Home server/NAS build help

[M4X1M0S]

I'm looking to build a plex server to stream all of my movies to various phones, tablets, and tvs. My whole family and their spouses and inlaws will have access to this server and I'm looking to build a server that can handle about 8 concurrent streams at peak movie watching times. 

 

If anyone would feel so inclined I would greatly appreciate the help of a pcpartpicker.com link or any schooling that you can provide. My only restriction would be that I would like to keep the build under $2000US but I can flex that a little if absolutely necessary. 

 

My current plan: 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel - Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	$399.89 @ Amazon
CPU Cooler	Noctua - NH-D9L 46.44 CFM CPU Cooler	$52.29 @ Newegg
Motherboard	MSI - Z370M MORTAR Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard	$99.89 @ OutletPC
Memory	Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory	$109.99 @ Amazon
Memory	Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory	$109.99 @ Amazon
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 10 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$308.89 @ OutletPC
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 10 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$308.89 @ OutletPC
Case	Corsair - Air 240 MicroATX Mid Tower Case	$79.99 @ Amazon
Power Supply	EVGA - SuperNOVA P2 650 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply	$117.02 @ OutletPC
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$1621.84
	Mail-in rebates	-$35.00
	Total	$1586.84
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-29 09:43 EST-0500

Please critique

[paddy-stone]

with that budget you could go with a pre-built, for ease of use also if you don't know freenas or anything. TBH though you COULD just use your PC and add an HBA card if needed for extra drives if the chassis allows. Just install plex server on your PC to try it out and see how many streams it can handle etc for an idea of what you would need.

[M4X1M0S]

36 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

with that budget you could go with a pre-built, for ease of use also if you don't know freenas or anything. TBH though you COULD just use your PC and add an HBA card if needed for extra drives if the chassis allows. Just install plex server on your PC to try it out and see how many streams it can handle etc for an idea of what you would need.

I'd like to stay away from pre-built unless it's just hands down the best bang for my buck. I'd like to learn about the process of setting up the server and managing it also, not just plug and play. 

 

I see you have specs for your own server listed, how well does it perform? 

[paddy-stone]

7 hours ago, M4X1M0S said:

I'd like to stay away from pre-built unless it's just hands down the best bang for my buck. I'd like to learn about the process of setting up the server and managing it also, not just plug and play. 

 

I see you have specs for your own server listed, how well does it perform? 

Very well, but TBH the CPU is overkill and draws a LOT of power, so I actually don't use that any more... what I ended up doing was using an HBA card and moving the drives to my main PC, that way whenever my main PC is on anyway, it can also serve duty for file serving and such.

If you want to build one though it;s pretty simply something like this for example.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD - Ryzen 3 2200G 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Processor	£89.00 @ Box Limited
Motherboard	ASRock - B450M PRO4 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	£76.49 @ CCL Computers
Memory	Team - Vulcan 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	£108.65 @ Overclockers.co.uk
Storage	Crucial - MX500 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive	£38.94 @ Aria PC
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Case	Fractal Design - Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case	£99.95 @ Amazon UK
Power Supply	Corsair - CXM (2015) 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply	£42.64 @ Amazon UK
Other	PRO/1000 Ptquadport Bulk	£20.00
Other	10Gtek® LSI 9211-8I HBA Card, 8Port 6Gb/s Per Port SATA+SAS PCIe 2.0	£30.00
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	£923.23
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-29 22:25 GMT+0000

It doesm't cover ANY eventuality/use case, so bear that in mind. IMO the CPU would be good for many streams if it's not transcoding... if you're looking for transcoding support, then an intel would perform better because of limitations of plex basically, not the CPU themselves.

Personally it would be MUCH better to either have versions that all clients can view, so 1080p mkv 2/5 channel audio for example then you don't need to tax your CPU. It gets more complicated because of how many clients and varying hardware you may have to support... if the device that plex client is runing on doesn't support the resolution/framerate and/or audio of the stream, them in tries to transcode it. IMO if anyone runs into issues like that you'd be better off making more versions of your content to support that than trying to transcode, you'd need a very beefy CPU to handle all those streams and transcoding, I'd say it's likely it wouldn't cope even and crap out. You could however have a backup plan and set up a VPN to your network for your clients to connect to if they evperience these problems, and then download the content they had a problem with maybe... then they'd get the actual content on their local device that they could play with KODI for example that will play just about anything and just resolves it's problems with framerates/audio etc... in fact if your client wanted they could just use kodi to stream through the VPN into your network instead of downloading.

Anyway, I'll try to help further if required, i'm not an expert by any means, but have a considerable history with problems with plex regarding streaming though, lol

 

[M4X1M0S]

33 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Very well, but TBH the CPU is overkill and draws a LOT of power, so I actually don't use that any more... what I ended up doing was using an HBA card and moving the drives to my main PC, that way whenever my main PC is on anyway, it can also serve duty for file serving and such.

