Building a Home Server for Backups and Ripping Blu-Rays

Read more about Will's Home Server build here: http://www.tested.com/tech/500455-building-home-server-using-freenas/

For the past few months, Will has been researching a build for a new home server for personal backups and media streaming. In addition to housing terrabytes of data, the server Will ended up building also doubles as an efficient DVD and Blu-ray ripping machine, automating heavy transcoding tasks. We discuss the build and give software and hardware recommendations for anyone looking to build their own!

Read more about the transcoding setup here: http://www.tested.com/forums/general-discussion/495076-transcoder-feedback/

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Closed Caption:

hey gang it's welcome Justin and it's
not from tested
normal Jan there's a lot of pcr
surrounding us yeah we build a pc know
we've already built a pc that happened a
while ago
okay um I build a new server for my
house and I wanted to talk to people
that is kind of interesting thing
yes and I mean I guess the first thing
we should probably talk about is why why
do you need a home server you have a
home server
i'm home server um i have had a home
server for years i was running one of
the old first gen windows home server
boxes that i made like 8-9 years ago now
its it lasts a really long time I've
swapped cards out a couple of times
fortunately no longer thing it's gone
you can't do that anymore site when it
was time to upgrade that I had to find a
new path and it was time to upgrade that
because I was no longer able to run the
latest versions applek server and things
like the Xbox plex client didn't work so
it was definitely time
ok why would you want to build a
separate computer as a home server so
I'm in my home with a tech-savvy home we
have a couple of laptops with my work
laptop we have gina's laptop we have my
big gaming pc and you're the reason but
the home server in the first place was
to consolidate all of our media stuff in
one place
so instead of putting a bunch of big at
the time one terabyte hard drives in all
of the computers which is impractical
I put 45 1 terabyte hard drives in one
computer and then stored music and
movies and all of our photos and all
that stuff there in a way that was easy
to back it up
I was more centrally located and I was
also able to access it online which is
kind of nice i don't want to do that
with this bill just because the the
Internet's changed a little bit you may
not want to have a publicly facing
server and there are two ways to do it
you can have a local local storage
people the server have all your media
here and backups and also distributed
media or it can be remote you might pay
for services dropbox windows one drive
all that stuff but then it's your
interaction it in reality not gonna have
both right arm so that living mention is
important backups are all of my local
machines the macs and pcs have always
backed up to the home server that
we'll continue with this new box and you
can do you know i like to use time
machine on the mac and then I supplement
that with crashplan for uh for you know
the most important stuff is kind of
small stuff on the pc I'd use the
Windows Home Server backup client which
was really really good
that won't work with this unfortunately
but there's built in windows 8 7 8 both
have built in backup clients and let you
just save your stuff to a network share
and then that seems to work really well
from initial testing
all right so um let's see back up all
the pcs in your house
media consolidation plus making that
available everywhere you transcoding
real-time trippin different devices
yeah exactly we'll talk about flex flex
is a big part of this and then you can
also get kind of crazy and do personal
cloud like you can make personal cloud
services like there is nothing there is
software that will let you mirror stuff
that you save on your server up to say
Amazon's s3 which is a basically a
bucket for data on the web
so then you'll have access to that
everywhere you probably want to do that
for everything but it is it's
essentially what crashplan does with or
black glaze or any of those services
with a little bit of a friendlier
shall we are making our own backup
service you make your own drop exactly
ok exactly so with windows home server
not really being available
what is the software you chose postures
i looked at a bunch of different stuff
there's a ton of like custom linux
distros there's you can get Windows
Server relatively inexpensively if you
get the low end like work groupers or
whatever it's called didn't want to fool
with that I wanted something that was a
headless ideally that means no video
card no monitor or at least no monitor
you might have a video card for the
motherboard boot arm and then I wanted
to have a uh uh I want to be relatively
easy to configure so I didn't always i
don't mind getting into a linux command
prompt
but once I haven't set up and running I
don't want to look at the one is current
problem with something goes wrong
so there's some type of the line yeah
and then the other thing I was looking
