PC Tech Thread

Storage only and I’d like to ditch them/move to NAS! I’m aware of when they kick in, it’s the base level noise I don’t want.

I just spoke to the support team, they have now moved my order to urgent dispatch as apparently it was forgotten or something.

good work, I would have just waited and got angry

anyone have experience of Power-over-Ethernet security cameras and have reccommendations?

This sounds significantly worse than it is but some fiddling with the motherboard software fan controller has revealed that increasing system and CPU fan speed to max makes very little difference to noise - something else is the main offender.
GPU fan isn’t making noise at this point either (setting it to max is a very different sound).

Fans are running at about 30% load and system temps are low (CPU 40C, mobo 27C, GPU 31C).

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I've had an Antec P180 getting dusty for about 7 years since the motherboard inside it died and I wasn't really using it much. The P180 and related models were designed in collaboration with the founder of https://silentpcreview.com/

In my first post-uni job I built a mailserver to sit in the IT team's office of a firm of solicitors. Used a Fractal Define R2 case and a Scythe Ninja cooler, with the fans that came with the case and cooler. This was about a decade ago, so the Define series is up to 7 now, and there have been a few generations of Ninja, but I expect you could put pretty much anything in there and have it somewhere between silent and quiet. The Define's panels had a heavy rubbery layer on the inside, with flaps to leave in place over fan positions that weren't used. The bays for 3.5" drives were soft-mounted.

Price varies according to size and generation, but always good VFM.
https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=define

ah, fond memories of those the P180 cases from the height of my pc building and gaming days

anyone have experience of Power-over-Ethernet security cameras and have reccommendations?

to add to this, I'm looking at synology NAS

it'll be used for plex streaming to my smart TV and storage for security cam footage

I'm trying to figure out if I need a NAS that does transcoding. Am I right in saying that transcoding is probably required? While I mostly stream prime/netflix now, i have a ton of old movie/TV show files in various formats on my PC (which will sit in my NAS once built). To ensure my smart TV can play these, i need transcoding, right?

I tried the Plex on NAS, other software on NAS thing. I keep it simple now. A NAS failure (raid controller) meant I realised how messy I'd made it, plus the performance of the software I'd put on there was really bad because it only has a really cheap low power CPU.

What I do now... Treat storage as storage, compute as compute.

I have a Synology NAS but aside from the base storage I only have syncthing on it.

I have a separate pc for my Plex server and home automation. But I researched this, doesn't need much storage (a small on motherboard memory disk for the operating system and basic files), and just a modern low wattage Intel CPU.

A modern x86 has most of the features you need for hardware transcoding. This happens on my PC and a couple of high quality streams do not push CPU above a couple of %. That PC is silent, it's passively cooled and has no fans anywhere.

As for home surveillance... I'm still paused on that. Ubiquiti and others get poor reviews in the wild. Typically are used by shops and garages, and the owners think it's all shit. Google Nest seem the best, but I'm a bit freaked out by surveillance within the home being processed and stored in the cloud. But at least Nest has features I want (only enable video when all the smartphones in the household are outside the house, when a fire alarm goes turn on the video to show me, etc).

You can put Plex on a NAS. I even tried Plex on an Nvidia Shield. But Plex really worked a dream and have a Netflix level experience when I have it a recent Intel CPU

To ensure my smart TV can play these, i need transcoding, right?

Probably, although another option is to use e.g. a Raspberry Pi, plugged into telly, as the client

i can run plex from my PC (assuming I can get networking issues resolved - it never wants to show me the server settings which i gather is a semi-regular issue...) but would rather not run that all day long if I can avoid it. I don't need RAID as I back up my precious stuff (basically just my photos) on the cloud anyway

synology appealed to me because the software gets good reviews and it allows two birds with one stone (streaming + footage storage)

Can I build a cheap x86 PC to use for both? With just windows? No idea about security cam footage software for windows (remote access etc)

re cameras, I like POE because it takes care of connectivity and power at the same time, with a single cable. I can run that through my basement and out through a vent with confidence and it'll be fairly neat too.

Ah, but scope creep :D

First it's storage, then it's storage plus Plex (which is a web server, a medium sized database, a bit of storage, some media indexers, some transcoders), then it's storage plus Plex plus home security cameras (which is a constant media transcoding, a lot of storage management and disks always spinning, and a web server, a small database).

Suddenly your NAS with a small ARM CPU is having to carry the workload of a larger machine.

And this is where in my experience things failed. The gradual scope creep compromised everything, and made my whole setup second rate.

I then purchased an Nvidia Shield https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/ as that could be the Plex Server... and it was much better than the NAS device, and it freed up my NAS to do other things... like falling asleep (damn, spinning disks are noticeable on your electricity bill).

The Nvidia Shield was good for being a Plex server for my film collection (~900 movies), but just couldn't cope with my music collection (~100K tracks) or my photo collection (~200k photos, recent ones very large in size). Which reveals how heavy the database in Plex has to work... if you can give it a better CPU then great, but once collections get large you also need to give it more RAM and storage. Plex on the Nvidia Shield massively outperformed the Synology DS 1817+ for transcoding, this is because it can and did use the hardware transcoding (the NAS never did this, the CPU would run very hot and limited both number of streams and stream quality - and the DS 1817+ is a recent model NAS).

