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The “everything home server” for under $300: fanless, 8 cores, 4x 10Gbe SFP+, JBOD support
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- Title
- The Everything Fanless Home Server Firewall Router and NAS Appliance
- Authors
- About
- Published
- Jan 2 2024
- Word count
- 472 words
This is a really fascinating machine: it’s using an embedded Intel chip from their enterprise range, which gives significantly better connectivity than the more standard mini PC/homelab boxes tend to have, but it’s a solid $1,000 cheaper than branded equivalents. For context, you can barely get a 4 port 10Gbe switch for the price of this thing from the majority of manufacturers, let alone a whole router/virtualisation host.
Associated video here.
Yea holy shit the connectivity on this thing is amazing.
You can get better deals if you only need a storage appliance. But if you want to consolidate a storage appliance and some serious networking gear, this is the way to go.
I wish it had POE for access points. That woulda been killer.
Would this be a decent Plex server? I assume you would have to add in a graphics card somehow
Like @JXM said, it wouldn’t be ideal - this is definitely a networking and storage focused platform rather than media. If you’re looking for a media server specifically, the connectivity will be overkill and the lack of transcode acceleration could be frustrating, so you could probably find better value in something with less networking and more coprocessing.
If you particularly wanted it for other reasons and figured you’d throw Plex/Jellyfin on there as a bonus I imagine the CPU alone would just about manage 1080p transcoding in real time, but anything more substantial you’d be looking at either transcoding in advance and storing the outputs or rigging up something janky with an m.2->PCIe adapter and a GPU hanging outside the case.
Not really because there’s not a place to add a graphics card and the processor doesn’t include Intel QuickSync (their hardware video encode/decode engine) so any transcoding would be software based.
It's probably fine if you don't spend most of your Plex time watching from a bandwidth constrained location. Software transcoding isn't as awful as people think, and I imagine 99% of the time you would be direct streaming anyways.
I would disagree. For simple codecs like MPEG it’s not bad, sure, but modern codecs take quite a lot of time. The last time I tried to transcode to AV1 it was something like an hour and a half per minute of footage.
Given AV1 hardware decoders are not ubiquitous yet, I wouldn't want to use it anyways. With this CPU, I think you could get by with real-time h.264 encoding. It won't be perfect, but I wouldn't think it needs to be since transcoding is only necessary when you are both away from home and bandwidth-constrained.
There is the caveat that I do transcode my DVDs and 1080p blu-rays with h.265/aac when I rip them. The only uncompressed rips I keep on my home server are from my 4k blu-rays.
Problems can come from browser codec compatibility too. Firefox doesn't support hevc, so any hevc content is transcoded even without bandwidth limits.
Plex has dedicated apps for every platform under the sun, I would use those instead of their browser interface.
I think it's dumb that Firefox refuses to support HEVC seeing as they don't have to actually implement it themselves, they could just use whatever decoder(s) are present on the user's system (like ffmpeg). Hardware decoders are also ubiquitous at this point, they could easily provide support via that route.
It's a licensing issue iirc, that's why AV1 is gaining so much traction since it doesn't require license fees.
Plex has tons of apps, but those apps are dependent on the device they’re running on for hardware that can support hardware accelerated playback.
When I rip my movies and TV shows, I choose codecs that I know my devices support. I used AVC for a decade, switched to HEVC in 2019 when the last of my devices got replaced with something that supports it, and I'll likely switch to AV1 in a few years.
You really want real time transcoding to be a last resort, as it murders picture quality, especially with hardware encoders. I found x264 to be fast enough even on some pretty old hardware to give me a reasonable 1080p image, this was almost a decade ago at this point.
My point is, with a little foresight and understanding of your use-case, this machine can be an excellent Plex or Jellyfin server. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth spending considerably more money to better cover ~1% of your use cases?
I don’t have much to add other than I think we agree. Direct play is ideal but realistically most people are just downloading stuff and throwing into the Plex folder as is.
Software transcoding isn’t bad (usually the result actually looks better than hardware encoding at similar bandwidths), it’s that it’s slow compared to hardware transcoding. You’re right, Most of the time someone is probably going to just direct play the files. But if you end up having to transcode because your network is too slow or the device just doesn’t support direct play, it would probably be a bad experience.
