Seek recommendation for dedicated SageTV server

[PeteCress]

I was looking at fanless mini-pcs, but got hung up on storage, the brass ring being a nice quiet little box running headless under my desk with the RecordedTV drives living in the LAN closet

My current box has 2 3-tb drives dedicated to RecordedTV.

Movies live on a NAS, so no problem there.

But I do not want RecordedTV on a NAS mainly bco the hassle of migrating 6 TB and the fact that I already have those two drives up and running.

Logically, I would expect to find 3.5" drive enclosures that support sharing over Ethernet, but the few I have found are out of stock with no anticipated availability date.

So maybe my fanless PC goal is unrealistic?

Would anybody care so suggest some solutions for a dedicated Sage box? I have no love for Linux, but Linux would not be a show-stopper...

[Telecore]

Looks like you use external HDHR tuners, so no need for a lot of PCIe slots - I would look for a mini-ITX motherboard, late model Intel core i3 CPU, run windows 10 Professional so you can use Remote Desktop, plan on 2 x 3.5 HDDs (+M.2 SSD for the system drive) and get a good case. I was recently looking at Fractal Design Node 304 (if you can support a cube form factor) because it is fairly small, holds a decent # of drives and appears easy to work with. I currently have a Silverstone ML04 with a micro-ATX motherboard+older core i3 - it is less tall, but somewhat cumbersome to route cables and install drives inside. I also recently built my desktop pc using a Micro-ATX M/B, core i5 9600K in an Antec VSK-3000, which is another fairly small case. If you have a MicroCenter store nearby, they seem to have good pricing for buying a CPU+MB. Good luck.

[wayner]

I actually have two fanless cases that I use as HTPCs but they don't contain much storage as I have a separate server for that. They are both HD-Plex cases - the H.5 and H.1.

https://hdplex.com/

I think I did a thread here when I built the first one - which is probably about a decade old.

edit - Here is my thread from 8 years ago on my first fanless system https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...ghlight=hdplex

[ojosch]

I currently have 2 fanless SageTV servers which work nicely for me these days. Before I used to have a 4U rack case with a little Mini-ITX ASUS fanless board having a Dell Perc5 RAID card in it and 8 hotswap bays, but even with fairly low power consumption, the case footprint was too big for me after awhile...

So today I have much smaller systems, one little PC running Win7 SageTV on a Jetway NF99FL-525 motherboard in a little Black Mini-ITX M350 Universal Computer Case, with Pico PSU-150-XT power supply, and it uses an HD HomeRun Ethernet tuner.

The second PC is running Linux Ubuntu SageTV on a SuperMicro X7SPE-HF-D525 motherboard (which is about an inch wider than the Jetway board, so doesn't fit in the above case), so this one I used the 1U case SuperMicro recommends for it: CSE-502L-200B.. This is fine, because this case allows for a PCIe slot to use a tuner which is Hauppauge HVR-1255 (one could also use it for a video card instead if you had an ethernet tuner).. The thing I like about the Linux Ubuntu with this card, is it supports PPA driver install (which made it super simple to install it) http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/suppo...ort_linux.html (they support a bunch of other cards for PPA install too).. That is the only way I prefer to mess with it on Linux..

I only use my SageTV servers as servers and they don't playback anything so they don't need beefy video cards or anything. I use HD-300 clients throughout the house or placeshifter..

I like that both of these motherboards have 2 gigabit NICs embedded, and so do my 2 Lenovo 10TB NAS's (Ix4-300d), so I can have a frontend network and a backend network, which allows me to have normal frontend for SageTV Client or NAS client access, and then I use the second NIC on a closed network between SageTV and NAS for pushing / pulling data to/fro the NAS.. I also use the second NIC between my main NAS and backup NAS to run rsync backup jobs from primary to secondary on their own pipe..

I do like both the Windows and Linux installs of SageTV, The Windows one runs fine on the D525 CPU with 8g RAM installed. The Linux one was fine to install, following instructions found on Hauppauge link above, then following steps here to install it: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62985 The steps for Java were a little different since Oracle pulled theirs off the repo, had to install Open Java (Java 8) via some other tutorial, but it went fine.

Maybe this info will help for something anyways. I used SageTV for a long time on Windows, but I never had a Linux license before and always wanted to build a Linux setup, and then Google swallowed them up and they went away so I could never find a license. Then recently I stumbled across the news that Google released the code and this was happy news, so it was on my bucket list to build a SageTV over Linux hehe..

Just Google any of the above part numbers and you can get an idea of what they look like if you want to check any of them out. I just bought all the stuff used for this latest project...

EDIT: One other note to make about the SuperMicro case, I have 2x2.5" SSDs in the bracket, but the bracket is actually tall enough to fit 4x2.5 SSD drives in them, a person could put 4x drives in that case if they didn't want to record to an external NAS.. In linux is really easy to set up a software RAID5. In the other M350 case I have, I bet you could make a bracket to hold 4x 2.5 drives (in mine I only have 1 drive), looks like you could do 2x on one side and 2x on the other side, mounted to the top, optional fan bracket..