Should I build a NAS/DAS/Home Server?

[Judge Dredd]

Recently my parents have been frustrated with TV and streaming services. You've heard it before if you're internet savvy enough to be browsing KF. Less content, wokeshit, ads, all that stuff.

So I'm considering building a NAS, or a DAS, or a home server (I'm not sure of the finer details of each) to rip dvds to and stream throughout the house. I have two major requirements.

1. It has to sip power. I can eat a few up front costs if it keeps power consumption low.
2. It has to be easy to use. I can muddle through the set-up, but my parents are boomers so anything more difficult than Netflix or YouTube means they might not use it. I don't know if this will need extra hardware like a special set top box to use.

Everything else is nice to have, but not required. eg. I don't need to run virtual machines on it. I don't need to stream outside the house.


I do have an extra PC that I am/was planning to turn into a Windows XP retro gaming PC I can use if needed. Another option is buying a cheap used PC, buying a pre-built NAS, or even building something with new parts. I'm still new to this, and I'm not even sure if I should follow through with it.

 

[Had]

Sounds like you want a raspberry pi plex server
Plex should be able to run on your smart tv's, tablets and pc's so it's boomer proof.
ras pi's are basically just mobile phones with a linux desktop os so they sip power, you could use an older laptop to but it might not have usb.3 and other modern features.

pi + hard drive

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I would go for something like the ODROID-H3+ for better performance and no ARM nonsense. Plus RasPi prices were high last time I checked.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Stay away from the ARMs, horrible configuration options and you're usually stuck with USB drives, any cheap celeron/atom rated ITX board will be idle most of the time even if you have OpenVPN on it running and it torrenting the movies and shows in the background. On pretty much every consumer board you also get at least 4 SATA slots usually. If something can get along with only getting passively cooled, that is a hint that it sips power. Active cooling starts somewhere around 15W TDP. There's also tricks you can apply like setting a TDP target, which will slow down the computer to keep it in a temperature margin, also conserving power at the same time. How hard the slow down will be is architecture and usage dependant and hard to predict, and can range from unusable to not noticeable. If attempting undervolting to get even bigger savings, be aware that intel CPUs can't always easily be undervolted anymore as intel had to disable that functionality to plug a hardware exploit, or so they say. It's also always better to have a more powerful CPU be less utilized than have a less powerful CPU more consistently utilized, energy-efficiency wise.

In a very low-powered environment it is most likely that the mechanical harddrives will actually consume the most power when active, some of them easily can eat 5-10W by themselves. The smaller the harddrive (as in physical size, not capacity) the less power it usually consumes. Many harddrives can be tweaked with "noise profiles" to be slower and eat less power, but that's firmware dependent and general recommendations can't be made. A setup with flash store as cache for often used files and things pulled from the mechanicals on request is also possible, but it might not be worth it for such a scenario. Also look for "green" and slow drives, they usually also consume less power. Drive speed is not going to matter.

As a "boomer-proof" frontend for it all, I recommend Kodi, putting it on your parents devices and just have it access the server remotely.

As a good and efficient power supply, I'd recommend getting a genuine PicoPSU (DC-DC conversion is very efficent) and high quality 12V power supply. (that'll were your losses will be so I can't stress "high quality" enough) If money isn't an issue you might also shoot for a Platinum rated, passively cooled PC one. Remember that that machine will be in idle probably all the time. It might also be worth it to set up S3 on idle and wakeup via (W)LAN.

E: If it's worth it I can't tell you, I was playing with the thought of such a server too but then realized that my&my woman's desktop literally have terabytes of capacity, I already backup them up regularly and just arbitrarily adding another computer to the mix really doesn't solve anything. I think a central server just makes sense when you have enough users.