Most desktop/laptop chips from the last four or five years can handle transcoding a 1080p video no problem, but the processor in this system is a very low power part (both performance-wise and power-wise) that’s explicitly designed for other tasks. I think even a single 1080p stream would be an issue. Especially past the first few minutes, since the whole system is passively cooled so it’s going to throttle pretty quickly.
Thank you for asking the question I wanted to.
The search for a cheap Plex server so my wife stops turning on my gaming PC continues.
I think the biggest question you have to answer is if you will want to be transcoding. I use a raspberry pi 4 as a media server (in my case, jellyfin), and it's perfectly fine because I use direct streaming, so it's basically just networking bandwidth.
I personally wasn't aware of this at the time and most things I read online were suggesting that I needed big compute/GPU and whatnot, so I'm just leaving this comment because maybe if your TV or whatever device you want to watch on supports the media formats you want to consume, you are most likely perfectly fine with a cheap machine
I have no idea if I want to be transcoding. Our typical use case is media on my PC streamed to the Plex app on my Sony Bravia. I admit that I don't really pay attention to what format my video files are in.
Will you be watching your videos inside your house? Or on the go?
If the former, then you can rely on direct streaming.
If the latter, you will need transcoding if the bandwidth between you and your server isn't enough to stream the original files.
Makes sense, thank you.
The bandwidth is only one aspect to direct streaming or transcoding. If your files aren't 4k high bitrate behemoths, then generally it won't even come down to bandwidth being the issue, it more often comes down to the codecs. I purposefully don't download HEVC/x265 encoded files because that codec is so license encumbered you can't even count on devices to actually support it. There are a good deal that do, but virtually everything handles x264 so if I want to avoid transcoding without considering the client devices then I'm better off doing that.
This just isn't an issue if you keep what devices you intend to watch on in mind when building your library. When I first started ripping DVD's and Blu-Rays, I used h.264 + aac as device support for them has been ubiquitous for as long as I've been doing this. In 2019 I switched to h.265, as that is when the last of my devices was replaced with something that has a hardware HEVC decoder. I'm not using AV1 yet because it is very slow, and my iPad and laptop still lack hardware support.
A lot of people run Plex for less-than-legitimate reasons (i.e. letting their friends use their Plex server as a pirate streaming service). To them, transcoding is important because their users are doing so over the internet.
If you aren't one of these people and you will mostly be using this in your house, then it probably doesn't matter.
Any older tiny pc from lenovo, dell, HP, etc with an intel cpu that supports quicksync (within the past 12 years or so) will do the job fine.
You can find em dirt cheap used online and pretty much any intel spec can handle at least a couple transcodes.
That gives me a decent starting place at least, thank you.
I'd also suggest looking into mini-ITX boards with QuickSync-capable CPUs on board. They tend to be a bit more expandable than the mini-PCs - for instance, I wanted to put an absurd number of hard drives in mine, so I slapped an 8-port SATA controller in the PCIe slot, and built it into a mid-tower Fractal R4 I had lying around from an old build that had 8 3.5" bays.
The build ended up turning into a combined NAS, Jellyfin server, and Docker host, and it's been great to me so far. Depending on your budget and your desire for expandability, it's a good way to go.
Yeah that sounds like something that could work for me.
Ooh this intrigues me, can you recommend any particular boards in this space? My wife and I have been toying with setting up a build that would be used for pretty similar things, and we're technical enough that expandability is a plus.
I personally went with ASRock's J5040 board, and it's served me well. If I were building a system today, though, I'd hold out for an ASRock N100M, or something else with an N100. It has more PCIe lanes, faster USB-C, and QuickSync support for AV1 decoding.
Case-wise, the more 3.5" bays you can get away with, the better. I built mine too an old Fractal Define R4 I had kicking around from an old build. You'll also need RAM, a PSU, an SSD for booting, and whatever spinning rust you have kicking around for storage.
Software-wise, I'm running OpenMediaVault with a btrfs raid1 array. I liked btrfs for the media server build because its raid1 support will handle anything you throw at it, with no need to match up drive sizes. If you want to grow later, you can add or replace as little as a single drive at a time. So long as no single drive makes up more than 50% of the array storage space, you'll be insulated against any single drive failure. ZFS is much choosier about its hardware, in comparison, which makes it great for planned servers, but less good for the "box of scraps" approach I took to my build.
woo ty so much for all the info, bookmarking it so I have this info on hand for later
A few thoughts/considerations:
Great, super useful information. I appreciate you taking the time to share!
