WHS bluray streamer build

U

UT-Jackal

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2004
Messages
373
So I already have around 12TB's of bluray movies, and its getting to the point where i need a dedicated box to stream them to my HTPC in the living room and my gaming rig in the office.

Here are the things I'm 95% sold on:

Case: NZXT Whisper + 2 Hard Drive cages.
8-port Sata card x2: AOC-SASLP-MV8
Spare 4gigs of ram

So now I just need recommendations on Mobo/cpu, and a psu. Here is what I'm currently looking at, but if I can cut costs I'll take it.
Mobo: GIGABYTE with a PCIEx16 and PCIEx8 slot, Dual MB LAN, and 8 sata ports.
CPU: Not Sure
PSU: Not Sure

While initially i wanted a Norco 4220, this case/cage config is much cheaper, and being that I don't have a rack, it is also easier for me to find space for.

I'm not attached to the mobo, or going the way of Intel, just seemed like a very solid board with tons of ports and enough PCIE ports for my two sata cards.

In regard to the processor, while I know it doesn't take a great processor to run a movie streaming WHS, I would like to be able to make bluray encodes on the box. I'm not in a huge hurry to output them, but having a quad-core to speed up the process wouldn't hurt. At the same time, I'm not willing to pay a high premium for this luxury.

For the PSU, I'm not sure what is required to spin up 10-20 hard drives, but I will probably end up with 15+ drives in this box before i would upgrade the hardware, so something to support that is what I'm looking for.

I'll be happy to answer any questions, as I'm sure there is required information I forgot to mention, and I would appreciate any feedback on the build.

Thanks!
 
why not buy one of the q6600s peope are selling in the FSFT forums? also for the PSU i my WHS i went overkill and got a corsair 750w because it was on sale.

I'd get at least a 650w. Corsairs warranty is kick ass.
 
My outgoing WHS has a EP45-UD3P. Great board but I am retiring it in the next week or two due to switching to an LGA 1366/ Core i7 platform. Building today, look at the H55/H57 boards with 2x PCIe x8 or x16 physical slots (and at least x4 on the second) and an i3 or new i5.

I have an Asus Atom N330/ION board with ssd and 4gb ddr2 in one Kill-A-Watt next to an i5-650 5gb ddr3, ssd in a second Kill-A-Watt. 31w idle in Win7 for the ION. 27w idle in Win7 for the i5-650.

Performance with handbrake the i5-650 with HT on is faster than my Q6600 at stock speeds (and uses WAY less power). Table with the encode speed for x264 midway down the page here: http://www.servethehome.com/?p=296

In the picture there, you can see two Intel Pro/1000 GT NICs installed. I'll post some pictures tomorrow of the setup with a raid card in the x16 slot and a HP SAS expander in the second PCIe slot with the two NICs. Total power consumption with those was around 70w idle. You can easily get away with a good single rail 500w PSU.

The NICs can be had for $40/ pair or less and are much better than Realtek's.
 
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@OmegaAvenger - Thanks for the tip. I have a q6600 in my gaming rig, and the mobo would support two of the sata cards, So the thought has crossed my mind just to upgrade it to a core i7, and use my gaming rig's cpu/mobo/ram for a WHS. My only concern would be power consumption. I'm honestly not sure how big of a difference it would make as I've never researched it, but the thought makes me think twice.

@pjkenned - Very interesting read. Thanks for the link. With the Price of the i3's and i5's, I am very tempted to wait for the i7 to drop to around $200 and just upgrade my gaming rig, as I said above.
 
Well if you have a Microcenter around the i7 920's are $199. I have two of the $199 specials now.

I will say, the noise difference between my main PC (watercooled) and the i5-650 makes me wish there was a big passively cooled GPU. I am sitting 5ft from the i5, which is not in a case just free air, and I can't hear the thing.
 
UT-Jackal said:
For the PSU, I'm not sure what is required to spin up 10-20 hard drives, but I will probably end up with 15+ drives in this box before i would upgrade the hardware, so something to support that is what I'm looking for.
Click to expand...

The Corsair 650TX should be enough for 15 drives. If 20 drives, spend the extra bit for the Corsair 750TX.

Also, a socket 775 setup would not be a cost-effective setup, even if you have DDR2 RAM already. Take a look at a AMD Athlon II setup using socket AM2+.
 
Danny Bui said:
The Corsair 650TX should be enough for 15 drives. If 20 drives, spend the extra bit for the Corsair 750TX.

Also, a socket 775 setup would not be a cost-effective setup, even if you have DDR2 RAM already. Take a look at a AMD Athlon II setup using socket AM2+.
Click to expand...

Need for a bigger PSU is based upon?

Transferring from Old WHS to new Server 2008 R2/ VM'd WHS so disks are active:

Old WHS (what's still in there):
Intel Core 2 Duo E6420
12 remaining Seagate 7200.11's
Gigabyte P45 motherboard
Adaptec 31605
2GB ram
Blu Ray drive
8800GTS 512MB (ok so I pulled the old passive GPU for something else)

New Server:
Core i7 920
7x WD Green 1.5TB
6x Hitachi 2TB
2x Hitachi 1TB
2x Seagate 7200.11's
4x Random 7200 RPM 500GB drives
Supermicro board,
Areca 1680LP
HP SAS Expander
Quad port NIC
12GB ram

Both are in Norco 4U's with lots of fans also. Each box has an Antec 1000w PSU.

