Question about AVS-10/4X

I am looking for a server to host media content on my home network. I need a decent amount of storage, and in that area the AVS-10/4X seems to do great.

I have a few questions though:

[*]How well will the drives that Lime sells work for streaming video?

[*]Should I instead look at getting 7200 RPM drives? Something like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145912

[*]I can put 10 x 3.5" SATA hard drives in it correct?

[*]Does this boot off a thumb drive? Or can I add a small-ish SSD to act as the OS?

Thanks in advance!

I am looking for a server to host media content on my home network. I need a decent amount of storage, and in that area the AVS-10/4X seems to do great.

I have a few questions though:

[*]How well will the drives that Lime sells work for streaming video?

[*]Should I instead look at getting 7200 RPM drives? Something like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145912

[*]I can put 10 x 3.5" SATA hard drives in it correct?

[*]Does this boot off a thumb drive? Or can I add a small-ish SSD to act as the OS?

 

Thanks in advance!

1. The drives they sell will work just fine for streaming video

2. Not necessary to use 7200RPM drives.

3. Yes

4. Yes, it boots off a thumb drive.  No you can not install to an SSD.

Awesome! Thanks for the quick reply. I am glad to hear the drives will work for video streaming. Just to be sure, I shouldn't have any problems running 15-20 video streams concurrently? I am planning on buying the server along with 10 hard drives, for a total of 36 TB usable I believe ( 9x4TB + 1 Parity drive) Would it be beneficial to upgrade the memory on the server as well?

Awesome! Thanks for the quick reply. I am glad to hear the drives will work for video streaming. Just to be sure, I shouldn't have any problems running 15-20 video streams concurrently? I am planning on buying the server along with 10 hard drives, for a total of 36 TB usable I believe ( 9x4TB + 1 Parity drive) Would it be beneficial to upgrade the memory on the server as well?

15-20 might be a little much, especially if all those stream are coming off the same hard drive.  Are these compress rips, tv shows, music, etc ?

If they are bluray I think the limit was something like 4 streams from one drive and then stuff started to buffer and lag.

At 20 streams your 1GB NIC will likely hits it throughput limit also.

Going to need a little more info on what you are trying to do.

20 streams of small music files should not be a problem, larger and higher bitrate stuff might/probably will be.

This server is going to be hosting mainly TV shows/movies.  A different PC will be accessing the share and streaming the content via Plex. The highest quality video that will be streamed is DVD quality. Currently I may be streaming to 5 - 8 people simultaneously. Mainly I just want to be sure that this will be able to stream to more than 1 or 2 people at a time. Is it worth it to upgrade the server to 32Gb of RAM?

This server is going to be hosting mainly TV shows/movies.  A different PC will be accessing the share and streaming the content via Plex. The highest quality video that will be streamed is DVD quality. Currently I may be streaming to 5 - 8 people simultaneously. Mainly I just want to be sure that this will be able to stream to more than 1 or 2 people at a time. Is it worth it to upgrade the server to 32Gb of RAM?

I think it is but I have always been a fan of throwing as much RAM at a machine as you can afford.

The current build I run has 12GB but the new one I am build is maxed out at 32GB.  The more RAM the better!!

A bit of counterpoint on the RAM question => with a board that uses unbuffered RAM, the memory will be more reliable if you limit yourself to 2 installed modules.    So I'd go with a pair of 8GB modules -- total of 16GB.    More is not always better when you're loading down the memory address and data buses 

As for 7200rpm drives => I agree these are not needed with UnRAID in MOST scenarios;  but if you're serious about 15-20 simultaneous streams, you may want to consider them.  As prostuff noted, that's a lot of streams ... I've tested my system with 8 simultaneous streams with no issues; but haven't tried that many (don't have enough clients to hit those kind of numbers).    But one thing is absolute:  the max number of streams/disk that you can support will be higher with 7200rpm drives than with slower drives.    Personally I think it will be plenty higher with the slower drives, but if you want to absolutely maximize the potential, the 7200rpm units will do that.

Thank you for the advice. I am planning to buy everything through lime. So it will be 32GB ECC DRAM. Eight streams simultaneously with no problems is good enough for what I need for now. Going up to 15 streams simultaneously would probably, in all honesty, require me to change my network configuration and get a bigger internet connection. So based off what I have learned here, I think I will probably move forward with the AVS-10/4X with the RAM upgrade and 10x of the recommended hard drives.  That way everything will be set up, and thoroughly tested prior to install.

If you're streaming to 15-20 users using Plex, you'll need a HUGE CPU, especially if you're transcoding.  Plex needs a single core with a Passmark of 2000 per transcoded 1080p stream to run properly.

Are there any updated internal photos of the server?

In particular if the current motherboard being used is the SuperMicro X10SL7, I would like to see how the drives are connected - which ones are connected to the SATA3, SATA2 and SAS connectors.

Are there any updated internal photos of the server?

 

In particular if the current motherboard being used is the SuperMicro X10SL7, I would like to see how the drives are connected - which ones are connected to the SATA3, SATA2 and SAS connectors.

The X10SL7 has 14 SATA ports:

2 x SATA3 and

4 x SATA2 provided by chipset

8 x SAS provided by onboard LSI chip (compatible with SATA2/3 devices)

The two SATA3 ports are connected to the far left 3.5" slot and the far right 3.5" slot.

The four SATA2 ports are connected to next 4 3.5" slots from the left.

One set of four SAS ports is connected to the four 2.5" slots.

