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I think that is an understatement...
Depends, for a few streams a 1700 could be not enough, NZB PAR2 is also very CPU heavy, as is generally usenet downloading.
Primary box, Does get 30-40% load on a few (less than 5) primarily 1080p -> 720p encodes.
Not sure for plex, but in some other systems speed can be useful as well - no reason to do live encoding, just run it at start, stream the first HSL segment and continue encoding + store on temp dir.
Family of 6, who like to use Plex plus a number of remote users so need the CPU for transcoding
It's been fun learning and building this setup, it's super reliable and even when handbrake is running we can have 4 or 5 streams running.
I am always used to very-very low specs, all my boxes are low end, either very old, very underpowered (heck, I do KVM in bobcat and even did ovz in via c7...) so seeing things like those which probably use a lot of power and/or are noisy, put me in a strange state of disbelief.
Yeah, DIY forever, as long as it is in the realm of the possible and does not require (at least at my initial guestimate which is almost always very optimistic) more than 24 hours of continuous work.
It's not that noisy to be honest, It's got some decent Corsair fans and is in a Cooler Master Silencio case, the Ryzen fan is also pretty silent unless handbrake is working on a 1080 file but even then it's not loud (you can hear a purring noise if the TV isn't on).
Power consumption isn't too bad, according to my smart meter it's less than £5 / $6.50 a month
When you think this replaced a full Sky TV package which without discounts is £75 / $98 along with Amazon Prime and Netflix it's a cost I'm happy to absorb to save over $100 per month 
I use an A8- 7600, running Proxmox and a slightly messed about with OMV install at the moment (Mostly to get it to mount a BTRFS array built by rockstor) 16GB DDR3 ECC unbuffered although pretty sure the board/cpu doesn't make use of the ECC.
Machine was running a c2750 until it died (hence the ECC) was going to go Ryzen but I couldn't find an ITX Ryzen board at the time and I wanted to get it going again.
Machine idles around 25-30% CPU load but that's because one of the VM's is processing video from the CCTV cameras.
Guys, but You are aware that you don't have to build freenas machine with 2x e5 2695 v4 but you can use boards with Intel Atom/Avaton that are used in synology for example. With that, You can achieve the same level of power consumption or even experience with xpenology.
Wouldn't xpenology technically be violating some copyright?
Wonder if the high availability stuff would work on it? Anyone tested it? Stable?
Perhaps, but the people dont use them only for storage...
I'd say forget both synology stuff and core i-whatever. Unless you have very(!) high load on thst box - and I mean really high load - even the intel D (as much as I like it) is total overkill. A 4 core intel N or J will do perfectly fine and eat less than 10W.
In case of a higher load you might want to consider a 4 core intel D. Also note that for high load file servers and the like RAM is quite important. All the processors I mentioned (well, at least the current versions) come with aes-ni which is helpful for those who like to encrypt their stuff.
For home or smo I'd simply use a standard case with lots of drive cages, for a rack I'd probably go with a supermicro barebone (spec as above).
Hint: If you have a home/smo server using less than 100W you might want to stay away from normal power supplies and rather prefer something like a pico psu. Gives you no less theoretical efficiency than 80+ gold and much better real practical efficiency.
I did consider that, but unfortunately they are too expensive and wasnt able to get something dirt cheap SH.
Look for Chieftain (iirc). They have basically the same but much cheaper. I just said pico because they are the best known, so people have an idea what I'm talking about.
My choice was HP Microserver - it was way cheaper (got it on $100 sale by HP) 4 hdd`s in tray and you can add like 4 more. Silent, low power consumption and still it is HP
add IPMI board and you can manage it from a remote location.
So you mean Your server is shit ?
It does. The A8 Kaveri APUs support Unbuffered ECC, if your BIOS has support for it.
They are available now, along with AM4 APUs based on non-Zen priced much cheaper but allowing a nice upgrade path
They are nice but the older ones (AMD) are rather slow (they however support Reg. ECC and not just unbuffered) and the E3 ones are not cheap
@William oh nice if it is using the ECC, it's a asrock a88m-itx/ac although I pulled the WLAN card as I wasn't using it.
It was essentially a case of what do amazon have instock (Had it delivered to one of their lockers), to be honest unless I add more CCTV/IP cameras to it I'll probably not bother upgrading it for now as it's rarely being taxed beyond 25/30%. I tend not to run most stuff from here anyway, it's just my NAS and local video processing for the IP cameras.
I have fireTV's connected to the TV's here anyway so most media can direct play - I might need to upgrade the older one at some point to get a hardware HVEC decoder but it's not been a problem yet.
Chieftec, yes, I found
DIY is always better and cheaper.
By speed, yea, but we should note some caveats:
And last:
Very limited PCIe lanes - 10G on a J1-2/N3 CPU is impossible outside of special configurations (switched PCIe with x4 upstream port and all going there), as you only get 4 2.0 lanes (~10G) but every board has a GB NIC at x1, this leaves a single x1 slot on mini-ITX and options for 2 M.2 E-key or mini PCIe wifi slots, or 3 PCIe x1 slots on micro ATX (sometimes only 2 and wifi slot).