My NAS is unencrypted, uses software RAID (I learned my lesson about relying on hardware RAID controllers), and I could construct it again from any Linux machine (software being universal).

I do strongly recommend something like this if you can... treat your NAS as NAS, it's storage, avoid the scope creep as it ultimately pushes your electricity bill higher and leads you down a quite unsatisfying experience where you're constantly trying to make it better but cannot. This was an expensive lesson to learn... I would have got a cheaper NAS if I'd known in advance it wasn't going to be able to do the things I was going to ask of it - just because you can install software on a NAS does not mean that you should.

For what you've described as your goal I would recommend:

• Get a Synology NAS and a few drives in a JBOD config
  
• Depending on the security cameras you choose, either run that from the NAS or look at what little additions run the software elsewhere and yet utilise the NAS for storage (i.e. a Ubiquiti Cloud Key as the camera server if you're buying Ubiquiti cameras... or if the NAS supports software for a brand of camera you like, just do that)
  
• Get an Nvidia Shield for your Plex Server (it will read media from the NAS)... or if you think your collections are large (more than 1K items) get a small fanless media PC with a modern low power (low TDP) x86 CPU as it will enable virtually free hardware transcoding.
  

Oh...

And Plex hardware transcoding information:

• Nvidia Shield supports it https://support.plex.tv/articles/221099648-limitations-when-running-plex-media-server-on-nvidia-shield/ but has storage considerations (mostly... get the Shield Pro and use the NAS for storage)
  
• Most Synology NAS do not support it
  
• Most QNAP NAS support it sometimes (lower resolutions, best support on the TVS models which are more expensive business models)
  
  

There's a big datasheet on Plex and NAS support for transcoding features https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MfYoJkiwSqCXg8cm5-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit#gid=1274624273

the tl;dr of that spreadsheet is that some QNAP NAS devices (higher priced ones) do OK... Synology do bad, most will struggle to do anything at a high resolution and your Plex server will likely refuse to play (or crash - which is what happened with mine).

Shield gets your further... but only for some codecs.

Hence... once I'd acquired enough media to encounter these restrictions, I went for a fanless PC to run Plex.

I found some memory in my parts box. Not sure what it is. Will PM a pic.

Cheers for this, case looks spot on - I’ve ordered one and a Corsair RM750i, which should run in passive mode for most of my usage.

Plex doesn't necessarily need transcoding, in which case you can probably just get away with a NAS. For this to be the case though you need to only be streaming to something on the same network that can direct play (and tell Plex it can) all of the different video formats you have (and if you want subtitles it may need to transcode). You also don't want too big a library.

Otherwise, I looked at this myself a while back but for the price of the better NASs that could cope with transcoding and the like you could get a cheap NAS and a better PC for the Plex side.

The benefit of this is that the storage just sits there unimpacted by the plex processing, etc and any system changes will be discrete. Your NAS in particular doesn't need to be the latest and greatest if all it's doing is acting as storage. I'm still using a 10 years old HP Microserver for mine.

For a ready made option for the plex box I'd look at the Intel NUCs although you can build something sufficient for a few hundred quid.

format wise the stuff i have tends to be .mkv or .avi (less common)

What qualifies as a big library? I won't be using plex for photos or music so won't encounter the same problem that @Velocio had

So I could use something like this combined with something like this this

If so, that's the hardware taken care of but software?

Yes! That's a great combination, and that NUC will do hardware transcoding great (the CPU supports it).

For the NUC I'd see if you can stretch slightly more and get an 8th Gen processor one or later. They're quite a bit more powerful for not much of an increase in cost.

My library has something like 8,000 tv shows and 1,000 movies and is perfectly fine. I occasionally run it on my file server when I'm testing stuff and it chugs a bit on there (and can't transcode).

I run my plex server on Ubuntu (and also use it for playback) as (I think) it's a little lower OS overhead and a bit more stable. Saying that I've done a fair bit of cursing whilst mapping network drives and getting shit to work whereas it's much easier to do all of that on Windows (although someone who uses linux a lot may disagree with me there)

but what if it arrives at 13:43? What then spotter?

Then its the hot oil off the ramparts for Sandy I'm afraid...

Speaking of NUCs... would the 'normal' models handle re-playing HalfLife, Deus Ex, HalfLife2, Portal and a few other games (all pre-2007 or so) or would I be better look for the Skull/Hades Canyon versions?

Normal version would handle it... but it wouldn't be great (you'd still have to reduce graphics quality, etc).

The Hades Canyon though... shit, it would be pretty damn awesome at it. The difference comes down to that built-in Radeon. This is a low-end VR machine, but that makes it a pretty powerful gaming machine.

I suspect they'd run them pretty well. They're basically laptops in a different form factor and I know my laptop (which only has onboard graphics) runs stuff of that era at max generally. Don't know about those games specifically though.