3:33 Ryan is holding a lvl1 mug 3:36 Ryan is holding the glass with m&ms You thought we would not notice but we did!

A home server really is a gateway drug. It makes you crave terabytes that you don't need.

I always talk to girls about servers while holding a glass of smarties/skittles cause I'm sophisticated. Sadly most times they run away.

i just want to say the comedy in this video is top notch and deserves more credit. the scene where Krista is slowly bringing the server up the stairs is hilarious.

That shot on the stairs probably took so many tries but it was hilarious.

PLEASE PLEASE keep going on this subject. I love you guys so much

"getting server from the basement" oh yea, there's nothing like hauling 2x 3u rack servers with 47 HDD in it, up a narrow staircase xD

I hate when I go to legally rip some media and accidentally drop a torrent file on my seedbox. It makes me sad for days.

best computer based youtube channel hands down.

Ayyy the House thing was why I said I was making these videos! lol

For anyone following along at home. This would work and almost certainly be fine. However, some raid controllers can present the disks to the system normally while others have to go through what was shown here by creating individual raid 0 volumes per drive. If you have to go the create individual volumes route then things wont be perfect but they will work. You want a controller that can present the disks normally (ie the controller is a HBA). The down sides to the raid 0 version is you may not be able to turn off any 'intelligent' operation that the raid card wants to do. So you might have unexpected performance for certain workloads (not really a concern for a media server) and you may not be able to access smart data (that's a little concerning). Also ZFS wont have full transparent access to the disks which is how zfs was built to operate. There should not be a raid controller between OS and disks.

Ah yes.. just want to watch some old movies and what not. What's that? You have a dual Zeon setup with 72GB of ram... perfect that will just meet my hardware requirements... As a plus now there is no need to worry about the heat in the winter.

Step 1: have a server

Lugging the server up the stairs was hilarious! Well done video. Please PLEASE make more content like this.

That comedic introduction actually had me watching how easy it is to set up a media server. Thanks! Now to get away from my PC once in a while to actually create a need for such a server.

I like how you guys filmed this. I remember pulling those old HPs out of our datacenter years ago. Nice little work horses.

I was dying when you guys were deadpan chatting while she struggled up the stairs with the device. XD

Nice video. My first media server was an old Dell server hooked up to an old Equallogic SAN. The server was not super loud but the Equallogic only had one fan speed. I'm done with most server level hardware on my home server. I took the RAID controller out of the server and put it in my old AMD 8320 gaming rig. I replaced the GPU with a $30 passively cooled model. Right now it has 9 500GB laptop hard drives 8 for media storage and 1 for the OS. I got the hard drives for free from work. Just said all that to say you don't need an actual server to do this. It can be done with regular desktop hardware. With desktop hardware my idle power draw is around 40-50W.

I wonder why Krista was so against going to the basement. Is it possible something worse than the Boiler Snake exists down there?

Great video thanks for making this walkthrough! I am currently looking into building one myself so this will definitely help soon!

I'm 100% excited about this series

This video is amazing. I've been subbed since day 1 and this is my favorite thing so far.

I've had a Dell server sitting around for awhile I've been meaning to do this to, Thanks for the tips!

I am sooo smart, I am going to stop paying $15 per month for a media service and now I'm going to host it myself and pay $25 per month in electricity to do so. Yay! Thank goodness modern day (Q2 2020) hardware is so much more power efficient.

Thanks for making this video. I plan on setting up a media server soon

NIce, been using FreeNas for a while. Started knowing NOTHING... got 5 random 160gb disks. Put random stuff on em. Randomly unplugged them. (tried to break stuff). uninstalled and reinstalled Freenas on a new PC, connected the same drives. Added the ZFS disks... Boom all data still there. SOLD. Never looked back..... Only issue now is, some updates sometimes dont work for me, so i just leave it at version 9. Thanks for doing the video, but I think a dumpster dive of an old pentium or other standard RANDOM hacked together hardware would have better shown the awesomeness of building a nas. You guys are awesome, keep up the good works.

