Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.
All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).
I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).
Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.
Those are CPU from, like, 2014… they are definitely “beefy” (ie. needlessly powerful regardless of what you plan to do with them) but not more powerful than modern mid-range CPUs (which have way lower TDP).
This is not to mean that the server is necessarily a bad deal (how much is it?)… there’s lot of stuff on top of the CPU, but you should definitely factor in the electricity cost (especially if you are not the one paying for it and/or are sensitive to climate issues) and see if you can maybe buy a more “humble” server with a modern CPU and fewer, bigger drives (each hdd consumes more or less the same amount of power, regardless of capacity).
Oh, make sure to check if those old CPUs have hardware-accelearted video codecs if you plan to do transcoding!
Also, make sure to compare prices from ebay.
I got the server crazy cheap & couldn’t pass up the offer. Figured I’d throw some needlessly powerful CPUs in it because why not, lol. Power isn’t actually nearly as bad as I said… looks like it’d cost ~$40/month to run. Which is way more reasonable.
Drives-wise, they’re all SSDs. So more energy-efficient by a long shot, which is nice.