Plex Server advice

Armageus said:
M900 Tiny - with a Skylake Pentium G4500T - 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512Gb NVME and a 500gb SATA 2.5" SSD.
Currently runs several VMs including:- pihole, a dedicated vm for docker (which currently includes LanCache, and YCast), as well as whatever I may be testing e.g. TVheadend, newer versions of Emby etc.


There's various different models, but they are pretty much all similar - the M900 I got because it was very cheap at the time (think I paid something like £40 from ebay). I've plenty of experience with these "micro" PCs, as we've used 100's of HP Minis at work (800 G1/G2/G3, and 705 G4/5's)

Personally as long as it takes DDR4 then there isn't much in it - the older Haswell/DDR3 models are a bit more limited CPU wise (and most were limited to 35w CPU parts e.g. 2 core/4 thread i5's :( ).

https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
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Picked up 4x Tiny 10400T think it was m902 or 920 from memory but I may be wrong. First one cast 265, the next 3 259.

extremely happy with them and most of content is on gcloud.
 
whitecrook said:
As for people saying Synolgy , NO, build a system, it's classic example of this "While beginners generally benefit from a more generic, simpler model to start with, can I just take this opportunity to recommend this ultra-niche, utterly esoteric model to bolster my forum credentials?"
"

from this thread : https://www.overclockers.co.uk/foru...-forum-advice-for-beginners-in-full.18931829/


everybody always has something fast/cheaper/bigger/whatever . Boasting that something could be 'plug and play' easy is seen as weak.
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feck199 said:
Picked up 4x Tiny 10400T think it was m902 or 920 from memory but I may be wrong. First one cast 265, the next 3 259.

extremely happy with them and most of content is on gcloud.
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Welcome to the ultra niche, just in it to advance our forum credentials club. Or as the other tens of thousands of people doing the same thing for the last 5? years know it, the cheapest and most efficient way. Don’t forget to collect your internet pointz on the way out ;)
 
Avalon said:
Welcome to the ultra niche, just in it to advance our forum credentials club. Or as the other tens of thousands of people doing the same thing for the last 5? years know it, the cheapest and most efficient way. Don’t forget to collect your internet pointz on the way out ;)
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Ok.... Thanks for that. Really cleared things up for me.

I started on OVH years ago, moved to hetzner before moving to a NAS in my shed with a 7700k using the same cloud storage I used at hetzner. I couldn't put up with the noise and finally just gave up on keeping any of it local apart from some classics like Yes Minster, Last of the Summers Wine, Dad's Army and original Dr Who stuff that's hard to get ahold of. The tiny pc with a separate hp micro server nas + cloud is almost silent and a lot less power.
 
feck199 said:
Ok.... Thanks for that. Really cleared things up for me.

I started on OVH years ago, moved to hetzner before moving to a NAS in my shed with a 7700k using the same cloud storage I used at hetzner. I couldn't put up with the noise and finally just gave up on keeping any of it local apart from some classics like Yes Minster, Last of the Summers Wine, Dad's Army and original Dr Who stuff that's hard to get ahold of. The tiny pc with a separate hp micro server nas + cloud is almost silent and a lot less power.
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We seem to have walked a very similar path, PG/CB/SB user by any chance?
 
I’ve used PG but didn’t like it. CB and SB not actually heard of! I’d say it’s trying to streamline it for the everyday user and you can end up without a deployment at the mercy of their updates. I did create another google account for it that I use for my main storage, but I started on what’s now a legacy free account before they stopped offering them. It’s similar to the charity only option. Tied to an old domain I can’t get rid of as I’ll lose that account.

My OVH days are going back 10 years maybe more, hosting teamspeak servers etc.

I do use unraid at home, mainly as I liked been able to add disks but it can make you very lazy on dockers. The 3x tiny pc’s were intended as a proxmox cluster but currently only one is running proxmox, still
makes sure I learn something.

gcloud (technically teamdrive) is just run by scripts and config files, service keys. Much easier to backup and move across platforms this way.
 
pioneer2000 said:
Ok, so £480 or so seems to get:

Fractal Node micro-atx case
16gb ram
I3
Motherboard
550w psu

So “better” but not sure if it’s worth sacrificing the ease of setup and use and software of the Synology?
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No
Synology is expensive but rock solid, super easy to set up, minimal power usage and silent other than hard drives.
Unless you want the PC to do PC stuff (synology can do most things) then I'm not sure why people bang on about building your own, other than cost
 
tres said:
No
Synology is expensive but rock solid, super easy to set up, minimal power usage and silent other than hard drives.
Unless you want the PC to do PC stuff (synology can do most things) then I'm not sure why people bang on about building your own, other than cost
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Did you notice the title of the post you were replying to? This is a discussion about running Plex, at this stage Synology is selling PC’s with a backplane, they aren’t magic, like for like spec wise the power efficiency will be similar (the more recent AMD chips are phenomenally efficient, but APU isn’t as FFMpeg friendly as iGPU for transcoding, that said software is technically still superior and 16K of CPU mark is very capable). Nothing about Synology is special, it’s just easy but you pay for that privilege. DSM is already installed, but essentially your buying a software licence and some over priced hardware to run it on thats awkward/expensive to replace if anything breaks out of warranty and slow to resolve in warranty.

Running Plex on an SoC and being dependant on driver support and hardware acceleration with no capability to do anything unsupported in software is not a fun place to be. Yes, Synology still have some low end SoC based SKU’s, but they’re really not ideal Plex hosts.
 
whitecrook said:
does this 920+ do 4K transcoding in plex ? i was getting buffering on a xeon e1245 v3 trancoding a 4k hevc to 1080p other day.
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That’s because you’re trying to do something that has a suggested CPU Mark of 14K on something that has a CPU mark of 7K and a Haswell era iGPU, essentially transcoding 4K is still not a great idea. Literally anything remotely modern (like the J4125 Celeron in the 920+) will do this. I would suggest something more powerful than a J4125 is a better idea, but yes it will do it - just don’t expect it to do so well if you add things like the *arr’s and a few other services or something like SAB/Get, it just hasn’t got the legs if you have a fast connection.
 
Avalon said:
That’s because you’re trying to do something that has a suggested CPU Mark of 14K on something that has a CPU mark of 7K and a Haswell era iGPU, essentially transcoding 4K is still not a great idea. Literally anything remotely modern (like the J4125 Celeron in the 920+) will do this. I would suggest something more powerful than a J4125 is a better idea, but yes it will do it - just don’t expect it to do so well if you add things like the *arr’s and a few other services or something like SAB/Get, it just hasn’t got the legs if you have a fast connection.
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ok cool so this 920+ should do better than my old r210 xeon for plex then?
Nice. Have a 500mb connection, this will be ok for sab etc (i used to use sab and couch etc on a c2d e6700) but you saying this unit will struggle to do 4k and binary decoding unzipping at same time but 1 or other is fine? Sounds good to me.


Also ifi buy plex pass do i benefit from the ‘hardware’ transcoding they offer?
 
Anything with a remotely modern iGPU with support for your chosen codec/bit-rate will wipe the floor with what you currently have. I say that as an owner of a R210-II with 1270v1 in it, great little general servers, but useless for Plex as you can’t make use of the iGPU due to the way dell implemented remote management.

If it’s just Plex, then why not consider one of the Dell Mini Micro’s or Lenovo Tony’s or a NUC? They’re lower power, have iGPU and are silent. I use a remote server to do all the leg work for my set-up, but my local is an 8th gen i3 NUC running Ubuntu, it’ll do more transcodes than I can throw at it (it’s north of 20x1080 in hardware, after that I got bored). I keep saying it, but one of those combined with an rclone GDrive mount is worth considering as you have the connection.
 
Great info thanks.

this synology will do fileserving backups, downloading, ... and plex. Currently also running jellyfin and ftp. I hope to also have this doing my own cloud style photo sync/backups, time machine backups etc just looking to consolidate.

May indeed look at a tiny lenovo for VMs etc but if i can load this up with all that i need then maybe not. As i said my last loaded box was a dell 755 c2d that did the lot then i got a r210 with 16tb, does most of above looking for something quieter, and less management of the system and i’ll got to 4x8 for 24 usable which should be decent.
 
jrwagh333 said:
My AMD 3600 and stock clocks, converts 4K with tonemapping without a hitch.
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You aren’t wrong, a CPU with 17K+ CPU mark can do a job that has a recommend CPU Mark of 14K, due to the way transcoding works, you may even get 2 running concurrently. The thing is an inexpensive Intel CPU+iGPU will potentially do significantly more, using much less power and leave the CPU relatively idle for other things. Your set-up works for you, my suggested set-up scales up for much higher user counts and is capable of running other things without them suffering. This is why my 3600 based server doesn’t do Plex and if it did, it would have a NVidia GPU. I’ll be interested to see where the new Intel GPU’s fall in terms of hardware transcoding support and price, that may change things significantly.
 
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