Other set of four SAS ports is connected to remaining four 3.5" slots on right.

There's a diagram of all this somewhere which I can't find at the moment 

It was set up this way thinking P drive would be on far left, Q drive on far right, and SSD's installed in 4x 2.5" slots.

Unfortunately AVS-10/4 is sold out with reorder lead time of about 6 weeks.

Are there any updated internal photos of the server?

 

In particular if the current motherboard being used is the SuperMicro X10SL7, I would like to see how the drives are connected - which ones are connected to the SATA3, SATA2 and SAS connectors.

 

The X10SL7 has 14 SATA ports:

2 x SATA3 and

4 x SATA2 provided by chipset

8 x SAS provided by onboard LSI chip (compatible with SATA2/3 devices)

 

The two SATA3 ports are connected to the far left 3.5" slot and the far right 3.5" slot.

The four SATA2 ports are connected to next 4 3.5" slots from the left.

One set of four SAS ports is connected to the four 2.5" slots.

Other set of four SAS ports is connected to remaining four 3.5" slots on right.

 

There's a diagram of all this somewhere which I can't find at the moment 

 

It was set up this way thinking P drive would be on far left, Q drive on far right, and SSD's installed in 4x 2.5" slots.

 

Unfortunately AVS-10/4 is sold out with reorder lead time of about 6 weeks.

So the P drive is the parity drive in the far left and the Q drive is the cache drive or the first data drive in the far right? Then the 2.5 SSDs are used for the cache/app drives?

I currently own the LimeTech D-316 case, which is a very nice case. I am looking at replacing my currently motherboard with the X10SL7, due to some intermittent issues that I am seeing. So I was looking at this board and wanted to understand the connections.

@Cstolworthy,

I would get as much memory as you can get in it if you want to do ~20 streams.  Plex caches the stream as it transcodes the video on whatever media you designate I believe.  It does not delete the temporary transcoded copy until the player finishes playing the video.  Even in direct stream, if it transcodes the audio, which happens a lot, it also keeps the video.  If you have a lot of streams going, you could get disk thrashing as it writes and reads to you temporary disk.  I would expect that SSDs might help.  You might have to keep them out side the array and stripe them in a Raid 0 config.

If you can set the temp directory to RAM, it should alleviate some of the issues.  The only issues is you could run out of ram.

If you are really serious about this many streams, you may have to separate the functions.  You could start off with the 10/4 doing both functions.  If that caps out, get a dedicated system just to do the plex transcoding. 

Just out of curiosity, assuming that most of these streams are not for local consumption, do you have enough uplink capacity to support that many streams.

So the P drive is the parity drive in the far left and the Q drive is the cache drive or the first data drive in the far right? Then the 2.5 SSDs are used for the cache/app drives?

Well it was designed so that P (parity) drive would be far left 3.5" HDD attached to a SATA3 port, and a Q (second parity) drive would be in far right also attached to SATA3 port.  The other 3.5" HDD slots would be for 8 data disks.  The set of 4 2.5" slots would be for a 4-device SSD cache pool.

Why put P on far left and Q on far right?  Mainly just to get them into different cages with separate fans.

What is this P and Q I'm talking about?  It's raid-6 style dual-parity, which is currently in development, but was thought about when we designed the AVS-10/4 

Honestly though, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever if your device is attached to SATA2 or SATA3 or SAS, though perhaps with very fast SSD you might benefit from putting that on fastest port(s), which would be SAS probably.

... What is this P and Q I'm talking about?  It's raid-6 style dual-parity, which is currently in development, but was thought about when we designed the AVS-10/4 

Nice to know both that it's in development and that you've already planned on it for the 10/4.

Honestly though, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever if your device is attached to SATA2 or SATA3 or SAS, though perhaps with very fast SSD you might benefit from putting that on fastest port(s), which would be SAS probably.

Agree that for spinners which port they're connected to makes no difference.    But almost any SSD will notably outperform SATA-2 data rates, so they should be attached to either the SATA-3 or a SAS port.    The way you've got the 10/4 configured works fine with this, since the 2.5" slots are connected through the SAS ports.

So the P drive is the parity drive in the far left and the Q drive is the cache drive or the first data drive in the far right? Then the 2.5 SSDs are used for the cache/app drives?

Well it was designed so that P (parity) drive would be far left 3.5" HDD attached to a SATA3 port, and a Q (second parity) drive would be in far right also attached to SATA3 port.  The other 3.5" HDD slots would be for 8 data disks.  The set of 4 2.5" slots would be for a 4-device SSD cache pool.

 

Why put P on far left and Q on far right?  Mainly just to get them into different cages with separate fans.

 

What is this P and Q I'm talking about?  It's raid-6 style dual-parity, which is currently in development, but was thought about when we designed the AVS-10/4 

 

Honestly though, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever if your device is attached to SATA2 or SATA3 or SAS, though perhaps with very fast SSD you might benefit from putting that on fastest port(s), which would be SAS probably.

So with P on the far left as parity drive (sdb), then until Q is implemented then does that become data drive 1 (sdc), or does it really matter?

I will be making modifications in a few weeks to my system, I have my new X10SL7 motherboard. I also have a SAS expander so I may port SAS 0-3 from the motherboard to the expander using a reverse breakout cable that I have. Then run the SSDs off of the last 4 SAS ports 4-7. My preference to is run most of the data drives off of the SAS controller.

"Q" is named "Parity 2" and shows up in the list of devices on Main right after Parity.  Might change this later but that's how things are arranged now.