I ran one of these blade servers in my house. It was really impractical IMO TBH. It was extremely loud and wicked expensive to run with the little use that it received. Better off going with a low powered Desktop CPU with a very quiet blower. Or like they mentioned a few single board computers. Each with dedicated purpose. One for a NAS, one for streaming Media, and so on. Don't forget there are other SBC aside from the Raspberry pi that you can pick from, and are much more powerful. Like the Odroid XU4, or the Rock64 Pro, or the lattepanda.

loving the format

2:51 God he is such a teddy bear, that I wanna hug whenever I feel sad or happy. He is like an upgraded form of Luke from LTT (current bearded form).

hell yeah :) #Plex4Lif3

When a man with a martini glass full of MnM's tells you to go to the basement, you're goin' to the basement

As someone who has gone through the pain of losing everything on their media server, I now consider it necessary to consider the 3-2-1 backup rule or some variation when planning a home server too. Component failure, software bug, electrical short/surge, lightning, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, burglary, hacking... you name it. (I'll leave it to your imagination as to which of those ones bit me.) A lot of things can happen that all result in the contents of your media server being gone. Decide how disposable/irreplaceable the contents of your media server are and plan accordingly. Some options... * F it. If I lose it, I lose it. * FreeNAS box or similar as a backup target. It'll need more storage space than the media server. Ideally physically isolated in another room, as far as practically possible. A separate electrical circuit from the primary server is good too. Combine with off-site storage like B2. This is the most robust and convenient solution and most closely matches enterprise best practice. * A pair of cloud backup accounts with two different providers that are using data centers located in different parts of the world. Saves some up-front cost, but more expensive over time. Long recovery times, although some will send your files via courier. * Original source DVD/BluRay/CD/etc in a binder at a relative's house or an off-site storage unit. You'll have to re-rip everything but if you already have the source media and already have a place to store them, it comes at no cost. It is less convenient if you're obtaining new media regularly. Takes more active management. This doesn't give you full 3-2-1 backups, but it might be good enough. * HDD toaster or internal hot-swap bay, internal HDDs as media, and HDD storage cases. You can manually copy everything to an HDD, put it in a storage case, and take it to a relative's house or storage unit. This works out to be _far_ cheaper than optical media as back-up. If you're sourcing your media digitally, this is a better option than burning to DVD/BluRay. You can make two copies to two separate HDDs and store one here at home and the other copy off-site. It requires work, especially to maintain the off-site copy, but it is fairly cheap. Bit rot once killed some irreplaceable family home video of the kids when they were young. You can imagine how that conversation went with the wife. :-| If I'm making archives now for cold storage, I like to use PAR2 and give it at least 10% parity, and make two different copies of the archive. On each HDD is an ISO with the portable Linux I used with the exact version of PAR2 and other utilities so I can be sure that even many years down the road that the files are readable.

I found 4x3TB WD RED NAS drives in a faulty ReadyNAS for $20, so threw them in an old server size case, with FreeNAS 9 on a GA-EP45-DS3L with 8GB DDR2 and it is now my (silent) media server. I had to remove the case fan for near silent operation, but it was well worth it.

you guys where holding your laugh back so much I was smiling because of it lol

I always wanted to build my own media server, thanks for the build!

Those completely natural and in no way set up dialogs deserve at least three oscars.

I love your content and you do a really great job putting these videos together (I'm a Patreon supporter) but you should consider EQing your mics. It would really make a big difference in audio quality. Take about 4db out of 300hz and add 4db in the 2.5-5k hz range. Just some constructive criticism :)

I love legally downloading terabytes of media from the web. This Plex thing sounds right up my alley

Loved the sketch. Keep it up!

This should be titled "2 Ogre's and an elf discuss Raspberry Pie"

YES!!! My wife was just telling me the other day that we need to just create our own media server. Time to get to work.

4:15 gave me this old house flashbacks

Yes, thanks you I've been interested in a home media server. Please build on it in the future.

