Building a NAS for movies/docker for under $400

[WaffleMaster]

I put together a list of parts for a NAS, I could use some help seeing if this is good.
My budget is $400 (without software or HDDs)

I'm mainly going to be running Plex and a bunch of docker containers with some high load and most being low load. Plex will be almost all 1080P with 4k on select movies and with only me and maybe one other watching. The igpu should be able to handle at least 1 transcode from 4k to 1080p which is fine. I can add a 1050ti in the future as needed

Im planning a few HDDs short term with Unraid as the OS and the server has the capacity for 8HDDs for long term. Mobo has 8 sata and case can hold 8 HDDs.

I am currently using my old pc to experiment on that's running a i5-7400 with 8gbs of ram and its doing like 60% of what I want. So the cpu I chose is about 4x as powerful and 3x the threads which should be plenty for a while. And mobo can support much better cpus if needed.

The ram im just going to pull out of my gaming pc that has 32gbs because I don't need that much ram in my gaming pc. Long term I can upgrade this.

I will be running an occasional modded Minecraft server for just me and my friend but will only be running as long as we are playing. Shouldn't be an issue for this pc

Also any ideas on how much power this pc might use per month?
Thank you!

LMK if you need more info

 

[neatfeatguy]

I've got my plex server on an i5-4660, 16GB RAM, 3 HDDs and a 3060 in it.

I use it to run a Valheim server my brother and I play on it (which the server handles the game pretty good, but slow HDD doesn't help). Everything else I need it to do works just fine. I've got 5400 RPM HDDs in it, I've been able to run 5 different devices in my house all playing from the server without any hiccups. No 4k movies on my server, just 480p to 1080p shows and movies.

I'll be working on migrating the system over to SSDs sometime in the next few months and leaving the HDDs as strictly backup drives, but for now, she's operating on spin drives only.

Three households outside of my house have access to the server and the only downside for them is the shitty upload speeds that Xfinity provides. Those family members that access my plex server don't use it very often so I guess the low upload speeds and slower hardware isn't any problem for them.

I leave the server on all the time, I haven't checked the power draw with my kill-a-watt meter and now I'm curious so I'll connect it....

Powered the server back on and the highest reading when powering up was 102W.
Idle = 53W
Running 1 - 1080p movie on remote device = Watts jumping from 55W to 75W
Running 3 - 1080p movies on remote device = Watts jumping from 70W to 95W

I'd venture to say that with my system, it probably averages around 70W per hour.
70 x 24 = 1.68KWh
30 days x 1.68 = 50.4KWh a month
That's probably pretty close to an average month for me. I watch a lot on my plex server over streaming so the server gets used a lot for movies/shows.

Hopefully that helps you out some.

 

[WaffleMaster]

Thanks, this does help put some things into perspective for me. What is the 3060 for? Doesn’t hosing servers use the CPU? And it doesn’t seem like you are transcoding much.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Thanks, this does help put some things into perspective for me. What is the 3060 for? Doesn’t hosing servers use the CPU? And it doesn’t seem like you are transcoding much.

Use to let the kids play games off the server before I built them a separate gaming computer for them last year. They mainly played things like Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare and Minecraft. In a pinch, if needed, the GPU can be used as a backup should something happen to a GPU in another system or if I need one for testing purposes.

 

[WaffleMaster]

Use to let the kids play games off the server before I built them a separate gaming computer for them last year. They mainly played things like Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare and Minecraft. In a pinch, if needed, the GPU can be used as a backup should something happen to a GPU in another system or if I need one for testing purposes.

Gotcha. Thanks for the info!

 

[argon]

I've recently bought a system with those specs. (mobo still in shipping will be here next week)
AMD 5600G processor
Asrock B550M-ITX/ac
Patriot P300 M.2 2280 PCIe gen 3x4 NVMe SSD 128GB
Silicon Power DDR4 RAM 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 3200 MHz (PC4 25600) CL16 1,35 V
Silverstone ML04B with SilverStone SST-ST40F-ES230 400W PSU
2x Hitachi HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 HUS726040ALA610 4000 GB (I had them already)

also maybe in future will swap for some 12 or 18TB pair of HDD from seagate prob.
my plan is install on it openmediavault rutorrent and plex and navidrome, don't wanna pay anymore for seedboxes

 

[DaemonForce]

This topic comes up around me often enough that I really should make a video about it at some point. One thing I don't hear about from anyone other than cringey techtubers is some strange schizm in the Netadmin/IT sphere about what qualifies a "server" or "NAS" and I'll just write it off because it doesn't matter as long as server computer goes brrrr. ✓

What you want to do seems deep into the realm of reasonable. The 5600G is newer than my best CPU. You don't need the best in a personal snowflake server. I'll remind you there is a line between good and good enough. I am currently riding that line. About 2 years ago I picked up a SFF eMachines (read: literal eWaste) just like this thing.

