Plex Server advice

Waqar

Waqar

Waqar

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Bradford
So sometime in the future I’d like to build a server for my plex library, currently I’m using a synology ds918+ nas as my plex server and it’s fine but it’s not exactly great at having multiple remote streams. I’d like to build a somewhat small factor nas with the ability to hot swap drives like my symbology and I’d use freenas as the OS, it would be on 24/7 so I can access it anytime and I’d like it to transcode at least 2 4K remote stream simultaneously, if I ever am able to get a 30xx card for my pc I could put my current 2070 in the nas for hardware transcoding.
Can anyone suggest parts?
Cpu, case etc
 
I hope you take this the right way, but I'd do a bit more research on your plans.

I've just built a Plex Server to replace my 918+ and CPU choice and OS are important if you're doing lots of transcoding.

Depending on bitrate, and what you're transcoding down to you *might* be able to do 2 4k streams using a modern Intel CPU with Quick Sync. However, if you can't, you need an Nvidia card and Ubuntu is the best OS to offer up the Nvidia card. Using something like Freenas you'll have struggles unless you're super prepared for hassle getting the functions from the card to pass through to the Plex container.

I've gone for a 11600K Rocket lake as its got one of the better intel GPUs for transcoding, and where that fails a nice high single thread performance with 6 core/12 thread to fall back on....

Further heads up, you can't use LTS Ubuntu 20.04 with a Rocket Lake CPU as the kernel doesn't support the new intel iGPU in Rocket Lake - you need kernel version 5.11 or higher. Using 21.04 works just great.

A 2070 should be able to do 2 4k streams OK though - but again this depends on the source file and what you're expecting it to go down to. Read up on how to configure plex properly for transcoding (EG using RAMDisk for transcoding temporary folder, etc).

It took me a week or two of reading threads and working out what I was going to do to finalise it all, however now its sorted its good.

I'd recommend you also make sure you have the best possible solution you can at home for the tvs you're streaming to. I've got Shield TV Pros (not tubes, they dont like 4k Remux very much) and that is allowing me direct play and thus keeping my at home streams to simply network traffic loading.
 
Conanius said:
I hope you take this the right way, but I'd do a bit more research on your plans.

I've just built a Plex Server to replace my 918+ and CPU choice and OS are important if you're doing lots of transcoding.

Depending on bitrate, and what you're transcoding down to you *might* be able to do 2 4k streams using a modern Intel CPU with Quick Sync. However, if you can't, you need an Nvidia card and Ubuntu is the best OS to offer up the Nvidia card. Using something like Freenas you'll have struggles unless you're super prepared for hassle getting the functions from the card to pass through to the Plex container.

I've gone for a 11600K Rocket lake as its got one of the better intel GPUs for transcoding, and where that fails a nice high single thread performance with 6 core/12 thread to fall back on....

Further heads up, you can't use LTS Ubuntu 20.04 with a Rocket Lake CPU as the kernel doesn't support the new intel iGPU in Rocket Lake - you need kernel version 5.11 or higher. Using 21.04 works just great.

A 2070 should be able to do 2 4k streams OK though - but again this depends on the source file and what you're expecting it to go down to. Read up on how to configure plex properly for transcoding (EG using RAMDisk for transcoding temporary folder, etc).

It took me a week or two of reading threads and working out what I was going to do to finalise it all, however now its sorted its good.

I'd recommend you also make sure you have the best possible solution you can at home for the tvs you're streaming to. I've got Shield TV Pros (not tubes, they dont like 4k Remux very much) and that is allowing me direct play and thus keeping my at home streams to simply network traffic loading.
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Thanks but I decided to just stick with my ds918 too much effort lol, maybe in the future I’ll revisit the idea but for now I’ll stick to HD movies
 
I went Synology and qnap for a few years, but for my last few builds I've wanted transcoding so have just used a larger box with windows and gpu. Works well with Ryzen/AMD RAID, also with local game streaming to my shield. House is wired with ethernet, so I keep it well away to avoid size and noise. Just a thought...
 
I'm using an M1 Mac mini for my Plex server. Works perfectly, consumes very low amounts of power, is silent and has no problem doing 2 x 4K transcodes. Plex is still currently an intel App but Apple native is in development which should improve performance further.
 
pcfarrar said:
I'm using an M1 Mac mini for my Plex server. Works perfectly, consumes very low amounts of power, is silent and has no problem doing 2 x 4K transcodes. Plex is still currently an intel App but Apple native is in development which should improve performance further.
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Cool, but no way am I buying a Mac mini just for plex lol also I’d like it to run 24/7 so I’ll just stick with my NAS for now
 
Have a look into UnRAID. It can be done relatively cheaply with second hand parts. Mine runs an old 7th gen i5 which supports QuickSync and handles 4k transcodes with ease. I don't think it supports hotswap but changing and expanding storage is fairly straight forward. The beauty is that you can just add disks or swap them out for bigger ones really easily when the need arises.
 