3TB into a 5.7TB transfer it is 680w at the wall, including the 16 port GigE dell switch, and any possible extra draw from the IBM Battery unit.

So 2x the CPU's of the OP, probably 2x the drives, a switch/ BBU, not super efficient range on either power supply, 20+ fans, and an 8800GTS thrown in for good measure... and still well below 700w... under disk/network load.

Just thought I would give the OP a data point. My reccomendation PSU wise would also be to get a single rail PSU for this project so that you don't have to worry about distributing the startup amps across multiple rails.
 
pjkenned said:
Need for a bigger PSU is based upon?
.......
So 2x the CPU's of the OP, probably 2x the drives, a switch/ BBU, not super efficient range on either power supply, 20+ fans, and an 8800GTS thrown in for good measure... and still well below 700w... under disk/network load.
Click to expand...

Need for a bigger PSU based upon the Corsair PSU finder, from other 20 drive builds here in the forum, and finally items 4-6 in this list:
Paul_Johnson said:
Yes and a quick search would turn up this topic a million times over. Here is the recap:

1) APFC can fool Kill-A-Watts into giving you abnormally low readings (some times giving better than 100% efficiency)

2) Power supplies derate with temperature anywhere from 2w/c above a nominal rated at value to 10w/c.

3) Kill-A-Watt's and most power meters sample too slowly to catch transient loads (the Transient load from our tests is 117w and is COMPLETELY missed by Kill-A-Watts).

4) Power supplies last longer if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

5) power supplies are quieter if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

6) Power supplies are cooler if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

The power meters in UPS software are just as bad. You have to spend some change before you get anywhere near an accurate power meter when your PSU has APFC.
Click to expand...

In addition, your 700W figure may be of as noted in items 1, 3 and the UPS note if you're just using your UPS or Kill-A-Watt or similar to measure power output. Additional evidence of Kill-A-Watt and other cheap power meter inaccuracy:
Here's Paul Johnson's post about the inaccuracy of the Kill-A-Watt:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032190998&postcount=7

Note that Paul Johnson is the PSU editor here on HardOCP.
 
Points 4-6 above are all very valid.

You get in trouble with amps in these things, much more than watts. If you look at the OP's system spec, it is probably going to draw <400w at full bore unless there is a P4 or i7, or big GPU folding in there (not listed). Maybe shooting for 40-50% that's OK for a 700w PSU with the system under load a lot. At the end of the day, 7,200 rpm hard drives are 7-11w devices. Two DDR3 modules won't break 20w unless you have a need to do serious overvolting/clocking with them. SAS Controllers are usually <20w per card. With onboard GPU's + decently low power CPUs are going to make it really hard to break 400w without overclocking (which is probably not a good idea on a storage server).

As a side note, I know at 100% load with 17 drives + additional GigE NICs I got the old WHS to consume 343w. Measured in the lab of a valley company whose single systems connect over 1,000 drives... using some setup that was in two 42U racks and I have no clue what brand that stuff was. Kill-A-Watts gave me 328w at home. I'll agree they aren't perfect, but saying that you can find ways to fool them by 50%+ doesn't mean they are always wrong.
 
pjkenned said:
As a side note, I know at 100% load with 17 drives + additional GigE NICs I got the old WHS to consume 343w. Measured in the lab of a valley company whose single systems connect over 1,000 drives... using some setup that was in two 42U racks and I have no clue what brand that stuff was. Kill-A-Watts gave me 328w at home. I'll agree they aren't perfect, but saying that you can find ways to fool them by 50%+ doesn't mean they are always wrong.
Click to expand...

You are correct in that KAW are not always wrong. However, a good majority of the time they are wrong. Even if you bought 5 of those KAW at one time, they'll all show different figures. Just ask Oklahoma Wolf, the PSU reviewer over JonnyGURU.com, about his experiences with his three KAW and Paul Johnson's KAW usage. In fact, both sites no longer use KAW due to their inherent inaccuracy and lack of solidarity when it comes to measuring power.

So when a good majority of the time a KAW or multiple KAW will be inaccurate, it doesn't make much sense to rely too heavily on the figures those devices provide for computer hardware.
 
I actually bought 8 at a time and picked the two that did 60 and 90w light bulbs accurately, gave the others away to people I work with. I was doing large Smart Meter/ Smart Grid litigation and wanted to explain to team members what the project enabled (given the SmartMeter/HAN technology is way cooler than a KAW and more sophisticated but it provided a general sense).

For the computer hardware side, I figure they are more useful for ballpark figures/ relative comparisons. Certainly, compared to some of the lab equipment at utilities and the power monitoring setups they aren't accurate if you want exact loads.
 
when I wanted a server upgrade I just built a new gaming system and used the old parts in my WHS.

I went with the norco 4020, old DFI 975x board and Intel Core2Duo e6600. I think I have 4gb of ram in there and a 400w, maybe 500w PSU. About a dozen drives in it so far.

At any rate it works fine for my blu ray movies.
 
Well at this point I just bought another 2TB, and removed my only sub 1TB drive in my two machines. So I'm holding off to do more research. I really want an i7 (and a new GPU) in my gaming rig, so there is a good chance that I'll just take my q6600, as overkill as it might be for a WHS movie streamer, and throw it with a 650/750 (in reality whatever is on sale when i jump the gun) PSU into a Norco or the case i mentioned. But either way, I appreciate all the input and the head butting of PSU knowledge. :p

Thanks guys!
 
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