It featured:

A dead cmos battery
Legacy BIOS
1c/1t Athlon 2650e at a miserable 1.6GHz
2x1GB sticks of Kingston DDR2-800 that only ever report as much as 667 speed with no way to set it to stock
A WD Blue 320GB HDD that spends a few minutes per every other hour squeak-seeking
A lightscribe drive that is likely as virgin as the rest of the internals but usable in anything I have because sata
225W SFF Delta PSU
A fun but dysfunctional copy of Win7x64, MSOffice, CS 1.6 (中文) and every Chinese app from Kuaiwan to QQ
nVidia GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics
nVidia 1Gb/s Ethernet controller

It was likely tossed out by someone that doesn't understand eWaste disposal but good.
The star of the show is the 3Gb/s dual sata controller and ability to boot from USB. I gutted the system and added the following:
New battery
16GB Sandisk USB (Windows Server 2016 Core)
Whitelabel 4TB HDD
Toshiba 16TB HDD
A newer pair of sata cables that fixes a low speed 1.5Gb/s interface issue for one of the drives under DiskInfo
A nice blue LED 120mm Corsair fan mounted to the side panel
An HP rebranded QLogic 2x10GbE SFP card and a 10mm shallow 50mm² fan to vent the extreme heat that radiates from that beast of a card

Does it support AMD-V? Surprisingly yes.
Does it have enough memory to make use of a legacy VM? Yes.
Can it host antique games from the 1c/1t era of FPS gaming? Easily.
Can it host files NTFS/ReFS shares over samba and iSCSI? Also yes.
Can it run Windows Server 2016/2019/2022/HCI in full, core and nanoserver configurations? YES.
Can it run Docker containers and Hyper-V? Absolutely not. The CPU doesn't support SLAT and the memory loadout disqualifies it.
Does it fully saturate nVidia gigabit? I'm unsure of this one just because it's an nVidia controller. It has issues on certain drivers and software.
Does it fully saturate 10GbE SFP? Not from this pair of HDDs and probably never.
Can it support a GPU? Probably a low power low profile single slot model like a Tesla P4 or Radeon RX 6400.
Does that mean it could possibly support OBS or video transcoding in the future? ✖ doubt
Can I configure it as a 24/7 torrent daemon and revive tens of thousands of dead/dying things to this timeline? total mystery
Does it have any other redeeming features? It's small, out of the way, cute, quiet, consistent and can support my ever growing GoG, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox and every other game library without trouble while sipping a grand total of 55W/hr (~1KW/day) from the wall.

Is there anything else I wish it could do? Containers would be a massive plus just to have all my network traffic running through a virtual Pihole and Lancache combination or being able and the chance to experiment with other virtual applications in an extremely reasonable manner. Everything over the linux ecosystem is pretty foreign to me these days and the Internet container library grows in extreme popularity with each Microsoft hiccup every patch Tuesday. There is a stray thought once in a while of running a Minecraft server, GG2, Terraria or other games but for now I think having the most stable and consistent uptime for anywhere disk access, .NET SQL web, FTP, hosting Unreal/WoT maps and any other game that isn't thrilled about multicore CPUs is sufficient. If nothing else it keeps me from switching on the FX rack or depending on my main Ryzen box for direct hardware support.

The purpose of a NAS is easy accessible storage with some user/admin friendly bits and bobs. Mine does exactly that by allowing me to leverage a mix of solid and spinning storage to a ridiculous extreme. I got this box for free and the only way I could price it out to a similar device is those obsolete Dell Optiplex 9010 USFF office boxes that every business manager and gov office is throwing out because "zomg slow and old, reee" or something. Those things are ~$110ish on a normal day, are more than double the clockspeed of this Athlon and their multicore CPUs support SLAT and are extremely fast. If you don't believe me, go to the Passmark bench chart and compare an i5-3470 or whatever to an Athlon 64. Not only is it at least double the clock speed, they're all gonna be multicore and you know it's gonna score well over 274pts while loaded with all of the virtualization technologies we care about in here. Better yet, I'm sure you can cram more than 2 HDDs in them and with full 6Gb/s sata connections.