How is this better than buying a used Dell r530, r610, or r710 with 8lff? Most of those can be had in the $400 range on eBay. Sure, they're huge and power hungrier. But the processing power difference is huge as are the storage options.
Asking as I acquired 2 (free) 2950s that are clearly super obsolete and incredibly power hungry but, with newer (cheap) eBay RAID cards, should still make excellent NAS boxes.
Tempted by bigger iron.
A lot of people don't have racks, don't have much space, need fanless or near silent operation for a living area, and don't want to spike their electric bill.
I've got a fairly respectable homelab running purely on fanless devices in a small entertainment stand that boxes like this are perfect for.
Perfectly suitable answer. That's what I suspected.
I don't have a rack yet. Right now, my old clunkers occupy too much space on my workbench.
I mean, I’m literally buying one as an alternative to hooking a MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN up to my existing router. For me at least it’s not an alternative to a full rack mount server (if I had space/sound isolation for that, which I don’t!), it’s an alternative to a small single task appliance - and it comes with the power of a full server as a bonus.
Are you planning to use ECC RAM in it? If so, curious if it works for you. It looks like this review didn't test them, just noted processor support.
I kept trying to sketch out a TrueNAS build that would have ECC RAM and just couldn't make it work. The I7-12700 was compatible, as was the motherboard I chose, but the chipset wasn't. The 12700 only uses ECC RAM in conjunction with the W680 chipset, and I couldn't find a reasonably priced one at all. It's an incredibly frustrating experience. I specced out a great home server that would be my NAS and home automation and server for ~ €1200 (not including HDDs) but adding ECC RAM was just a nightmare, I gave up...
Totally reasonable.
I have a basement, fortunately. I still need the rack.
I wish it could daisy chain additional external storage. If it could, it would be my first choice.
Very nice deal. I suppose you could use this as a router and “switch” with all of those ports. I wish they could just have RJ45s and up the speed. I built my own 10Gb router/switch for around $500. But it’s much bulkier than this.
SFP+ really is superior for most things in the 10Gb space though.
10GBASE-T runs into physical heat limitations rather easily and is a lot more failure prone at the connector and throughout the run. There's also less options for cables than fiber where you can buy precisely according to your speed and distance requirements.
Seems like this would make a great prebuilt OPNsense box for a 10Gb homelab with fiber.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how cheap direct attach copper cables seem to be, as well - for anything long or complex you can install fiber with the reasonable knowledge that it’s extremely future proof, and for anything short you can get a DAC cable for less than half of what a single RJ45 transceiver would cost. Given you can get an SFP+ NIC for less than half the cost of an RJ45 transceiver as well, it tends to work out good value overall going SFP+ unless you’ve already got a load of cat6 in place.
Going to hijack your comment to pick your brain on my own homelab plans. I'm planning on purchasing 2gig fiber from my ISP now that they offer it. (1gig is what I currently have but it's over coax and not as reliable.) But I'm struggling to figure out how to make the best use of the bandwidth for the devices that don't sit in the (makeshift) rack. I've heard some new WiFi standards are nearing that point, so I'll probably invest in that. But I'd like some physical drops for the office and tv.
I've seen some brocade switches that have like 8 SFP ports, which people put an adapter in to run Ethernet to instead. That's my current best idea- can you think of anything else?
At that level and especially just going to access devices I wouldn't bother with SFP+ or fiber honestly. Maybe just between the actual network infrastructure if you'd like to future-proof.
I'm resisting the urge to go and find specific models for you but you'd probably do just fine with a "multi-gig" switch that allows 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps speeds through native RJ-45 ports with Cat6. They're pretty cheap these days and avoid the quite large expense of individual 10GBASE-T transceivers (that's what those adapters are) that can also be prone to other issues.
The jump from "multi-gig" (which is kinda the industry standard stopgap right now) to 10Gbps is a rather expensive one that I can't really recommend for home use unless you really like spending way too much money on barely utilized enterprise network gear like me.