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now that i have a bad ass htpc on the way im getting ready to build a storage server to match. last time i built a PC from scratch the P3 was the baddest bitch on the block so to say ive been out of it a while.....
i want this to encode dvd and bluray rips so im thinking a 64 bit server or workstation level chip. i remember quad cores being big, but i don't know where they are now and apparently clock speed isn't the only way to tell how much number crunching capabilities the chip has anymore. what am i looking for in chips and motherboard combinations? i know i want dual 1gig ethernet ports, usb3, and minimum of 3 pci enhanced slots for the drive controllers im using. its a server so onboard video is fine, my monitor is DVI so that has to be taken into account.
im looking at 8 gigs of ram and a 40 gig ssd main drive.
my sister and i are building the case from scratch out of acrylic so that won't be a problem, im mainly having trouble picking a motherboard and chip, anyone have a suggestions. i want a real movie encoding powerhouse here.
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high quality mkv i would imagine. i use handbrake for everything and thats what it supports.
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Big ass-rig = big-ass power bill if you're going to keep it on 24/7. Likely case once you get more things attached / depending on it.
Moral of sentence #1 is that an i3 or i5 or XXX whatever lower-power server will do you better in the long run. The i7 rigs and such are very fast, etc but suck up a lot of power + heat to deal with if you want it on all the time.
With tools like Handbrake too for instance you can queue up as many movies as you want to transcode and let it do its things overnight...
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ok, so if i go with a low power chip, say an i5, what am i looking for with motherboards. can you suggest a few?
also, with these multi-core chips, mhz is less relevant apparently than it was in the past, how do you compare the power of one chip to another?
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You won't really need the integrated gpu from the cpu, as this will be mainly a server. Z68,P67,Q67 chipsets are for power horses. H67 is for general/HTPC use. I'd say go with an H61 chipset board and an i3 cpu (even i5 is an overkill). This will be give you a low power consumption system and 6 sata (2 of them sata3) + 4 pci + 2 usb3 ports on board. Look at the microATX Intel boards.
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The new Sandybridge chips have Intels QuickSync technology which offer the best performance for encoding video. Buy the cheapest chip you can find with Quicksync if your primary objective is video encoding.
Quicksync operates independantly from the CPU core itself so performance on the "slower" CPU is the same as the "faster" CPU's.
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ok, let me throw this one out there. im adding to this server 20 2tb hard drives in a software raid (probably 6), with the case we are building capable of adding 20 more when then first array fills up. im using pretty much the same HD setup as the BlazePods from backblaze. does the added overhead of the parity calculations for the raid array change the opinion that an i3 is good enough?
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If you're going quite hardcore - I'd call 20 x 2TB drives hardcore - go with something a little more sophisticated than raid6.
Look into a FreeBSD build using ZFS - multiple zpools spread amongst the drives.
I'm also assuming you're going to be using some form of SAS expander otherwise you wouldn't be mentioning the addition of 20-40 HDD's in a system?
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oh im beginning to see what you guys are saying, the GPU itself is used for encoding. does an app like Handbrake utilize that functionality of the GPU?
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The big draw for ZFS is the built-in data integrity mechanisms...moreso than ext4.
As far as OS support besides the Solaris variants the only other real option are FreeBSD or FreeNAS which is built off FreeBSD.
For Linux there is one very active zfsonlinux.org project, but its still under heavy development. btrfs will also be very zfs-like once its done, but most of those advanced features aren't currently working - in heavy development as well.
There's a large FreeBSD community and lots of good online and offline reference material - I'm dabbling with that at the moment.