Think about it.

 

[WaffleMaster]

This topic comes up around me often enough that I really should make a video about it at some point. One thing I don't hear about from anyone other than cringey techtubers is some strange schizm in the Netadmin/IT sphere about what qualifies a "server" or "NAS" and I'll just write it off because it doesn't matter as long as server computer goes brrrr. ✓

What you want to do seems deep into the realm of reasonable. The 5600G is newer than my best CPU. You don't need the best in a personal snowflake server. I'll remind you there is a line between good and good enough. I am currently riding that line. About 2 years ago I picked up a SFF eMachines (read: literal eWaste) just like this thing.

View attachment 329234

It featured:

A dead cmos battery
Legacy BIOS
1c/1t Athlon 2650e at a miserable 1.6GHz
2x1GB sticks of Kingston DDR2-800 that only ever report as much as 667 speed with no way to set it to stock
A WD Blue 320GB HDD that spends a few minutes per every other hour squeak-seeking
A lightscribe drive that is likely as virgin as the rest of the internals but usable in anything I have because sata
225W SFF Delta PSU
A fun but dysfunctional copy of Win7x64, MSOffice, CS 1.6 (中文) and every Chinese app from Kuaiwan to QQ
nVidia GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics
nVidia 1Gb/s Ethernet controller

It was likely tossed out by someone that doesn't understand eWaste disposal but good.
The star of the show is the 3Gb/s dual sata controller and ability to boot from USB. I gutted the system and added the following:
New battery
16GB Sandisk USB (Windows Server 2016 Core)
Whitelabel 4TB HDD
Toshiba 16TB HDD
A newer pair of sata cables that fixes a low speed 1.5Gb/s interface issue for one of the drives under DiskInfo
A nice blue LED 120mm Corsair fan mounted to the side panel
An HP rebranded QLogic 2x10GbE SFP card and a 10mm shallow 50mm² fan to vent the extreme heat that radiates from that beast of a card

Does it support AMD-V? Surprisingly yes.
Does it have enough memory to make use of a legacy VM? Yes.
Can it host antique games from the 1c/1t era of FPS gaming? Easily.
Can it host files NTFS/ReFS shares over samba and iSCSI? Also yes.
Can it run Windows Server 2016/2019/2022/HCI in full, core and nanoserver configurations? YES.
Can it run Docker containers and Hyper-V? Absolutely not. The CPU doesn't support SLAT and the memory loadout disqualifies it.
Does it fully saturate nVidia gigabit? I'm unsure of this one just because it's an nVidia controller. It has issues on certain drivers and software.
Does it fully saturate 10GbE SFP? Not from this pair of HDDs and probably never.
Can it support a GPU? Probably a low power low profile single slot model like a Tesla P4 or Radeon RX 6400.
Does that mean it could possibly support OBS or video transcoding in the future? ✖ doubt
Can I configure it as a 24/7 torrent daemon and revive tens of thousands of dead/dying things to this timeline? total mystery
Does it have any other redeeming features? It's small, out of the way, cute, quiet, consistent and can support my ever growing GoG, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox and every other game library without trouble while sipping a grand total of 55W/hr (~1KW/day) from the wall.

Is there anything else I wish it could do? Containers would be a massive plus just to have all my network traffic running through a virtual Pihole and Lancache combination or being able and the chance to experiment with other virtual applications in an extremely reasonable manner. Everything over the linux ecosystem is pretty foreign to me these days and the Internet container library grows in extreme popularity with each Microsoft hiccup every patch Tuesday. There is a stray thought once in a while of running a Minecraft server, GG2, Terraria or other games but for now I think having the most stable and consistent uptime for anywhere disk access, .NET SQL web, FTP, hosting Unreal/WoT maps and any other game that isn't thrilled about multicore CPUs is sufficient. If nothing else it keeps me from switching on the FX rack or depending on my main Ryzen box for direct hardware support.

