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Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 550 GA 80 Plus Gold 550W Large Family Media ServerĬPU Cooler: Enermax ETS-N31 CPU Air Cooler And despite its tiny stature, it’s got three 3.5-inch drive bays, so you’ve got room to run your drives in a RAID 5 array.įinally, while you won’t need a graphics card, the 400-watt EVGA N1 will ensure you have room to add a graphics card later if you want to do more serious transcoding.Īt around $400 for the build, excluding your media storage drives, it’s small, fast, and powerful enough to serve a small home, blending performance and price with few compromises. Paired with the Team Group MP33 Pro, you’ll have plenty of room and speed for an extensive Plex metadata library.
#AIR MEDIA SERVER PRO#
The MSI B560M Pro offers both a 2.5Gbps NIC for fast network throughput and an M.2 drive slot.
And the Thermaltake Gravity i2 pairs well with the 10100, being a good budget-oriented cooler that offers excellent cooling performance at its size and price. The Core i3-10100 is more than powerful enough for transcoding without consuming a ton of power, thanks to its use of Quick Sync.
This Intel Core i3-10100 is an excellent way to get started if you’re looking to dabble in the home media server space with a small yet powerful build. Now that we’ve gone over media server hardware let’s look at a couple of example builds to give you an idea of what you might want for a home media server. However, remember that to take advantage of the increased bandwidth capabilities, you’ll need a 2.5Gbps-capable switch or router at the other end of the Ethernet cord. Many motherboards may come with a 2.5Gbps connection, giving you more room to expand. For most people, a standard 1Gbps connection should work just fine. Since you’ll be streaming media across your network, you will want a hard-wired connection to your media server. Last but certainly not least is your network. For example, if you plan to put your drives in a RAID array to protect yourself against data loss, you’ll want to consider a RAID 5 array for security and performance, requiring at least three drives. But that doesn’t mean you should completely disregard speed.
#AIR MEDIA SERVER SOFTWARE#
For the software and metadata, an NVMe drive is optimal, though a SATA SSD is an excellent second choice.įor the media, speed isn’t as much of an issue as redundancy for most users. A fast drive will help make for a smoother experience accessing the server and metadata. When choosing a drive for your streaming software and metadata, you’ll want to select a fast drive. You’ll also want a separate drive to house your streaming software and media metadata since you can quickly end up with hundreds of gigabytes of media metadata with an extensive media library. You’ll need to have enough storage to house your media library and extra space in case your library grows. Storage is one of the most important aspects of a media server. A cheap 8gb kit should be sufficient and allow you to use the money you save on RAM towards a better processor or storage. But overall, you won’t need a lot of RAM since most streaming platforms don’t use much. Faster RAM can help speed things up a bit. RAM doesn’t make a substantial difference in performance for a media server. But for most people, a GPU is overkill and adds to the final cost of building and maintaining a media server. Yes, a GPU can offer hardware transcoding and could be a viable option if you’re looking to repurpose an older build or want to transcode many high-resolution streams simultaneously. When it comes to a media server, a GPU isn’t typically necessary. Primarily, they still lag considerably when it comes to video transcoding, meaning if you use an AMD CPU, you’ll probably need a graphics card. However, with modern Intel processors offering Quick Sync, you can do hardware transcoding without a GPU, meaning you’ll generally want to consider a Quick Sync compatible Intel CPU.Īs for AMD CPUs, they’re not usually a good choice for media server builds. And to put that into perspective, an Intel Core i5-3770 has a PassMark score of 4664.
#AIR MEDIA SERVER 1080P#
For software transcoding, Plex recommends a CPU with a PassMark score of 2000 for transcoding a 1080p stream. When choosing a CPU for media server usage, you typically won’t need anything too powerful. But if you want to build a new machine to take advantage of the power and efficiency of modern hardware, then making a new machine for the job is an excellent way to go.
#AIR MEDIA SERVER DRIVER#
Technically, you can use just about any computer as a media server, from your daily driver PC to an old office computer to a Raspberry Pi. But to do that, you’ll want to set up a media server. Thanks to popular streaming software like Plex, you can run your private streaming service in your home. Home media servers are nothing new, but they’re all the rage today.
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