd gen FireCube regulary goes on sale for about $100

 

So we should take a crap-shoot on used stuff and long delivery times? 

A New Fire Sticks (4k max) regularly go on sale for about 1/2 that of the cube(and transcodes/passes-through most if as required)(terrible adds on home page Thou).

Refurbished/renewed/used to be a great deal, died about 10+ years ago and are unfortunately far and few and between available.

Used stuff can be great but more often ends up in the trash bin because they can't be returned...

This is in no way meant as a flame

 

Edited April 22 by TMCsw

[RanmaCanada 346]

20 hours ago, TMCsw said:

Guess we are just bickering old folks here

 

So we should take a crap-shoot on used stuff and long delivery times? 

A New Fire Sticks (4k max) regularly go on sale for about 1/2 that of the cube(and transcodes/passes-through most if as required)(terrible adds on home page Thou).

Refurbished/renewed/used to be a great deal, died about 10+ years ago and are unfortunately far and few and between available.

Used stuff can be great but more often ends up in the trash bin because they can't be returned...

This is in no way meant as a flame

 

The problem with the 4k Max sticks is they have a hardware flaw in regards to HDR10+ and certain DV profiles being in the same container. A flaw that Amazon has known about since the first gen 4k Max was introduced, and they refused to address it.  It's so bad that Plex devs have had to do a workaround to strip layers on the fly. I used to suggest them in the past (had 2 of them), until this came to light. The 3rd gen Cube does not have this problem. Ads can be resolved with a pi-hole, which OP could inject on the server through docker on either windows, or linux, IF they want to go that far for their mom. Personally I can't live without my pi-hole as ads have become so intrusive that I now VPN into my own network to stop ads everywhere.

But yes, at this point we have become bickering old folks haha. I used to also recommend Roku in the past, but their current patent on injecting ads into an HDMI stream is scary.

[SDMattman 6]

I'm actually planning on using an old second gen i3 machine to get her going.  It's fast enough to transcode x264 1080p content to a Roku.  It even sort of works on x265, but it makes the proc sweat, and if there's any hiccup the playback catches up with the transcoding.

It'll get her started - and she'll either fall in love with it and I'll build out something better, or it won't click and all I'm out is my time (I have this stuff laying around).  I was really hoping to start her out with something better out of the gate, but it might be better this way (for now).

[Q-Droid 653]

Transcoding isn't always necessary and if you're the person preloading the media for your mom then pre-convert it to a format that Roku can direct play/stream. 

[SDMattman 6]

14 hours ago, Q-Droid said:

Transcoding isn't always necessary and if you're the person preloading the media for your mom then pre-convert it to a format that Roku can direct play/stream. 

Yeah - I thought of setting her up with a pi, and having the media be converted into a direct play format.

[TMCsw 122]

Hey there, A Pi 4 (Presumably 5, I don't have one) will indeed direct play at least 3(or more) HD streams concurrently (never tested more than 4). 

But although the (3/4) do have have some HW acceleration, it's woefully disappointing... 

[Dickydodah! 128]

I'd like to maybe start this discussion again. I want to build a similar (very) low powered Emby server but I already have the hardware albeit rather old. The hardware I have is;

HP Microserver N40L with 8GB Ram

Hacked BIOS to allow all SATA ports to be used for HDD

PCI SATA card.

240GB SSD for OS

I can fit up to six 3.5" HDDs and the SSD in the case and want to use old used HDDs which I already have. This system has in the past actually run Emby on Windows 11 and Drive Bender to provide JBOD but it was a bit slow when using RDP to manage it. I want to start from scratch and add Sonarr, Radarr and SABnzb. It will do no transcoding and only serve one user on a local LAN. I'm considering dipping my toes in the Linux world but I'm not sure what OS to use.

What would you suggest, the budget is essentially £0.00 

Edited Saturday at 10:30 AM by Dickydodah!

[Q-Droid 653]

3 hours ago, Dickydodah! said:

It will do no transcoding and only serve one user on a local LAN. I'm considering dipping my toes in the Linux world but I'm not sure what OS to use.

