Plex server/Backup NAS from old parts.

Salty22

Salty22

Salty22

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Joined
10 Jan 2013
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Going to be upgrading my cpu/mobo/ram soon and ill have leftover:
i5 4690k
Asus z-97p
16gb ddr3.

Was wondering if that would make for a good basis for a nas/plex server, and what other parts people would recommend to complete it?
I've got 2x3tb WD reds in my main pc ill be adding to it too.
Does GPU factor into transcoding (ill barely be doing any), because if not ive got an old Nvidia card thatll do the job for now, or shall i just use on board?
Something fairly energy efficient would be good.
 
There any drawbacks from it being overkill? Like power consumption etc?
I wanted to do a raid 5 setup for a good amount of redundancy, will this require a separate raid card?
Was thinking of adding in another 3x3tb reds for a total of 15tb before taking off the raid 5 redundancy space.
 
I’m not really that bothered if I lost a disc of movies/tv I can easily get those back, so what if I just used single discs for those?
Then maybe a small raid 1 array for backups? All I’m bothered about backing up is photos/videos of the kids from mine and my wife’s pc.
I currently back up to another internal drive every day then to an external 1tb drive every week manually.
 
Heard a ton of good stuff about Unraid so I’ll do some more research into that and maybe go with that for the operating system.
I don’t think I’ll bother with raid for the media array now.
My motherboard only has 4 sata ports so what card would you recommend for extra drive connections?
 
I looked at pricing before and seems reasonable really, well happy to pay for a good piece of software.
Would you guys suggest buying say a 120gb ssd for the the unraid nas? Is it still called a boot drive? I’m really clueless so really appreciate all the time you guys have spent helping me with this
 
Avalon said:
Unraid is a much better idea than R5, free trial, great community and great software, freeNAS is another option.

Power wise intel have used power gating technology since at least the 2xxx series, if its not used, the power draw is near zero on any unused cores. That said if you don't need transcoding 'much', its still overkill. I use a 4770 to provide Plex to family and friends with reasonable concurrent user counts, that said I also tend to push content in a direct play friendly format. I'd suggest before you go down this route and potentially make a storage choice that's not scalable, you consider using GSuite for your back end and unless you have a fast home connection (at least in the upload sense) a VPS of some description. I'd pimp PlexGuide as being an ideal project for you to have a look at, but i'm biased.
Click to expand...

Ah so Unraid doesn't use R5 itself? I just thought Unraid was like an OS and it used whatever file sorting format etc you picked.

By power gating performance do you mean like SpeedStep?
 
Spent a few days reading and pretty clued up on unraid now, just one quick question (save me registering on another forum for now).

In my rig I’ve got a 250gb SSD as boot drive, a 2tb old crappy hdd and two 3tb WD reds.
I’m planning to put the two 3tb reds into the unraid machine when I build it, but for now I’m going to be too skint to afford anymore disks.
The two 3tb reds are nearly full, I’m guessing unraid requires you to format the disks before creating an array so would I have to buy/borrow with enough to hold what’s on the WD reds for a few hours while I bulld the new unraid array?
 
I’m tempted to hang on building it until i can afford two 4tb reds and an SSD for a cache drive.
Just upgrade my cpu/mobo/ram and wait a couple months to do the nas then.

Is there any way to get NORDVpn working on unraid? Been googling and can’t seem to find anything about that particular Vpn.
I wouldn’t mind but I’ve just paid for 3 year subscription
 
Im looking into building a smaller form entirely new unraid nas now, what would be a cheap spec for just unraid with plex on it? cpu/mobo/memory/case/psu
 
Avalon said:
Do you need to transcode? Are you going to use local storage or GDrive? What else other than Unraid will it be running? VM's etc?

If you can direct play/stream then older micro servers (G8) are cheap and reasonably efficient, designed with 4-6 drives in mind and quite capable of a basic unraid set-up. If you are happy to build, then you have a lot more options.

Be warned, the more drives you add, the more likely it is you'll suffer a drive failure eventually and the more parity drives you are likely to want to cope with multiple failures. SSD cache (and indeed SSD's to pass through direct to VM's) are also a consideration. I literally spent thousands on drives/hardware over the years to populate two servers + multiple storage pods, now I pay google $10/m and Hetzner a few quid and don't have to worry about it.
Click to expand...

We normally stream Plex to the front room Xbox one, bedrooms LG tv and fire sticks in two other bedrooms so don’t think any of them use transcoding do they?
I do have Plex on my iPhone and android tablets but it’s not that often I use them.

I wouldn’t mind using the unraid pc for my torrent clients etc but I don’t plan on really using for anything else.
Maybe pi-hole but that’s about it from what I’ve seen they can do.
 
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