 

[Slav Power]

Sounds like you want a raspberry pi plex server
Plex should be able to run on your smart tv's, tablets and pc's so it's boomer proof.
ras pi's are basically just mobile phones with a linux desktop os so they sip power, you could use an older laptop to but it might not have usb.3 and other modern features.
View attachment 3835797
pi + hard drive

1) Raspberry are fags who said whoever supports Gamergate should stop buying their products (they're br*tish)
2) Plex is a fucking shit closed source service that paywalls functionality, use Jellyfin: https://jellyfin.org

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

Get a real PC case that is designed for bulk storage and get a cheap motherboard and cpu for it. Aim for 16gb-32gb ram, use either Unraid, FreeNAS or whatever the successor project is called, Mediavault, or Proxmox as the OS. Have them interact with the media via Kodi/Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, really its up to you, its all the same shit with a different skin. I'm assuming you want to pirate media and boomer proof the process, something that will be a bit difficult, if not downright impossible. Using Sonarr and Radarr to handle TV Shows and Movies isn't the hard part, its the torrenting or usenet failures when it downloads a movie that is split up in .rar files or the usenet stuff par2 doesn't assemble right, a tech savvy person can handle this hangup immediately, but the boomer will encounter a slight hiccup and immediately ragequit and refuse to learn. If you intend to handle the addition of movies and shows for them I recommend Nzb360 for Android phones, its an excellent little application and definitely worth the few bucks to purchase the full license.

 

[Kosher Dill]

getting a genuine PicoPSU

Can you provide some links? Last time I was looking into this everything I found seemed to be sketchy and/or Chinese knockoffs.

 

[Stasi]

Have a look at those tiny office PCs, they are a much better option than something like an SBC in my opinion and are easily found second hand. I have a Lenovo Thinkcentre with a Pentium N3700 which has a 6W TDP so consumes almost nothing and is plenty powerful.


Personally I went for super lazy approach: got a 2tb hard drive for the tiny PC and set up Jellyfin on it, no server shit or any of that, just set up Jellyfin in windows. I can connect to it through a web browser on any device on my network and the Jellyfin UI is decent and normie friendly


You can get 5tb+ HDDs now and one of those will have more movies and shows on it than you will ever have time to watch, don't waste money on some server set up with multiple drives unless you need it. I filled up my 2tb drive and honestly 50% of it is shit that I will never get around to watching.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Can you provide some links? Last time I was looking into this everything I found seemed to be sketchy and/or Chinese knockoffs.

mini-box.com, the guys who make it. They also have a list of resellers globally on their website. The problem with other sellers is the seller can just have genuine pictures of the PicoPSU up and you get something entirely different. In general, if the price is too good to be true, it probably isn't genuine. They're expensive.

There's two types of the PicoPSU, the normal one that only takes +12V (and passes them through to the system, and as modern computers pretty much do point-of-load regulation and don't really use the other voltages much, this type basically doesn't do much and the upstream +12V brick does all the work) and the "wide-range" one that actually converts the input voltage to +12V. They have very minimal loss but with enough load they can get hot and will need active cooling. People shitting on them and saying they did literally nothing and they blew up did ignore this little fact.

Spoiler: retrocomputer sperging

For retro computers, these things are an amazing and incredibly clean and small source of power. Once a poorly rated tantalum capacitor in a 286 of mine shorted out and the pico-psu sensed it and went into protection mode so fast that it didn't even have time to blow up or burn. Be aware though that since old systems basically don't use the +12V rail except for audio and serial port stuff, there's a lot of conversion happening on that small board and it will get warm and might even have to be cooled. A good rule of thumb is, if the system you power with it hasn't got a CPU that needs to be cooled, you can probably get away with the PicoPSU not being cooled either, within reason. I removed the ATX connector from one of mine and wired it directly into an A600. Pure Magic. Didn't think this would ever be possible.

@Stasi gave some good advice. Really think if a server is necessary.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I overwhelmingly use pirate streaming instead of storing anything, but I find the Kodi addons of the week to be inferior to using websites like FMovies directly in a web browser. If there was an interface that integrated those sites well and blocked the ads, as well as all the usual features for a few locally stored videos, radio stream URLs, etc. then I would try it.

If you're going to store terabytes o shit, it ought to be obscure movies and TV shows from private trackers.

 

[Catgirl Enthusiast]

What you are looking for is a media server. Youtube that and you will get a few million results. You will need a viewing device or an external device that can connect to a media server. Roku can do that. I have a old ass tv that can't but my 4k uhd super special disk player box can so I can do it through that. You're looking at 25-50 watts to run a media server. That's about what a tv consumes now. When I was a kid that was a quarter to half of what a single lightbulb would use.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I'm assuming you want to pirate media and boomer proof the process, something that will be a bit difficult, if not downright impossible.