Apollo Lake (N4xxx, J3xxx) fixed this by providing 6 lanes, albeit again only at 2.0 speeds.
(If anyone wonders where sound is uplinked - the SoC in this case, usually the chipset, provides a HDA interface that is bound to a Realtek DAC (and DDC); very rarely vendors implement sound via USB also)
Oh, come on, not everyone needs a SAN here, a reliable and economic storage is something that most people want for home.
Of course, enterprise grade is needed for serious needs, we bought 1 mil one (catalog price, there were some discounts, though) and you cannot make your own something like that, but for home? As I said, mine uses 2 bobcat cores and also does KVM in 4 GB of ram. It is not underpowered for my needs, i usually mount encrypted containers from there over wi-fi, so, obviously, it can do that.
I do explicitly not count anything without ECC reliable enough to run anything storage related for a long term timeframe.
Aside of this (and possibly AES-NI as everything should be encrypted, always, but this is still possible without, just slower) I promote an informed decision: these things can work but some will be severely limiting at one point, even if that is years away, some you can work around but that might not be cost effective.
I raise you with: "and only mounted remotely so the traffic is just garbage even if not encrypted or sniffed/eavesdropped/cracked etc".
This obviously means that encryption is not done in the storage box.
Serving that over plaintext (AES-NI improves many things dramatically obviously) sounds... icky. Absolutely not my thing, you never know if the additional layer - at in reality low 'cost' - will be useful at one time. Obviously this has no direct implications on a loop mount and local encryption, but still.
(I am aware of the VPN option, but this is still client-server unencrypted at L2 level at last, using SSH is also again AES-NI capable as far as i am aware)
Ehm, if my house is breached, they can simply retrieve the containers directly from the source, however, even if they sniff/decrypt the traffic wont be able to get the key, because it never leaves the device which mounts the container over iSCSI (also encrypted). This is not to say you are completely safe if you mount the block device over clear channels, I raised your local encryption to remote encryption. iSCSI does some encryption, true.
Yes, as noted if the upload is limited or other factors are problematic then it can make sense and might do for a long time (= until it dies).
It died already twice, but everytime i was able to recover all data because i use a simple software raid, and then make some transplants of obviously used "organs" and "resuscitate" the "corpse".
yea but at some point this turns to "work" and not worth the time, i assume for everyone...
Sure. But you are too professional there. Let me tell you about my addressees: small office (incl. lawers) or private users whose backup consists of "backup? Sure! We have an external hard drive" and those who buy some [insert brand name] boxen based on who knows what.
Again: We're not talking DC or enterprise here. Let me tell you how I convinced my lawyer friend ("we have a usb drive and sometimes the secretary pulls backups from important stuff"):
A single box that does telephony, fax (important for lawyers), small office file server plus backup - all in one! the mainboard is a mutx with apollo lake, 2 * 2GB sodimm, dual 1 Gb eth, 2 x 4 TB firecuda, 2.5" in sw raid 1, all of it put into an old gutted case and powered through 12 V with > 90% efficiency (with a spare ac/dv to 12 V adapter). if 4 TB aren't fat enough some day there will either be cheap 8 or 10 TB drives or we'll simply use a dumb (non raid) 4x sata adapter.
The whole thing is silent and guzzles very little power while offering everything that guy needs.
Well it's all well and good to be discussing this from a consumer level. I'm still not sure if the Synology stuff is good enough for Enterprise use, and if a diy setup would be better or not.
AMD, the only competition, has ECC on all comparable CPUs and APUs. Even the crappy E-350 Mao has should support unbuffered. The Geode N36/N40L shit (AMDs Atom) does registered even.
ARM, overall, does have full ECC support but is not really used by vendors, sans socket nobody can really test this either.
I do not see ECC as optional in 2017, it is a proven technology even if your usage inside the box does not absolutely require it. Storage based on parity, the default these days with increased CPU performance, is insane without.
Further, from a commercial perspective: Registered ECC memory, both in DDR3 and DDR4, is cheaper than unbuffered and non-ECC.
An AM4 APU for the same price does 64GB. This is just another example how Intel rips you off, as the CPU does support 2 DIMMs per channel and you just get forced to buy another SKU if you want them.
Right, good point - not sure why i calculated with 1.1, probably because most used cards are 1.1 -.-
Regardless you do need an x4 slot anyway which is highly unlikely to be wired x3 (does not exist) or x2 (very, very rare) so 10G is still out of reach on most setups.
Sure, that works, but i do not see this as anything but consumer grade, will all the issues that this implies.
We have redundant routers, redundant uplinks and redundant systems in all office and flat locations, because I will not go that low and trust this hardware (or, in fact, ANY other SPOF) considering i value my income and system/data stability.
Most don't need that, i don't imply this either, as noted: i promote an informed decision with, mostly, unbiased informations. I don't claim to provide entirely unbiased information either, or that my views will not change.
Using a single atom box for all your corporate stuff, especially as notary or lawyer, is imo extremely dumb, but it is not my problem.