at was file system availability
so there's a ton of different file
systems on linux available for this type
of server when I wanted something was up
something allowed me to add
more drives and replace existing drives
without a massive amount of hassle
I didn't necessarily not necessarily
want duplication or redundancy cross dr
what's the point is that you chose
freenas I chose freedom as it has all
those things freenas is a bsd a fork PSD
or a distro bsd if we're using linux
terminology which the BST people are
gonna yell at me for
um but it's a it's a relatively
lightweight console-based you I and then
once you get it installed and running
then you can access all the stuff that
you need to change your winner web
interface including the shell
you can also ssh into the Machine stuff
like that if you want to on but it was a
relatively easy setup and it's neat
because it's portable
so meaning your install once you have it
set up lives on a thumb drive the dangly
on one of the hard drives not lay down
on one of the hard drives it you install
it to this thumb drive the thumb drive -
hangs out of the back to pc when you
boot the machine it copies the contents
of the thumb drive into ram which is why
you want to have a lot of ram for this
and then and then runs the less out of
ram and it just looks at the hard drives
as the data pool
Wow so if i want to move like if this
motherboard dies
I'm not tied to the raid controller on
the motherboard so like if you if you
build a Windows but if you build a
server on linux you use built-in
hardware raid the hardware on your
mother the raid on your motherboard
then you can like if you need to switch
to another motherboard some point the
future you might have problems with that
with this all i do is take these drives
out take the thumb drive out plug it
into a new computer booted up and it
should
after a little bit harder detection be
good to go and there are plugins and
also support for time machine
yes so I'm native support for mac
backups is important so I want my wife's
computer backup really seamlessly on the
the plugins are great because PSD has a
concept called jails are people have
informed me that it's similar to a
chroot on linux
I don't know what that means ok but
jails are basically they're not exactly
virtual machines but they behave kind of
like virtual machines
basically it's a it's an instance of bsd
that lives inside your bsd your hardware
machine that is access is only a small
portion of the hard drive that you
control so that you can run things that
may have a higher security privileges
required inside these jails and not also
give them access to the rest of the
machine
it also makes it very easy to update and
maintain them so people maintain the
different several different jails things
for things like plaques and crash plan
and bakula and all these other services
you might use and when it comes time to
update flex I don't have to go to the
command line i just hit update the jail
and it's done
which is great that's cool um however at
the same time you can still log into a
shell for those machines those machines
can be assigned an IP address on your
network
so when this machine is plugged in i
think it's 45 different IP addresses
from my router right one for the pluck
server one for the crashplan thing went
for a virtualbox instance and then one
for the server itself so and those all
show up his real clients on the network
which is really good
that's all that ran off that that us all
runs off of a flap of an eight gig thumb
drive with technology which is amazing
arm so the BS details are also you can
also build your own which is interesting
which it has afforded some interesting
opportunities
one of the other things i wanted to do
with this machine is move my DVD and
blu-ray transcoding off of a highly
manual process which involves you know
putting a disk into the dr ripping the
stuff that I want off of it using make
MKV then taking that file and jamming it
into handbrake and tweaking a bunch of
settings and all that stuff
I don't want to do that so you want to
keep mostly automated I want to keep it
mostly automated we think you want to
swap this and and and i want to select
this stuff that I pull because you have
this kind of tons of crap you don't like
I don't want FBI warnings right
yes and I don't need the
the thai language streams or sometimes
so you select so now i have it set up so
i select the the things that i need and
make him Cavey
and then you copy that file that big 25
big files across the network into a
folder on the server and the server has
a virtual machine it's just always
looking at that machine
it sucks it in uses this this guy named
John Milton wrote a series of linux
scripts and I was ten scripts for
automating handbrake
but still not as automated as I want
this does the the andy mccurdy former
whiskey media engineer and and friend of
ours helped me build a linux vm they
will show you guys how to do too so that
basically it's a black box of
transcoding just taken any file many MKV
on it'll look at all the audio tracks
and subtitle tracks in there
it looks at for subtitles burns them
into the video