I'm using a intel pentium G4560 with a 980 ti using plex pro so I can use the GPU and it works absolutly fine, actually better on my OLED using plex than HDMI-ing from pc
 
Aaron97 said:
I'm using a intel pentium G4560 with a 980 ti using plex pro so I can use the GPU and it works absolutly fine, actually better on my OLED using plex than HDMI-ing from pc
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If you've got a Plex Pass, QuickSync in the Pentium is probably better at transcoding than the 980. From memory, I don't think the 980 will do HEVC 10bit whereas the Pentium will.
 
You can pick up 10400T mini pc’s for less than £300.

I haven’t tested Max 4k streams but often have 1 4k direct play and 1 transcode. Along with 5-6 other 1080p transcodes.
It can certainly handle a lot more than that.

I also have a 11th gen nuc but the drivers and kernel issues are not fixed yet. It’s been resolved for the desktop version of the chips but not low power mobile ones.

I replaced an 7700k as my plex server with the 10400t dell system since it fits in my hand it has been great. Most of my media is located in the cloud now though.
 
I've just ordered a Synology 920+ on Amazon for £400 as seems a good price... been meaning to get a plex server setup for a while now and pre-built NAS wise this seems to be rated highly. Would I be better off custom building a mini server for this purpose? What sort of spec would be best for a plex server at around the same price?

Also, I've read that NVME drives for caching are often redundant, particularly for a plex server... is this correct? I've seen that there are Crucial 500GB M2 NVME's on Amazon for £35, so not a great extra expense to add if I will actually see a benefit?
 
@pioneer2000 Just looked at that Synology, looks like it's for the enclosure only? I am very biased, but I would go for Unraid - you can put together a cheap system using old parts or less than cutting edge, then upgrade as you see fit.

I ran my Unraid server with a Ryzen 2200 APU, 16 GB of memory and a standard X470 motherboard. That was used for general storage, Plex, CCTV and many other things. Recently upgraded to a 5600X as I needed to unlock all of the PCI-E slots, so the APU was out.

You could get a cheap case, something like a Ryzen 3600, some cheap memory (doesn't have to be all singing and dancing as you can run it at a lower XMP profile), a B450 motherboard and be laughing. Then if you want a bigger enclosure with more drive space, you haven't wasted all of the money on a fixed system that can't grow. It'll be even cheaper if you are willing to go second hand, in which case you could look at at Intel option with Quicksync.

One other thing to be mindful of is that if you want to use the Synology for CCTV, the licences are on a per camera basis and the cost racks up very quickly. Might be worth a browse of the Unraid forums for some ideas :D

Edit: If you go Unraid, it's definitely worth getting an SSD of some sort for a cache drive.
 
Is there anyway to get reasonably priced hard drives lately? Used to be the 14 / 18TB external Western Digital's were the go to for shuckable drives but they seem to have gone drastically up in price the last few months.
 
pioneer2000 said:
Is there anyway to get reasonably priced hard drives lately? Used to be the 14 / 18TB external Western Digital's were the go to for shuckable drives but they seem to have gone drastically up in price the last few months.
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Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but between a pandemic and a chip shortage, a lot of electronics have gone up in price. Those of us using cloud based storage are unaffected.
 
TangoEchoAlpha said:
LinuxServer tried using S3 to host a remote Plex instance. The short version of the project is that it was expensive.

https://blog.linuxserver.io/2017/07/17/i-deployed-a-plex-media-server-to-aws-because-why-not/
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That’s not how I would suggest (or for that matter did suggest) it should be done, even in 2017 when that was written. For context that was the year Amazon pulled it’s unlimited storage option and Google effectively took over the market for about £7 odd a month from memory. That was also about the time I began running a local server with cloud storage, worked perfectly for 1080 on my FTTC (80/20) line, obviously uploads were rate limited to make things smoother and I had to be careful what I recorded, but it worked pretty well and a ‘well known project’ to automate the whole process became a thing the same year :)

Hetzner Cloud gives you way more than AWS for £5/m or a decent dedicated server started at £15/m with symmetrical gigabit pre-COVID. You could also make use of the $3K of AWS credit promotion and do it that way for bugger all or the $300 GCC credit promo and keep signing up with new cards and literally pay next to nothing for a VPS.

At the time GSuite cost less than the power to run a local server, let alone the cost to buy the server or the storage for it locally.

pioneer2000 said:
I've obviously noticed, hence the question. I'm not sure cloud storage would help me with 4K/Atmos etc. MKV's?
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4K/ATMOS are largely irrelevant, in simple terms, it’s all about bandwidth and if your client can direct play/stream the content. If you are stuck in 10Mbit FTTC then that’s not an option, but for many people it is.
 
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