I find the timing of this video quite interesting. I've been thinking of setting up a super basic NAS and just recently set up Open Media Vault on my Raspberry Pi 3. I'm using it simply as a file server with a couple external hard drives on it. Certainly not the best solution, but for my needs it works well enough.

this is the video that i've been waiting for

Oscar-worthy performances + solid tutorial. Very cool. Very cool.

I love this. Make it the first of a home server series. Please :)

Love to see you guys look at running Emby. I use it in my home server and love it

This channel is a hidden gem.

For file servers and media serving, a desktop will work reasonably well. I'm currently running an i3-2120 with 8 GiB of RAM and that's working fine, with virtualization (3 different VMs up at anytime).

This is awesome. More please.

love your guys content!!!!! keep it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I so love used server stuff from folks who know used servers!

I don't want a media server but I couldn't stop watching.

This is a great vid. Thanks so much!!

Gosh you guys are so funny. Letting her bring that up all the way from the basement while chit-chatting. Lol

Like that entryway to the basement, the white railing and green walls remind me of the PBS shows I watched as a kid. Kind of fits with the content.

Y'all gotta do more videos like this got me geekin.

I am still using an old Pentium D "Media Center" for that...I can rip a DVD on that machine faster than I can on my new ones.

Good evening/morning, This comment might seem depressing, but please keep reading. Bcause the subject didn't seem interesting to me, I've only clicked this video just to keep running on the side, and maybe put an emoji comment to support this channel. But the intro although longer than what I've gotten used to on KZfaq, was very interesting for some reason...So I kept watching. And all of a sudden I hear that banging Kreestuh is making 😂 Great work. Educational and entertaining. Keep it up 👍♥️