so for example in hunt for red october
when Sean Connery's speaking Russian
yep you you can still read that right
arm and then a few hours later
spits out a itunes store sized MKV that
has all the audio tracks including like
directors commentary and stuff like that
and if you want to move into iPad you
can find anything and well then you move
it into your plank server
yep and it's available to anything you
can sync it out to your iPad's to your
android tablets whatever you can watch
it on the xbox to watch the chromecast
pretty amazing it's basically like my
wife said hey this is actually working
like personal Netflix which I'm excited
about make your netflix i made my own
netflix customized because it's all the
stuff i wanted to will TV
okay um a lot of software stuff I'm not
gonna go through everything we're not
going to tell you how to set that up to
i'm gonna happen now they'll be
separately on the site and give you
links below
we'll talk about the hardware is
building a box building the box the
first time there's a lot of
considerations here on there are two
ways to go with this right because i
wanted to move the transcoding under
this box as well I went really much
bigger than you probably need to go for
a backup on if you just want to run
backups and serve files and even if you
just want to scream plex
so components around here so we go
through you would you start off with so
the first thing I don't the box for
cause I got a white box version on but I
looks wet cpu shopping and I ended up
going with has one that has well he hexa
core cpus
ok I'm we talked about the octa-core few
months ago I it's a thousand dollars you
don't need to do is spend a thousand no
it's not worth a thousand dollars for
two extra cores
yeah so I got the cheap octa-core a
cheap hexa-core rather which is I think
three hundred an eighty bucks reporter
dollar something like that
okay mom it's the i7 15 8:20 I 758 20
exactly
it's it's not if you're not going to do
transcoding you can go way cheaper and
cheaper you can buy a $90 pentium
quad-core that sits in the socket 1170
that will be more than sufficient for
the mrs a
if you want to go just for storage just
for some distribution so my transcoding
six hundred dollar project even less
than yeah even with hard drive with
drives
um I mean if you want to get even more
simple you you could theoretically just
by an ass box right
right on i look at those two it's worth
mentioning there are some very capable
of mass boxes they all run low and
processors so they have trouble doing
things like transcoding on the fly to
make a 1080p bluray into something that
will work on your phone or something
like that so I thought I'd don't step
aside from that I want something I
wanted to build a box that I wasn't
gonna have to fool with four five or six
years and even if you build it like a
six-hundred-dollar center drawer box you
can still use free now and get many of
the speech exactly exactly
the big price jump right now is for hard
fast transcoding many cores and moving
and basically like we talked about that
as well e it has a wii platform right
and there's a there's a because it with
as well you're out in order to get heads
to court right now I didn't tell you
have to do ddr4 which is expensive
yeah so this is the x29 a this is the
motherboard i chose it's a sous board it
has a lot of SATA ports
it only has one ethernet port which I I
was a little bummed about initially
because with the freenas you can channel
bond multiple ethernet ports in 212
gigabit connection
sounds like a much we're looking for
motherboard for a box that you don't
need audio
you don't need six USB 3.0 port this
problem is there's not a lot of
options options in the in the socket
2011
is that a yes option three yeah so okay
so we're talking about a lot more easier
for memories expensive
this is xin a it's a nearby us which is
good because boots fast you can send it
to boot off the USB which is everything
can do that now
yeah but if you can make it sticky which
was important some biases kind of let
you vote off USB once and then bulk the
second time
some of the considerations if you're
going to go for if you want the extra
two cores of hexa-core over quad-core
you're also buying into a platform that
you may not be able to use for server
I love maximize all this potential on
the server may be there later on there
will be motherboard that supported that
maybe don't have all the features they
don't have all the other stuff you don't
need
it's not gonna hurt anything you're not
using extra power with that stop it's
just upfront costs it's just it's just a
little bit more expensive this board was
I think the on the cheaper side for this
chipset with 250 box
okay um and then for gram for gram
I went big everything I read about free
dance before i send it up and I did do
some test runs on other machines that
showed that the file system that you use
which we'll talk about it in length in a
minute is very memory hungry
combined with the fact that i do i want
to run virtual machines and a bunch of
Lex's and stuff like that
I went for 16 gigs of memory and if I
were doing a smaller