The purpose of a NAS is easy accessible storage with some user/admin friendly bits and bobs. Mine does exactly that by allowing me to leverage a mix of solid and spinning storage to a ridiculous extreme. I got this box for free and the only way I could price it out to a similar device is those obsolete Dell Optiplex 9010 USFF office boxes that every business manager and gov office is throwing out because "zomg slow and old, reee" or something. Those things are ~$110ish on a normal day, are more than double the clockspeed of this Athlon and their multicore CPUs support SLAT and are extremely fast. If you don't believe me, go to the Passmark bench chart and compare an i5-3470 or whatever to an Athlon 64. Not only is it at least double the clock speed, they're all gonna be multicore and you know it's gonna score well over 274pts while loaded with all of the virtualization technologies we care about in here. Better yet, I'm sure you can cram more than 2 HDDs in them and with full 6Gb/s sata connections.

Think about it.

I have been using the PC that I bought in 2017 when I didn't know anything about PCs. It has an i5-7400 with 8gbs of ram but I can see that its already struggling with what im doing and it can only hold 2 HDDs. It was fun to experiment with but it hit a snag that needs me to wipe the whole PC or the DNS wont work. So all my containers are barley working while I look for a new PC solution that Ive been wanting anyways. I don't want to spend hours on redoing everything and still having a crappy pc. My major in college is System and Networking Administration so I want to be able to do more with my server and learn as much as possible.

With the PC list I put together I can easily upgrade the cpu to be much better if needed and I can have plenty of HDDs and I have a big enough PSU to be able to add a GPU for transcoding. Its about as future proof as it needs to be. I already have something that can run about 25 docker containers with most being low load and it can run plex, but cant transcode. But theres no way I can run a MC server on it or fit 8 HDDs or do any higher load things that I want to experiment with like Frigate. So id rather buy a new server that will last me years and I wont have to worry about getting a new one, just upgrading some parts.

So I want a NAS/Server basically.

 

[DaemonForce]

An i5-7400? Isn't that a quad core with half the thermals of my Phenom II X4 955?
It was my first 64-bit chip and paired to the worst 4GB kit of DDR3-1600 from 2009 until 2018.
The day I finally added a 30GB SSD it was like a rocket. I was still on Server 2008 until newer apps aged it out.

2 HDDs or not, you should be doing perfectly fine with that kind of loadout. If the board only has two sata connections, that might be a rough spot unless you're also the type to never do backups or RAID. Maybe SSDs aren't your thing but I can tell you that you probably should have a minimum of ONE on hand for tacticool performance. If it were up to me, I'd probably toss in something like a Seagate WarpDrive and drop it into whatever PCI-E slot you have pinned x4 or x8 just for VM scratch, DNS/Lancache scratch or some combination for service tests. Even in 2024 it's extremely regrettable that I don't do containers or transcoding so I'm not able to help with that and I know you've got quite an uphill fight unless the usual interactions on that box are in the single digit count of total users. Even then, 25 docker containers sounds like a lot of fun. As long as you don't need a direct video output from that machine, a workstation card might be the best cheap answer. I haven't had an nVidia card since the TNT2 days but there's a lot of cool stuff getting dumped by the bucketload in more than a few places. I'm more the type that's interested in getting my feet back into streaming and there's enough shouting about HEVC and AV1 having the future-proof hookup that I'm securing a full size card for my giganto Ryzen box, hopefully putting my RX 580 to bed.

One of the things that I like to do when I want to stage the setup of a new server is preload the OS, apps and configs from vmware, then move that media to the target device to do the real tests. If you're looking forward to the NetAdmin life and it really seems to be for you, there will be a lot of "lazy" situations that call for it. It's your server and you should be able to enjoy it. Sometimes things don't work right away and that's the interesting part of it all. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

 

[WaffleMaster]

An i5-7400? Isn't that a quad core with half the thermals of my Phenom II X4 955?
It was my first 64-bit chip and paired to the worst 4GB kit of DDR3-1600 from 2009 until 2018.
The day I finally added a 30GB SSD it was like a rocket. I was still on Server 2008 until newer apps aged it out.

2 HDDs or not, you should be doing perfectly fine with that kind of loadout. If the board only has two sata connections, that might be a rough spot unless you're also the type to never do backups or RAID. Maybe SSDs aren't your thing but I can tell you that you probably should have a minimum of ONE on hand for tacticool performance. If it were up to me, I'd probably toss in something like a Seagate WarpDrive and drop it into whatever PCI-E slot you have pinned x4 or x8 just for VM scratch, DNS/Lancache scratch or some combination for service tests. Even in 2024 it's extremely regrettable that I don't do containers or transcoding so I'm not able to help with that and I know you've got quite an uphill fight unless the usual interactions on that box are in the single digit count of total users. Even then, 25 docker containers sounds like a lot of fun. As long as you don't need a direct video output from that machine, a workstation card might be the best cheap answer. I haven't had an nVidia card since the TNT2 days but there's a lot of cool stuff getting dumped by the bucketload in more than a few places. I'm more the type that's interested in getting my feet back into streaming and there's enough shouting about HEVC and AV1 having the future-proof hookup that I'm securing a full size card for my giganto Ryzen box, hopefully putting my RX 580 to bed.

