Potential PC upgrade advice and thought

[gavin286]

Fellow Carbies,

I've been mulling over for a while now on a "media" type of PC upgrade. I've outlined my current scenario and reasons below.

Current kit:

i5-670, 8gb RAM, Intel DP55WG mainboard. Basic gfx card, 3 spinning disc drives and 1x ext usb drive for storage, and a 160gb SSD for OS

Uses:

Plex server, max 4 concurrent streams (no 4K as the PC can’t decode fast enough)
Unifi controller
Unifi video for 4 cams
Hyper V for Home Assistant

*Currently this PC is adequate in terms of processing power to run the above, and uses between 120 and 140w minus the 1 external drive*


Potential upgrade:

NUC NUC6CAYH (funds are tight so this would be the best I can afford right now)


Reasons:

My main drive is to lower power usage and a smaller footprint, possibly allow 4k Plex streams (YTS hevc movies)

I would also like to have the NVR functional during load shedding. Here I will have a single dedicated USB drive on the UPS.



My current thoughts on data storage for Plex: Either combine the 2 of the 3 internal drives onto another ext drive, or just get USB enclosures for said drives. I can connect these onto a UPS if need be. Note that the Plex content CAN be offline during load shedding IE the external drives don’t need to UPS’d.

 

[SynicalFox]

Alternatives:

You could consider an HP Microserver Gen 7 since this machines use very low power.
Then you'd have multiple other uses for it if you go the VM route.

I'm not sure the 4k capabilities of those servers though.

Another option is an android TV device as most support Plex and there's Plex for Kodi. They also do 4K but then I don't know how that all works with the transcoding/encoding. Those little devices are very power efficient so running one during loadshedding I imagine is super easy.



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