we're doing it so the other way to go
this is to is to take your old machine
take the components out of that put that
make them the server box upgrade your
your current gaming pc or whatever if I
was doing that and memory was cheap but
if everybody ddr3 I probably would max
out the memory that the board can handle
yes i can do for the
haswell chips that lets you do more
memory yeah you're buying quad channel
anyway you can force lots of four
gigabytes did speed matter on never on
the speed matters on random capacity
ok so you're gonna buy ddr4 buy
something buy a crucial by don't buy
course like John by you don't need /
comin round the clock
i bought the cheapest crucial memory
that they had it was ddr4 that was on
the compatibility list for this
motherboard
cool um let's see next up is the power
supply the power supply actually is
important here very important bomb
so this is about this is the corsair
ax750 27 and 60 watt power supply but
it's platinum-certified what that means
it's very efficient so very little of
the heat the extra heat gets run off as
extra energy gets wasted as heat
most of it just goes into the pc when
you're talking about a machine that
really running 24 hours a day
you probably want to maximize that at
the temperatures involved so it's me
five-year machine and it's going to you
want something that's gonna lie i want
something to last it was an expensive
power supply was a hundred and sixty
bucks i think when i say 200 bucks 500
660 from that seems really expensive for
70 60 watt power supply
it's probably overkill a product that
may do with a 500 right couldn't find
any platinum-certified power supplies
from brands that I trusted that were
that were 500 ish wats for cooling could
have gone with the bullet with the air
cooling Intel recommends water cooling
for the haswell-e processors . so this
is a sixty-dollar this is the corsair
h50 five to sixty dollar water cooling
it you don't have to add water to its
closed system and it's nice and quiet
simple install
yeah it was you didn't have to have the
motherboard out of the case to install
it
cool um the last thing I think frosting
hard drive hard drives
backblaze a few weeks ago over the last
couple weeks has released a ton of data
about the drives that they use for their
backup a raise thousands and thousands
of dr thousands and running non-stop
over the years years yeah um did the
failure rates i was looking specifically
at failure rates over one or more years
on different drives that they have in
place on there were some that were
definitely bad this
the four terabyte hgst just drive
ives the NASA drive specifically and off
of the model number in the in the down
below
I had the lowest failure right of any
for terabyte drives on you can get as
many of these as you want I started with
the one on if i wanted to do redundancy
in my file system i would have to do
more obviously are you
you add drives in pairs or triplets -
triplets to get redundancy with CFS and
once it's the copying is over
I think it works a lot like the windows
home server file system used to work in
that it does
it's a block-level duplication I believe
that means it works at the hard drive
level rather than file system level so
you can't say okay I want this part of
the drive to be duplicated in this part
of the drive to not be duplicated
I which like I'm not running i'm not
running this business here I'm just
storing my grip to blu rays and dvds or
photos
so rather than do duplication I went
with a just a bunch of disks array and
took that drive for terabyte drives in a
couple of old two terabyte drives that I
had from my old home server and i did a
big bunch of disks just a bunch of disks
as well but that's called when you put a
bunch of them together
it's the data stripe across all of them
means if one drive fails everything goes
away my my gamble on that is that I'm
gonna build a good backup strategy using
our sink and some of the other tools
that are built into though you think me
a t-box to crash plan or backplane you
haven't yet
ok four terabytes is a lot of data just
send up to the cloud
well yes and once it's true it's true
right now i'm copying it to an external
drive that just for the short term as at
after I i ordered to those drives only
one of them came when we got lost
the goal was to have one that was the
host drive and one that was the backup
drive
how much space it is needed what I mean
how much space do you think you need
let's see i'm not going back out how
much of actual storage so there's six
SATA ports
ideally I'd never want to have all those
films that it makes it hard to swap out
a driver starts to fail or something
like that
my goal was to have eight to 12 gigs of
storage available terabytes of storage
on the system
I have three terabytes of rip blu rays
and dvds which is the bulk of the of the
data
I just didn't wanna have to keep adding
drives all the time it's a little bit of
a pain in the ass if you want terabytes
the sweet spot for for price it's a
hundred eighty bucks for four terabytes
that's amazing right arm
the the when you're setting up the
system if you
we should talk about redundancy a little
