Dell Poweredge server T410, 32GB ram, Intel Xeon E5645 2.13GHz Quad-core No HDD SAS
Going for 50 AUD (32 USD)
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For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.
That thing is going to be chugging power. Also note that it uses SAS drives, so you can’t just use consumer SATA drives in it. ALSO 410s are from the 2009-2011 era. Do you really want to depend on a 10+ year old PSU? What’s the cost going to be for you to find replacement parts?
Just want to point out that you’re replying to a bot
I would look at the list of CPUs that support hardware encoding and see if this Xeon is on the list. If it’s not, I would pass on it for a Plex server. It might be good for a NAS, though. It’s a pretty old CPU, but would be perfectly adequate for a NAS/NFS server.
I mean, it would definitely run it. But so would a raspberry pi 4 as long as your just direct streaming 1080p videos.
I run plex and the full support stack on a dell optiplex 3060, obviously the data is stored elsewhere. Cheap, quiet and can stack them like legos.
Can feed 3 streams simultaneously, haven’t tried it with more.
Relative to a laptop or consumer pc this thing will be a power hog
I’m using this exact tower still. I inherited it for free from work. I swapped the CPUs to some lower TDP L5640s and put an H710 in to allow a 6x4TB array and a Quadro P400 for transcode.
It has no problems pushing 4K HDR streams in my house, or several 1080p streams remotely to family and friends.
You can definitely find lower power solutions, but probably not at this price point with the 6 Bay storage included. All things considered it really doesn’t draw that much power, but I might be biased with my inexpensive solar electricity.
That’s my plan with my T410, the L5640(s), though mine is going to be an occasional use ESXi host for bigger labs than my Gen8 Microserver can handle. Have you got power figures or was that just a guesstimate?
No, just no
Too old and power hungry at this point. Plus the raid controllers of that generation only support up to 2tb.
Aim for at least a T320 or R320.
I use my R320 as a Plex server and it’s pretty good. Not as power efficient as something newer, but I got it for free, it has lots of RAM so I can run many VMs as well as Plex, and it supports SAS which made getting several inexpensive 8TB drives going in ZFS nice and easy.
I just want to make a small correction for others reading this. The Tx10/Rx10 CAN have a raid controller that doesn’t support larger than 2tb drives, specifically any of the PERC 6 lines. If your Tx10/Rx10 has a PERC H200/H700, you don’t have that 2tb limitation.
Edit: But yes, too old to be worthwhile for anything.
I believe you still are limited to 512k sector size though.
I am on year 4 or so with my T3610, still kicking.
If you’re willing to double your electricity bill, it’ll be fine.
Allegedly if I had a homelab, and allegedly had 8x10tb for storage. I would have allegedly used a dell tower server similar to this with 32gb ram and have allegedly had no problems.
Also allegedly I ended up with a second one for the times allegedly I’ve upgraded hard drive size.
I’ll say it again and again, 7th Gen Intel because the Quicksync does 10bit HEVC decode and encode on the hardware. If you can get better for cheaper sure but i5 7500 or i7 7700 work great. I run that with several hard disks using unRAID and then load Plex Media server as a docker container. Power draw on a setup like that is way less than what you’re looking at, op.
I use something like this. But I run ESXi on it and Plex is just a VM among several other VMs.
It’ll do the job no problem. The power consumption is more than your average little desktop, but it’s not horrific. 100-150watts depending on what’s going on from what I’ve read.
I figure mine’s actually four PCs in one, so I’m not really worried about it.
I agree with one of the users. It’s going to use. A bunch of power and its going to be a space heater. You should just get a regular computer. This is a very odd ball thing. But yes it will be able to run plex. But also you can run plex on a ras pi but have it okay via direct play. I don’t use pi. I have. Amd ryzen 7 3700x with 64 gb of ram for my plex served.