If you're going to store terabytes o shit, it ought to be obscure movies and TV shows from private trackers.

You can get 5tb+ HDDs now and one of those will have more movies and shows on it than you will ever have time to watch, don't waste money on some server set up with multiple drives unless you need it

I don't know if this counts as powerleveling, but this is the situation more in depth.

My parents are old and don't go out much. There's two main rooms TV is watched, the living room and the bed room. They have a big DVD/BluRay collection, and there's more we can borrow from family; but they rarely watch DVDs due to having to constantly change discs or being films they've seen a hundred times.

My plan was to start ripping DVDs and compressing to whatever file type makes sense. Starting with favorites and then gradually progressing through the collection. Most modern films and shows are crap anyway, so I'd mostly be buying older films and shows for cheap from Ebay or CEX.

The only real exceptions I can think of are light entertainment shows that don't get DVD releases like quiz shows and house moving programs. I don't know if EZTV or equivalent is still around as I've not used it for a decade. I wouldn't need to boomer proof this part as it's something I'd handle.

While I can put some of the content I like on there (there's no reason not to) they aren't into cult films and old anime. They're fairly normie in their tastes. Ghost hunting shows, quiz shows (my dad seems to like The Chaser), house moving shows, cop shows, etc.

Really think if a server is necessary.

Going for a stand alone device is tempting. At very least it could make a good test case and could expand it to a home server later. It's only "necessary" in that it could serve multiple rooms, and I could tinker with it away from prying eyes. But those are all optional, nice-to-have things.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

My plan was to start ripping DVDs and compressing to whatever file type makes sense. Starting with favorites and then gradually progressing through the collection. Most modern films and shows are crap anyway, so I'd mostly be buying older films and shows for cheap from Ebay or CEX.

The only real exceptions I can think of are light entertainment shows that don't get DVD releases like quiz shows and house moving programs. I don't know if EZTV or equivalent is still around as I've not used it for a decade. I wouldn't need to boomer proof this part as it's something I'd handle.

Man that's retarded, just torrent everything bro. If you're doing it for old people that counts as ethically-deductable if that's an issue.

Someone already recommended the Arr suite (Sonarr for TV shows etc) which is meant as a networkable tool for automating downloads with a neat episode calendar and everything. You can remote interface in for additions and maintenance, and while it's not perfect out of the box does have the aforementioned issues with being too greedy with bad releases/broken downloads from time to time and can get sometimes tripped up by schedule changes, there's online resources of rules you can add to improve behaviour (like avoiding problematic releases/uploaders or setting delays) and automatically upgrade downloads to an extent. The docs also kinda suck but it's still much easier than manual management.

 

[Mister Uno]

I will say I own my own little NAS server using a Pi, but as stated earlier in the thread. You limit yourself, video performance is dogshit, and they're currently expensive.

Find an office PC like a Dell or Thinkcentre with a decent modern-ish processor, most have solid video performance for basic streaming. You can get a budget video card if ya like to but it maybe unneeded, unless they want high definition on a big ass TV. I would slap Ubuntu or Debian on it, and download Jellyfin and whatever torrent client you want. Others in this site have said Jellyfin is a solid or better alternative to Plex, but I personally don't know. If ya want to go the extra mile, install OMV (OpenMediaVault) on Debian without a GUI (or with but it will consume more resources) then Docker/Portainer, and create a Jellyfin and qBittorrentWebUI container. OMV has a optional add-on that installs OpenVPN for you, but that requires setup. This option is a lot of setup really, but takes considerably less resources and once set up is very convenient. You would be able to download torrents from anywhere in your home network as well as storage for those files.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that using a HDD drive should be fine over an SSD unless you have a lot of people streaming at once. Correct me if wrong please.

 

[Stasi]

Going for a stand alone device is tempting. At very least it could make a good test case and could expand it to a home server later. It's only "necessary" in that it could serve multiple rooms, and I could tinker with it away from prying eyes. But those are all optional, nice-to-have things.

I think a standalone device would work for that. With my setup like I mentioned, anything on the home network can connect to it in any room. Just add a shortcut on the browser and then one click and you are in the Jellyfish UI. I can also remote desktop from another pc to mess with it if needed so I'm not plugging it into a monitor all the time (it currently sits under my TV stand and isn't plugged into anything other than the router) guess you can set up something like TeamViewer on it so you can do so over the internet from somewhere else too. Expansion option is always there, the thing has plenty of ports to add external drives.

