New Plex Server

[PenguinMaster]

Will this server run Plex?

 

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F182918495762

 

i am looking to add a 10GB SFP nic into it, will it even fit?

[PenguinMaster]

What other Dell PowerEdge servers are good Plex servers?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yes it will run plex, should have plenty of cpu power for a few transcodes at once aswell.

 

You have one pcie slot, so a 10g nice will fit and work fine.

 

If you want a storage server, id get something like a r510 or a hp dl180 g6 as they have much more drive bays for the same cost.

[NelizMastr]

Such a machine for just Plex is a huge waste though. A server like this is a prime candidate for being a hypervisor. You can have a machine for Plex on there, a storage server and more. Just dumping a Linux distro or Windows on there with a Plex server is inefficient. 

 

To answer your question more directly: yes, it'll do fine for Plex. These machines aren't amazing for power efficiency, so don't be alarmed when you see around 150w idle.

[PenguinMaster]

20 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yes it will run plex, should have plenty of cpu power for a few transcodes at once aswell.

 

You have one pcie slot, so a 10g nice will fit and work fine.

 

If you want a storage server, id get something like a r510 or a hp dl180 g6 as they have much more drive bays for the same cost.

Is there any specific RAID Card that I should be looking for that is included with the Server? 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Chickenfans said:

Is there any specific RAID Card that I should be looking for that is included with the Server? 

 

Do you want hardware or software raid? What os?

 

 

[PenguinMaster]

20 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you want hardware or software raid? What os?

 

 

Which one is better? What OS does PLEX run best on?

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Chickenfans said:

Which one is better? What OS does PLEX run best on?

Depends on your use. What drives do you want? How much storage?

 

Os doesn't really matter, use what you like more. I mostly use linux as I like working with it more.

[PenguinMaster]

9 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on your use. What drives do you want? How much storage?

 

Os doesn't really matter, use what you like more. I mostly use linux as I like working with it more.

To start, I’m probably going to have 4TB, and fill the other bays later down the road. I was thinking ssds? What would you recommend.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Chickenfans said:

To start, I’m probably going to have 4TB, and fill the other bays later down the road. I was thinking ssds? What would you recommend.

Why ssds? Unless you got money to waste or a very heavy load(20+ streams at once) hdds will be fine here.

 

Id probalby get a single or two 4-8tb drives here, and add more as needed, with only 4tb of storage I don't even see the point of raid here.

[PenguinMaster]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why ssds? Unless you got money to waste or a very heavy load(20+ streams at once) hdds will be fine here.

 

Id probalby get a single or two 4-8tb drives here, and add more as needed, with only 4tb of storage I don't even see the point of raid here.

What Brand of HDD? I was thinking a max of 10 Streams at once, but The streams would be between 4K and 1080p, would HDD's still be fast enough?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

What Brand of HDD? I was thinking a max of 10 Streams at once, but The streams would be between 4K and 1080p, would HDD's still be fast enough?

Do you need transcoding? You probably want more cpu power then for all of those streams, or a gpu and get plex pass

 

I don't think hdds would be your limit, A normal movie is like 10-20mbit max, so for 10 streams were thinking about 25mB/s and thats much less than the max a hdd can do(moderns hdds can easily do 150-200mB/s.

[PenguinMaster]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you need transcoding? You probably want more cpu power then for all of those streams, or a gpu and get plex pass

 

I don't think hdds would be your limit, A normal movie is like 10-20mbit max, so for 10 streams were thinking about 25mB/s and thats much less than the max a hdd can do(moderns hdds can easily do 150-200mB/s.

I was thinking an 8 or 12 Core Server, with 16+ GB of RAM. Would these HDD's Do? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Chickenfans said:

I was thinking an 8 or 12 Core Server, with 16+ GB of RAM. Would these HDD's Do? 

Yep that hdd will work fine.

 

If you need transcoding, esp if some streams are 4k you gonna need more than that amount of cpu, I have a simmilar dual 1366 system and dual 2011 system I can test this on, but im guessing you need more than this can give you for transcoding.

 

Also what is your media type, with that many streams id just convert it to a type that plex can direct play

[PenguinMaster]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yep that hdd will work fine.

 

If you need transcoding, esp if some streams are 4k you gonna need more than that amount of cpu, I have a simmilar dual 1366 system and dual 2011 system I can test this on, but im guessing you need more than this can give you for transcoding.

 

Also what is your media type, with that many streams id just convert it to a type that plex can direct play

I was thinking of ripping Blu-Rays, DVD's and random Video files from the many old cameras we have. How many cores do you think I'll need? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

I was thinking of ripping Blu-Rays, DVD's and random Video files from the many old cameras we have. How many cores do you think I'll need? 

If your just ripping media, make it in a format that plex can direct play, then dual 8 cores will be fine, you can always get the 6 cores pretty cheap later on if you need more.

[PenguinMaster]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If your just ripping media, make it in a format that plex can direct play, then dual 8 cores will be fine, you can always get the 6 cores pretty cheap later on if you need more.

 Do you think I need to 10 Gig this Server then?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Chickenfans said:

 Do you think I need to 10 Gig this Server then?

 

not for plex, movies are pretty low bandwidth. If your copies files it may help.

[PenguinMaster]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

not for plex, movies are pretty low bandwidth. If your copies files it may help.

Well I am also planning on adding more servers later on down the road, and my switch only has 2x 10GB SFP ports. I want to add a mass storage server, and a backup server (Which probably doesn't need 10GB). I was also considering adding a logon server down the road, so we could access our files anywhere, until I realized how much Windows Server is.

[PenguinMaster]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

not for plex, movies are pretty low bandwidth. If your copies files it may help.

Can I use This Server?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Chickenfans said:

Well I am also planning on adding more servers later on down the road, and my switch only has 2x 10GB SFP ports. I want to add a mass storage server, and a backup server (Which probably doesn't need 10GB). I was also considering adding a logon server down the road, so we could access our files anywhere, until I realized how much Windows Server is.

Id run vms then, makes it much easier to manage and upgrade and change hardware. Look at proxmox

 

1 hour ago, Chickenfans said:

Can I use This Server?

I have that server running right now, works well.

[PenguinMaster]

18 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id run vms then, makes it much easier to manage and upgrade and change hardware. Look at proxmox

 

I have that server running right now, works well.

Or would this server work better?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Chickenfans said:

Or would this server work better?

Thats what id get, lots of drive bays for data, lots of cpu power, not a bad price.

 

So I have a system with dual l5630's and doing a 4k stream uses about 1/2 of the cpu power, so this system can probably do about 3 4k streams or >10 1080p streams transcoding at once.

[PenguinMaster]

27 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Thats what id get, lots of drive bays for data, lots of cpu power, not a bad price.

 

So I have a system with dual l5630's and doing a 4k stream uses about 1/2 of the cpu power, so this system can probably do about 3 4k streams or >10 1080p streams transcoding at once.

So the Dell machine is better than the HP?

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

So the Dell machine is better than the HP?

There going to be basically the same, the hp is very loud, and hp has more limits on things like bios updates than dell, but the dell limited to 8 dimm sticks in the system. Really both will work fine here.