What would you suggest, the budget is essentially £0.00 

Can you guarantee it will do no transcoding? That means you'll likely have to convert somewhere to get to that point. Whether converting "offline", like overnight or on a second box, chances are you'll have to manipulate the media source to get everything to play without any transcoding.

How new are you to Linux?

[Dickydodah! 128]

@Q-DroidMy main server is on a low-ish powered PC and I have never had any transcoding, mainly because it's turned off but also because my media is chosen to play correctly on my Samsung TV. This "baby" server is only going to play back on my son's PC which is a very high end gaming machine. I will be selecting the correct media sources so that the Emby app on his PC can play with no transcoding. If there is no option I'll hijack his gaming PC to transcode overnight, I might have a fight on my hands there though.

My Linux experience is limited but I have installed a few distros on a few old machines I have. They were reasonably painless to get up and working but I never really used the machine for much. I've used Windows since 3.11 and MSDOS prior to that so command line is OK for me but I do struggle a bit at times with the linux command syntax. Google and poke and hope are my best freinds there  The permissions on linux are a complete mystery to me at the moment.

There will be no access from outside the LAN so security isn't an issue but alongside the apps I've listed I suppose I will need an antivirus and a firewall (or is there one built in on linux?) I prefer using a GUI but as this will be a headerless machine it might be unnecessary.

[Dickydodah! 128]

I've just remembered that I did also install TrueNAS Core on this system once and found it quite straightforward. I didn't keep it though as I didn't really want to use RAID but if it can do JBOD it might be a nice easy solution.

Just had a search and TrueNAS is a non starter, linux with mergefs seems to be an answer.

Edited Saturday at 02:34 PM by Dickydodah!

[Q-Droid 653]

If you're new to Linux there are many excellent primers online. You want to learn about:
- ssh/PuTTY
- shell and command line basics.
- files and directories (not folders!) and navigation.
- users (UIDs) and groups (GIDs).
- files and directories, ownership and permissions.
- program execution, processes and threads, runtime users and groups.

- Stick to mainstream distributions: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, openSuSE. Maybe even Fedora but meh... There's a lot more quality info when you need help with a mainstream distro than with the other cool/exotic ones. Avoid Arch and its derivations.
- I can't say much about desktop GUI. My installations are headless servers and I haven't touched a Linux desktop interface in years. If you want a GUI look for a light weight version that can run well on low power systems. Many distro installers include multiple desktop options or none.
- The apps you listed and Emby have web interfaces. Consider this when deciding what kind of desktop UI you want or if you even need one.
- If you want to try the NAS route I can only recommend OpenMediaVault (runs on top of regular Debian) to someone new(ish) to Linux. The others are restrictive and can be confusing to new users. They might be running the Linux kernel but the rest of the system is their own thing.
- Docker. It's worth learning and a good launch pad for other containerization platforms. Once you get the concept the others are easier to learn.
 

The storage concepts are pretty much the same across platforms/OSs but with different names and terms. If you know the storage terms and options on one OS then you can pretty much find the translations for the others. Not always 1:1 but close enough.

 

[Dickydodah! 128]

Of your list of things to learn the users (UIDs) and groups (GIDs) is the one I have most issues with. Files and directories, ownership and permissions in linux are a bit of an issue but everything else is not that different in Windows or I had experience of it at work albeit initially in a monkey see monkey do way. I guess a bit of reading and playing with a system will get me in the swing of it and of course the best way to learn is to get on and do it.

I'll probably start with a GUI as it tends to be a little more novice freindly and once I've got to grips with the bits I need to know to get the few programs I need to run I'll more than likley go CLI only. The web interfaces for all the programs will be very familiar as I've been using them for years.

I've already looked around at the distros and found it quite bewildering. However I have some experience of Mint which I see in your list so I reckon I'll start there. I have another old PC that I'll probably run as a testbed for my linux self training so that I don't make any disasterous changes on what will become a live system at some point. I'll also have a look at OpenMediaVault to see if its something I may want to use.

Thanks for your advice, it's definitely given me a better understanding of what to start with and what I need to learn