As others have mentioned, depending on your internet speed, torrent stuff before ripping manually. A torrent will be pre labelled, split into folders etc. Which will make it easy for software like Jellyfish to set it up properly. Doing it manually you will need to rip, label individual episodes, split them into folders and all that jazz which will be a huge pain in the ass. Only do it for obscure stuff you can't get online.

 

[I (Don't) Have A Gun]

Personally I went for super lazy approach: got a 2tb hard drive for the tiny PC and set up Jellyfin on it, no server shit or any of that, just set up Jellyfin in windows.

I was planning on doing something similar. My current PC is several years old so when I finally get around to updating it it will have to be a full refresh, so might as well take my current box shove it full of hard drives and turn it into a media server.
Might be a bit of a waste of space and power though... Might just get a cheap laptop and have a couple of external hard drives hooked up to it.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Man that's retarded, just torrent everything bro. If you're doing it for old people that counts as ethically-deductable if that's an issue.

As others have mentioned, depending on your internet speed, torrent stuff before ripping manually.

I'll have to look into that then. I was going to go down the DVD rout simply for convivence. In the past (and even today) I struggle to find nostalgic favourites, or older shows in general. I remember EZTV back in the day wasn't good for any shows that weren't currently airing.

I doubt I'll find, let's say, early seasons of Law and Order or Stargate SG1 from the 90s.

The same goes for films. I assumed anything more than 5 years old will basically be dead when it comes to torrents, but can be found very cheap on DVD. eg. London has Fallen can be bought for less than £3 brand new. I figured I could spend about the same as any streaming subscription on mostly second hand films and shows, and possibly sell them on when I'm done ripping them.

Maybe things have changed in the decade I've been out of torrenting TV shows.

 

[Stasi]

I doubt I'll find, let's say, early seasons of Law and Order or Stargate SG1 from the 90s.

Try this guy, has loads of uploads of older shows and decent seeder count (you might need to open the link in a tor window if your ISP blocks it), 1337x is where I got most of my stuff and very rarely had cases where I couldn't find something I wanted, though YMMV.

https://www.1337xx.to/user/g01ngf0rward/

If it spazzez out google 1337x proxy, they keep having to change it.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

I remember EZTV back in the day wasn't good for any shows that weren't currently airing.

I doubt I'll find, let's say, early seasons of Law and Order or Stargate SG1 from the 90s.

The same goes for films. I assumed anything more than 5 years old will basically be dead when it comes to torrents

Yeah that used to be true for sure. Not so much any now though, maybe partly thanks to the kinds of better tools we're talking about and cheaper storage leading to more people seeding media archives, I guess. I went on a big hunt for some obscure-ass italian films from the 60s etc recently and between the new sites and some googlefu it turns out you can eventually find anything, let alone popular junk like stargate. Meanwhile even finding kurosawa films used to be iffy.
In extreme cases you might have to wait a day or two for a seeder to show up, but that's not a big deal if you're setting up a media box and are getting lots of stuff in parallel.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

2) Plex is a fucking shit closed source service that paywalls functionality, use Jellyfin: https://jellyfin.org

you cant use plex locally if your internet goes down. and they keep pushing their own stupid streaming shit and fucked up library organization with their own stupid shit.

reencode your media for playback on android devices so you dont waste watts on transcodes.

I'll have to look into that then. I was going to go down the DVD rout simply for convivence. In the past (and even today) I struggle to find nostalgic favourites, or older shows in general. I remember EZTV back in the day wasn't good for any shows that weren't currently airing.

I doubt I'll find, let's say, early seasons of Law and Order or Stargate SG1 from the 90s.

The same goes for films. I assumed anything more than 5 years old will basically be dead when it comes to torrents, but can be found very cheap on DVD. eg. London has Fallen can be bought for less than £3 brand new. I figured I could spend about the same as any streaming subscription on mostly second hand films and shows, and possibly sell them on when I'm done ripping them.

Maybe things have changed in the decade I've been out of torrenting TV shows.

you can still find all complete series torrents on pirate bay if you're fine with 480p resolution.