I know this isn’t build a pc, but everything over there is so gaming oriented I thought I might get better advice here.

I’m a noob that wants a home media server for sharing photos of my kids with my family (across the country), video library sharing to some family members, and streaming my music collection to my phone (and maybe my dad’s).

But I’m considering ripping my father in laws extensive bluray collection (well seeing it up so he can rip them into my library) so I reckon a full tower is required for HDDs.

I’m imagining unraid, with a big pile of used drives. What I like about that approach is that I can economically add storage as the video library grows as I/we rip. Or are used HDDs a false economy.

I think the only processing intensive thing in the use case list is ripping and video library sharing. I have no concept of what sort of processing is required. Should I get a graphics card?

There’s a Lenovo TS-140 (E3-1226 V3) available available used for $80 Canadian. Is that a good place to start?

I

  • @rambos@lemm.eeEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    Id say rip blurays on your main PC/laptop and build low power device for server.

    Streaming musing and sharing photos is not intensive task, but streaming 4k video is another storry. Unless you need 4k streaming you should be fine with almost any intel cpu that supports quicksync and with no gpu afaik. I googled that Lenovo and it seems like it has Xeon E3-1226 v3 which does support quick sync, so I bet it will run just fine. My celeron g3930 can transcode 1080p

    • @cron@feddit.deEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      Streaming 4k content is not a problem, transcoding on the fly to lower resolutions is hard and requires good capacity planning.