• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Old HP SFF i3 2120 PC as NAS/Media server?

Joined
Feb 28, 2022
Messages
263 (0.21/day)
I have an old SFF pc lying around, not sure of the exact model though it's an Intel i3 2120 CPU I believe, would this be any good to use as a NAS if I configured it correctly and threw in a couple of 2TB HDD's? would mainly be used to backup my PC and if possible as a media server, I have 4GB DDR3 spare and would be using the Intel HD iGPU, not sure if this would be enough for video streaming however? it should have onboard gigabit LAN so transfer speeds shouldn't be an issue, just want to know if it would be a good system to use in this way or a waste of energy compared to other options, of which I don't have many due to not having any funds to dedicate to this apart from the drives though it is something I would like to do either now, or when I am able to afford something better.
 
You could probably get a quad core cpu for that server pretty cheaply.

If you need a server, it's definitely worth keeping around
 
I run a home server on an i3-2125 with no issues. Fast enough to handle three or four plex transcodes while still doing all of the other things I expect it to.
 
You could probably get a quad core cpu for that server pretty cheaply.

If you need a server, it's definitely worth keeping around
Yea, though would the i3 2c/4t struggle? not sure if a quad core would be needed though am sure I could probably pick one up for less than £20 if needed.
I run a home server on an i3-2125 with no issues. Fast enough to handle three or four plex transcodes while still doing all of the other things I expect it to.
You replied as I just typed out the above sentence, lol does the i3 do the encoding? as I would probably like to run Plex or something similar and stream to a Roku stick, not sure which side handles the encoding as I'm fairly new to things like this.

Also do you run Windows/Linux? use a raid card or just the onboard SATA?
 
The i3 transcodes, yes, but if you’re streaming on your LAN you shouldn’t need to transcode at all and can just play the file directly. I run Linux with a RAID card.
 
Yes, just make sure to set all of the video quality settings on your Roku and the server to original or maximum.
 
Any recommendations for a Linux distro? it does have a Windows 10 license I could use as well though it seems Linux would be a better fit, I have used Ubuntu and Mint on my main PC recently, so don't mind getting my hands dirty so-to-speak, and any other software recommendations?
 
I use Debian, but Ubuntu is generally a safer bet. I haven’t used mint in awhile so can’t really speak to that. If you search for “best Linux distro” you’ll find some threads here.

As for the media server, I run sonarr, radarr, lidarr, tdarr, ombi, tautulli, jackett, and a few others just for Plex, then I have some other docker containers for my network and some web development work, an ebook server, and some other odds and ends. Check out below to get an idea of what you can run.


 
Back
Top