bit because it is it's kind of confusing
and you can make mistakes there that you
don't necessarily have to for home use I
almost always recommend that people do
daily backups
instead of doing redundancy because it's
much cheaper if you're if you're talking
about a for disk array to do
redundancy you need eight de eight disks
if you need for disc sort of storage you
need eight disks to have it redundant
and that means what where you could just
back up
you can just do backups of backups are
much easier coffee's up yet redundancy
doesn't protect you from things like
viruses or accidental deletion
yeah although ZFS does do shadow the
equivalent of the the file system
including shadow copies are they call it
snapshots
so if you do that you can actually go
back so once you said you have set it up
manually but once you enable snapshot
and set them to run x there were times a
day it will give you a way to rollback
of stuff that you've deleted which is
nice and that even shows up in Windows
that's one of the other things i like
about freeness like when you right-click
on a folder in windows on the free ass
machine it just sees the shadow copies
the snapshots on the on the freeness box
so yeah I mean that's a hard word yet
about hardware up ten thousand dollars
four hundred dollar system but you're
gonna spend most the money on hard
drives anyway right
and and most people don't need that type
of system they can go with you don't
take your old machine if you have a
gaming pc that's ready to upgrade mean
look at the power consumption for it you
might end up paying more
or anything that shown here yeah so this
is on this one
this machine right now is is a kind of a
hog it's drawing 81 wats I haven't done
any of the power optimization stuff and
freenas yet i'll talk about that in the
in look at must realize how you can do
things like I switch the drives too low
power mode you can have them turn off
almost immediately
I i did also just last night dropped an
old SSD that was my part of an array and
my in my system years ago and set that
up as a cash
so the the ZFS looks at the most
frequently access files and stores them
on that SSD
in addition to the main the main volume
such can make use of different targets
it's very smart it's it's the kind of
thing that you'd normally see in
enterprise stuff but it's available in
something that normal people can install
the other the two things that are
important like I said before storage
memory remember your your install is
going to take about four gigs of memory
every time you boot it
so subtract that from the amount of
memory you put in you want to have 12 16
gigs of memory matter about the USB 3
key
I doesn't a little bit faster than USB 3
I don't know if the PSD supports USB
three other thing that's important have
to use a wired connection is no support
for wireless connections on a server
which makes sense and i don't want to
have a server on was right i mean
however you can access it you can access
it over wireless plug it in and just
plain to plug it into your router come
if you're going to set up a the the nest
box you will show you anything
oh yeah we can show you let's walk you
through the you is kind of neat so this
is what you see when you log into the
freenas box
you guys can see all the hardware that's
in here or at least the bits and pieces
the UI is a little confusing after a
week or two of working with this and
kind of started to understand it across
the top
this is all and this is all accessible
from your phone as well
these are the kind of high level menu
items these guys on the left side or
shortcuts that will take you directly to
something
it's it's not intuitive it starts to
make sense after you get used to it
this is the storage situation i
currently have four point seven
Timmy bites
which are based 10 gigabytes the system
that the hard drive records uses and you
can see what's in use you can set quotas
on each net on each folder on each what
they call them data sets
ok so let's explain this this is a
volume
yep this is the thing that you create
when you set up the machine you add
drives to it if you want to do striping
if you want to data redundancy you have
to do it at the volume creation level
it's really hard to retrofit that in
later the easiest way to do it is
usually just buy one extra drive than
you need
create a new volume copy all of your
stuff over to that volume and then it's
just if you're gonna do it do it up
front don't try to do it later
each of these underneath it is a is a
store is a data set these are equivalent
of two folders based applications
yeah you can set quotas on each one so
for example my time capsule which is
currently backing up my laptop and
Gina's laptop is a captain one terabyte
might even bring that down a little bit
after you use it more I just because you
know
time time machine automatically deletes
old backups when it runs out of space so
you don't want to give it it will fill
up the whole disk if you get the
opportunity on the jail for the previous
details you can see I have three or four
in here
uh there's a virtualbox install which is
how i'm running the