That's gold content, congrats, guys

Been running my own home server for about 3 years now, and I have to say... it isn't for everyone. I use to be a film student waaaay back in the day, and at the time had a collection of ~400 DVDs and ~50 blurays. But with Netflix purging more and more movies, and with fewer and fewer devices in my home having optical media readers, I decided to take the plunge and build a home server. At any rate, a few things I have run into; 1) Spend a little money on ripping software. I picked up DVDFab on a decent sale (its always on sale... but some sales are better than others). The first hundred movies I tried ripping through Handbrake... and it works... but quality was inconsistent. DVDFab made things much quicker and simpler, and when I eventually got a newer GPU it took BluRay rips down from 10-14 hours per disc, down to about 1 hour... my power bill dropped enough to justify the purchase of my mid-range GPU lol. 2) Buy good quality SATA cables. I convinced a friend of mine to do this with me, and we both had weird inconsistent issues with checksum errors that made us think that our HDDs were dying. Turned out to be that our 10 year old SATA cables that had been in and out of several machines over the years were developing issues. Bought some nice thick new locking cables and all of those problems went away. 3) HDDs can be expensive. Especially new drives that are made to be on 24/7 (Like WD Red). To get around this we have had very good luck getting refurbished enterprise drives. They are made to be on 24/7, and typically cost $50-60 for a 3TB drive, where a new high-end consumer drive costs nearly twice as much. To be sure, used drives are a little bit scary... but that is why you have redundancy. We use RAIDZ2 (essentially RAID6) where 2 drives can be lost without issue. I have had a few drives come in DOA, but have yet to loose one of the refurb enterprise drives yet. Between my friend and I we have bought 10 drives about a year ago, and 2 were DOA and replaced with no questions asked. Everything else has been smooth sailing. 4) Get lots of RAM! FreeNAS/ZFS drinks RAM like you wouldnt believe! And while it will continue to work with less ram, you will experience slowdowns and hiccups. General rule of thumb is a minimum of 4GB of RAM, plus 1GB for every TB of usable storage (ie, don't need extra ram for redundant disk space). So I have 10 3TB HDDs in my system for a total of ~20TB of usable space (to calculate: 8drives*3TB*80%after formatting), and 24GB of RAM. 8-16GB of RAM is plenty for most people starting out... but just know that RAM needs will balloon as you add more storage. 5) Use file permissions!!!! And not file permissions used on your home network! I worked in a few school districts a year ago when all of the crypto viruses were hitting hard and heavy, and I can't tell you how many got hit hard simply because everyone had read and write permissions on the network storage!!!! The way I have it set is that everyone has read access to the whole ZFS pool. We can all watch movies and listen to music to our hearts content. But write access is relegated to 1 user acct which has a unique name and password. This way my kids can accidentally delete things, and if we catch a nasty virus we dont loose everything. If my wife or kiddos want to add things to the server, I have a folder/share with full open access, and they let me know they put it there, and then I put it where it belongs after that. 6) A home server does not count as a backup! Now, I am not about to back up 14+TB of movies and TV shows that I have ripped, because that would essentially requite building a 2nd server. But this is why I have not gotten rid of my physical media either. If my server dies it will be a bad day, but I can still pull my discs from storage and start over from scratch if needed. I do however copy off all of my home media (mostly pics and videos of the kiddos), and important digital documents to a portable HDD and send them to my Dad every once in a while (who also has his own server). So if our house burns down (or their house burns down) we each have copies of each-other's media. We also use services such as OneDrive and Google Photos, but the quality on those is not quite the same. So all that said, it can be a ton of fun! And now we are looking at going over the 1000 movie and 1000 episode mark some time this year. Still looking for a 4K ripping solution as I am starting to collect 4K media, but I have to say that 1080p rips from bluray look way better than anything I have seen streamed at 4k, so I am still pretty happy with it. I would also say that you need to find a good balance on drive size vs quantity of drives. I started this quite a while ago when 3TB drives were about as good as you could go reliably, and so when I maxed out the 6 ports on my motherboard I was using, but I needed more space, it quickly became a question of building a larger system and adding more drives, or starting over with larger drives. Thankfully I had my current motherboard fall into my lap (workstation Ivy-Bridge board) which has 10 on-board SATA, and 2 eSATA which helped me make my decision easier. But if I was starting over, I would probably opt for 6 4-6TB drives rather than the 10 3TB ones that I am running now. But after my last upgrade I should be good for the next 2-3 years, so that is now a problem for another day. About the best thing about having the home server is that it is our own curated collection. Very few "B" movies (except the ones we happen to enjoy), and the collection does not cycle through like Netflix and other services do. Plus, lots of really hard to find stuff, and imports that you just cant get from American streaming services. If it is on a disc, you can generally add it to your collection without much issue.

Oh I love you three. Great video.

The gag with the stairs was too funny :P

Thanks! You're funny & sympathic! And one can learn!!!

I was using Subsonic, found Plex, found a Dell R710 and now I still have the Netflix Hulu and Amazon, but no Cable, last four years of a cable free home has been amazing

well its about time somebody brought this up, netflix does not equal quality just re-encoded compressed crap and now it looks even worse when watched on 4k tv's.

Was this just for the media server demo portion? I thought setting up zfs with the raid card (even with raid-0) in anything other an "IT mode" was a big no no

These are the videos I live for

Very nicely done.

I love these guys 💕

love the camera work :_)

This can also be done on an old PC with a few extra hard drives thrown into it. You don't need a server as such.

The stairs bit was funny :P

Great video. That thing is thirsty though! My FreeNAS box with 8 drives, pfSense box, and iMac running Blue Iris pulls less than 250 total.

Living in an apartment, a true server isn't ideal with the noise - even if minimal. I run an optiplex 990 mini tower as a home server. Really, as long as anything decent 2010 and up has a gigabit nic, you're set on a home server without the rack or noise. Quad cores will likely be your best bet if you're hitting it with multiple clients or even higher res.

😂 the beginning was like I just walked into a conversation in an elevator.

You found some good co-hosts wendell.

love u guys! :D

I see a ductless mini-split air handler back there. Great choice!