If you want to build one though it;s pretty simply something like this for example.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD - Ryzen 3 2200G 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Processor	£89.00 @ Box Limited
Motherboard	ASRock - B450M PRO4 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	£76.49 @ CCL Computers
Memory	Team - Vulcan 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	£108.65 @ Overclockers.co.uk
Storage	Crucial - MX500 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive	£38.94 @ Aria PC
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Storage	Seagate - IronWolf 4 TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive	£104.39 @ CCL Computers
Case	Fractal Design - Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case	£99.95 @ Amazon UK
Power Supply	Corsair - CXM (2015) 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply	£42.64 @ Amazon UK
Other	PRO/1000 Ptquadport Bulk	£20.00
Other	10Gtek® LSI 9211-8I HBA Card, 8Port 6Gb/s Per Port SATA+SAS PCIe 2.0	£30.00
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	£923.23
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-29 22:25 GMT+0000

It doesm't cover ANY eventuality/use case, so bear that in mind. IMO the CPU would be good for many streams if it's not transcoding... if you're looking for transcoding support, then an intel would perform better because of limitations of plex basically, not the CPU themselves.

Personally it would be MUCH better to either have versions that all clients can view, so 1080p mkv 2/5 channel audio for example then you don't need to tax your CPU. It gets more complicated because of how many clients and varying hardware you may have to support... if the device that plex client is runing on doesn't support the resolution/framerate and/or audio of the stream, them in tries to transcode it. IMO if anyone runs into issues like that you'd be better off making more versions of your content to support that than trying to transcode, you'd need a very beefy CPU to handle all those streams and transcoding, I'd say it's likely it wouldn't cope even and crap out. You could however have a backup plan and set up a VPN to your network for your clients to connect to if they evperience these problems, and then download the content they had a problem with maybe... then they'd get the actual content on their local device that they could play with KODI for example that will play just about anything and just resolves it's problems with framerates/audio etc... in fact if your client wanted they could just use kodi to stream through the VPN into your network instead of downloading.

Anyway, I'll try to help further if required, i'm not an expert by any means, but have a considerable history with problems with plex regarding streaming though, lol

 

Just so I'm clear. I've been burning my movies as mp4, if I do it a mkv instead then that eliminates or reduces the transcoding requirements? 

 

And thank you! I'm brand new at this and you've given the clearest answer I've gotten yet. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 hours ago, M4X1M0S said:

Just so I'm clear. I've been burning my movies as mp4, if I do it a mkv instead then that eliminates or reduces the transcoding requirements? 

 

And thank you! I'm brand new at this and you've given the clearest answer I've gotten yet. 

Its the codec and bitrate that matter, not the container. It also depends on what the clients can play.

 

How much do you care about noise and power?

 

You can get much more bang for your buck with something like dual 2011 or dual 1366 systems, and you get more server features like impi and ecc.

 

What os are you running?  You probably want a boot ssd.

[paddy-stone]

15 hours ago, M4X1M0S said:

Just so I'm clear. I've been burning my movies as mp4, if I do it a mkv instead then that eliminates or reduces the transcoding requirements? 

 

And thank you! I'm brand new at this and you've given the clearest answer I've gotten yet. 

No, that was just an example, and as @Electronics Wizardy said, it's actually an example of container file (mkv/mp4) not the Codecs, the codec would be for example x264 for video and aac/mp3 or whatever for audio... so you could check what capabilities all your "clients" have for playing back video and audio and pick something suitable that most if not all could play without transcoding to save you having to have MUCH better hardware to deal with that. <ost newer devices, in the last couple of years should be able to meet the codecs spec above. Even a lot older hardware should be able to meet that... even a first gen raspberry pi can meet those spec, so if your clients did have problems playing back as above, at least you could suggest the Pi as a low cost alternative for example. You can get a program called mediainfo that will tell you all about your files and what codecs they are etc  https://www.videohelp.com/software/MediaInfo

 

Also as above pointed out you could get older hardware to do this, but IMO it's not worth the headache, they are MUCH noisier, bigger and innefficient energy wise... just a personal opinion.

I think you should consider just trying out plex server on your PC first to see what it can handle streams wise. You can still share it with your relatives (clients) and see how many streams and what codecs would be better to cater for for example. Then go from there to figuring out what hardware you require, most times you could get away with relatively cheap consumer grade pc stuff to build your media server IMO.

 

[paddy-stone]

Oh forgot to include what you would see with the media info program I linked to, lol

 

[Salacious B Crum]

See my signature for an example this was built from a $700 pre built gaming pc I run unRAID as the os and Plex is running from a docker I have added allot of extras since its first iteration but you get the idea and as stated power consumption should be considered, remember if your running Plex your more than likely not going to power down your server. I have tested and can get around 6 - 10 concurrent streams but it really comes down to the clients as direct streams are very light compared to transcoded streams