the rip the transcoding black box plug
in jail is a thing I was monkeying with
crashplan and plex media are here so you
can you can see those and then the rest
are just folders for music and public
stuff and just open chairs are these all
support linux unix style permissions so
you do have to learn how that stuff
works are also it's going to be
challenging you to work
yep i opened the one that I absolutely
should not under any circumstances
change
I this is DSD so you can make mistakes
that will get you in big trouble
and the good news is it your volume the
data volumes
it's pretty hard to mess up so worst
case you reinstall freenas onto the
thumb drive plug it back into the
Machine and then . to those two that
volume again
and so one of the jail's you have is
running this plaques yeah so um to to
install plex
all I did was go to plugins it takes a
second to load is pulling data from the
internet right now to see what's
available and this works a lot like an
app store or apt gatineau . or something
like that if you for that
if you want to BTW sink what speech in
sync between think I don't use it toward
the little things but it's for its for
syncing multiple machines across the
internet right and sharing files yeah
you can run like a minecraft server
instance are right
so to install plex all I did was hit
here hit install it transcripts
once it was installed i got it up over
here and you can
it gives you an easy way to click
through come on let's go - I you know it
only it only pops up when i turn on i'm
going to turn on so i want to have to
turn it off
but once you can figure out and hook it
up to your account it shows up in your
pluck server on the old servers offline
over there you can see but you know all
of the movies that are in the shared
folders are here
all 600 something of them on and you can
stream them anywhere in the like you
could be outside our local network
because i'm paying for flex pass i can
stream to my ipad when I'm in a hotel
traveling some plays
it's great for kids because it means
that i can rip all of my daughters to
stop my daughter likes old watch
and she has no more discs that she can
destroy like some of the best things I
mean it's flex is wonderful even if you
pay for backup
and you use Dropbox and you use other
services having a plaque server setup is
think is a good reason to pay three
hundred dollars four dollars to build
the server if you have a media
collection if you rip your blu rays or
done whatever
yeah it's a wonderful wonderful tool to
have and everything's browsable
everything searchable so if you watch
speed racer
you can it's right here and you hit play
and it just pops right up and it has all
the background are also flex is a
delightful application there's on not
going to play because I don't get
copyright takedown
you can this clients reflects on iOS
Android pretty much everything xbox xbox
I sorry xbox 360 xbox one Roku
amazon fire TV you can use the tablet
clients with chromecast it gets his
super useful tool and because i have a
lot of power behind this machine it can
transmit even if I have video files like
these high-resolution MKV is that my old
devices can support little transcode on
the fly and it's seamless you don't
notice anything awesome facility
freenas the i would show you the ripping
thing but it's really boring basically
you have a folder on
I can show you you have a folder on your
hard drive
ripping is he ropes and I have
permission set up right on that
anyway there's a folder it has an input
folder and output folder you drag stuff
into the input file folder come back a
few hours later when it's in the output
folder is ready to watch basically cool
um so that's it and that's a the
overview we do it did go in depth image
we showed what you chose and why you
chose it to me but for people want to
build their own there'll be more guides
on tested with recommendations
specifically on how to set yourself up
people plugins to use and but right now
things you should know is if you want to
read up more on it right now
yes free now so we should read up on
freenas we should have the installing
portion up by the time you read this
video
CFS is is we've chosen ZFS is the only
choice for file systems on freenas know
you used to be able to do ufs which is a
little lighter weight
most of the guides that are available
now reference ufs if you're running a
quad core or higher
you're not going to have a problem with
ZFS a lot of people say it's its
performance intensive I turned off three
of the cores in this machine
no problem I haven't tested stuff like
hyper threading it seems like the SD
gets a little bit perplexed by
hyper-threading that you know the two
virtual cores out of one real core that
Intel does on high-end cpus on the hard
drive configuration is super important
up front by as much room as you can
afford and then the rest of it is less
important example if you set up your own
home server home with a screen as for
someone else let us know what you use
and how you backup your stuff and how
you distribute your media and we're
interested in now
that's it we'll see you guys next time
thanks for watching like