One of the things that I like to do when I want to stage the setup of a new server is preload the OS, apps and configs from vmware, then move that media to the target device to do the real tests. If you're looking forward to the NetAdmin life and it really seems to be for you, there will be a lot of "lazy" situations that call for it. It's your server and you should be able to enjoy it. Sometimes things don't work right away and that's the interesting part of it all. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

I mean I could just get a new case that can hold 8 HDDs (found one used for $20) and then put all of my old pcs parts into it and then get one of those pcie cards that allows me to plug in more HDDs and then I can add that 16gbs of ram I have. Because I’m mostly just limited on space, ram, and sata slots right now. Thanks, I’ll think about it

 

[argon]

I've recently bought a system with those specs. (mobo still in shipping will be here next week)
AMD 5600G processor
Asrock B550M-ITX/ac
Patriot P300 M.2 2280 PCIe gen 3x4 NVMe SSD 128GB
Silicon Power DDR4 RAM 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 3200 MHz (PC4 25600) CL16 1,35 V
Silverstone ML04B with SilverStone SST-ST40F-ES230 400W PSU
2x Hitachi HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 HUS726040ALA610 4000 GB (I had them already)

also maybe in future will swap for some 12 or 18TB pair of HDD from seagate prob.
my plan is install on it openmediavault rutorrent and plex and navidrome, don't wanna pay anymore for seedboxes

successfully completed!

moved to a different route instead of omv installing debian with no gui then installed CasaOS.

On second picture you can see close to my Cambridge amp

 

[WaffleMaster]

successfully completed!

moved to a different route instead of omv installing debian with no gui then installed CasaOS.

On second picture you can see close to my Cambridge amp

Looks good. Nice and compact. My case is huge haha. I’m currently using my old PC parts in a new case + a pcie card for adding more hdds. So let me know how that cpu performs. I’ll upgrade in a bit once I see my server struggling too much.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Idle = 53W

Dafuq with that idle power? Mine is 16W off wall with various services in docker alive. It's a Z590I VISION D with i9 11900T.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Dafuq with that idle power? Mine is 16W off wall with various services in docker alive. It's a Z590I VISION D with i9 11900T.

Got a couple of SSDs in it and pulled a couple spin drives. Everything idling with the GPU is now sits around 40W. Take out the 3060 and it would be closer to 20W.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Got a couple of SSDs in it and pulled a couple spin drives. Everything idling with the GPU is now sits around 40W. Take out the 3060 and it would be closer to 20W.

SSD eat 0.0xW while in sleep, spinners should sleep. Okay the 3060... In Linux don't forget to install powertop on intel system and do powertop --auto-tune, it will enable more power savings.

 

[argon]

Looks good. Nice and compact. My case is huge haha. I’m currently using my old PC parts in a new case + a pcie card for adding more hdds. So let me know how that cpu performs. I’ll upgrade in a bit once I see my server struggling too much.

this is the cpu usage while viewing a 24Mbps H265 2160p 18gb movie

It make literally no sound i can hear while its under the TV cabinet

 

[DaemonForce]

Looks great. Do you see what I mean about being resourceful with an old loadout?
27% CPU on a 5600G and 16GB is perfectly fine for what is basically delivering UHD video.
Expect Plex to be the majority of your CPU usage while torrents go BRRR (and a possible future memory monster).
Be mindful of loading it up with too much stuff too. I wanted to setup qbittorrent on mine but fell into a rabbit hole of tixati, transmission and half a dozen other clients either eating WAY too much memory, experiencing really bad CPU choke or some other odd misbehavior leading up to straight up crashes that had me return to utorrent 2.1 on Windows Server Core. There's a point where too much is too much and I found it.

If you've already gotten that box established for what you want to do I could probably expect the same from a mid-range Ryzen Embedded system with 4GB.

VMs and Containers would throw a real big spanner in that whole thing real fast but you get the idea.