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Looking to use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a low-power and small form factor replacement for an aging media server.

Currently running an i5 4690, 16 GB of RAM, and a 2TB RAID 1 array. Used for movie/tv streaming (with Jellyfin) and torrenting media (Q-Bittorrent) on Ubuntu 18.04. Transcoding performance isn't the best but it can direct stream with a plugin in Kodi. I usually only run 1 stream maximum (1080p to 4K media).

  • Would the Pi be a good replacement? The bench marks I've seen aren't the best compared to the i5 but it consumes a fraction of the electricity.
  • If not the RPI4, would a NUC be a better replacement?
  • If the Pi is okay, how would I connect the RAID array?
cantStop45
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    I had a friend try a pi4 for a kodi box, and it ultimately worked, but there were some issues with media encodes that didn't have hardware acceleration, and the pi could really only do one thing at a time (while doing it well). His old media box was soooo old&cheap that it was an improvement at the time, but he has since moved on. a NUC is probably a good bet, but be sure to look into the details of hardware acceleration. if x265 10bit is important to you, be sure its supported (it wasn't last I looked but that was years ago). – Frank Thomas Sep 28 '21 at 06:08

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I don't think a Pi is a good replacement - it does not have the power to do general purpose transcoding, and RAID would be a problem (maybe you could do something with a USB hub - it apparently has USB3 which may make it viable). Have a read of How does a Raspberry Pi 4 truly compare against a modern desktop CPU? about the relative performance of a Pi - in summary a Pi is about 1/6th the power of your processor for general tasks, but I'd imagine its a lot worse for encoding tasks, depending on the codec.

A NUC would absolutely be a far better replacement, and will be a lot more power efficient then your current rig (of-course it will cost a lot more then a Pi). It would also allow you to do RAID if you can work out how to attach 2 disks to it. (Likely you would need to use SSD which would be very expensive compared to spinning disks, although theoretically you could use an external USB disk). I expect a modern NUC would use a lot more electricity then a Pi, but a lot less then your 6-7 year old i5 - especially if you tune it as you might a laptop to reduce its power consumption at idle.

Have you considered NOT using RAID and instead doing some kind of software mirroring, archiving to an external disk - for example using rsnapshot or rsync periodically (which could mean loosing the latest changes, but if its just a media center, so what. If you use rnapshot instead of rsync you get cheap point in time recovery. )

davidgo
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  • Overall the NUC sounds like the better option. What benefit would rsync/rsnapshot have over RAID 1? – cantStop45 Sep 29 '21 at 00:24
  • Well, RAID1's only real purpose is to prevent data loss in event of drive failure (it might help with read speed as well, but thats not its purpose). If you accidentally delete a file on RAID1, or if a Cryptolocker like thing hits a computer the NAS is shared with its bye-bye data. Rsnapshot means you can roll back to old versions. RSync is just a simple way of only touching changed files when backing up, so its faster then many other forms of backup. – davidgo Sep 29 '21 at 00:43