Built a server with an e3 1241v3 CPU. Also run FreeNAS on it. At idle it pulls about 50 watts from the UPS it's on. And can get up to about 120 watts when transcoding with plex. And with Noctua cooler and fans, it's very quite. Though not as cheap as an old rack server, it sure is nicer to live with.

So glad I found this channel haha

that thing is so loud! I am using a silent, fanless mini PC with an i7 8650u and it works great.

I love your sense of humour :D

Wow.. she is actually a good actor and very funny!! Nicely done!!!!!!!!

Great show, I am going to try thus guys, I have a Poweredge R410 so maybe a PLEX would be great option for it. Thanks for the info.

When I first started hearing the "thumps" I thought that the boiler was even more possessed than before, until I saw her lugging that server up from the basement. :D lol

This is so helpful. tnx guys.

Point of fact: Krista's grey shirt looked very nice. Excellent taste.

Have been running a media server for quite some time now and here is a basic guide on creating a cheap media server for streaming all your mediaaround your home. 1. find a decent motherboard & cpu combi on ebay ideal core 2 duo, 2gb ram anything more isn't needed but is better, the motherboard your only really interested in Sata slots (4/6 is ideal) and pci slots for adding extra sata slots with raid cards if you need more space. 3. Tower casing your really only seeking something that has 8+ hard drive bays and a couple of optical drive bays is a bonus (optical bays can be converted to add more hard disk space). Gaming towers, expensive servers and other such things are not needed. You can get away with using a cheap 30 pound tower casing. 4. Power Supply - Needs to be a decent brand name, good quality and at least 500 watt+ to cover future upgrades IE adding more hard drives in and it should come with a few sata power connectors ie 6+ (you can get splitters to add more connections) 5. thumb drive - get yourself a small 16gb thumb drive needs to be one of them tiny ones that don't stick out so you don't accidentally knock it if moving server any time. Installing and running an OS from the thumb drive makes sense because it means freeing up sata slots for hard disk for your media. 6. Hard disks - start off with say two 1tb hard drives having two means you can use raid to have back ups to keep your data safe. You can add bigger disks like 2tb, 3tb, 10tb etc but you don't need that much space unless you already have large collections of media ready to rip. You can add more disk space and upgrade disk space as and when needed so starting off small and growing when needed makes sense. You can get away with using existing hardware, used hardware etc so don't need to break the bank and can fit even a small budget. Get yourself a copy of freenas 100% free and does a pretty good job of sharing media. I have a cheap media server set up and it cost under 150 and it servers all media purposes fine. :)

That server boot fan spin up breeze gets me everytime.

Been waiting for an update on this since the freenas tutorial from teksyndicate. Really hope this is just the start/teaser.

It's nice to see Kreestuh and Grizzle in more videos! I'm assuming Wendell overdosing on m&ms while watching Star Trek in the next room... or he was filming

Very excited for this, I attempted to build a plex server out of an old PC for my first computer project and failed miserably and gave up.

Looks like an awesome place to work.

Love the comedy in this. 😂

Do a vid on OMV + snapraid + mergerfs. You can use any size drive, any amount of parity (as long as larger than largest drive), can lose any amount of drives, any filesystem, and can start with full drives. So many benefits to the setup for a starter media server and only sacrifice speed which is generally not a factor for a home media server.

With over a decade of dedicated media servers behind me I just don't bother anymore. Just as easy to keep the media on my standard pc and stream to chrome cast or our Roku box. The bonus is you only have to maintain your normal system. The Roku has a good built in media player which organizes the videos and will pull title thumbnails.

I just realized that Krista has a nice shape . never seen her NOT behind a desk .

For those that dont want a loud server and want to go through a little extra work can try my setup, I run a Super Micro SuperServer 5015A-EHF-D525 (Atom based server)running Ubuntu 16.04 headless as my plex server, one very large hard drive for media (Backed up to another server), I have all my media encoded to direct stream to my roku 3's and samsung TV's. works like a champ and is quiet and uses less power. You can get the supermicro servers off ebay for about 100 bucks if you keep an eye out.