Help with NAS/Home Server Setup

[ilookbetterfromafar]

Hey everyone. last year I repurposed an old Athlon II X2 dual core into a home network server. As I have gathered more media and installed more applications (read: sonarr/plex/gitea etc.) the dual core, and its old networking, has been struggling. I attempted to use Plex to help encode some of my newer HQ/HD rips for viewing, but Plex lagged all the other services on the server and basically brought it to a halt. I had to remove Plex to restore my auto downloaders/cachers etc.

 

I have decided that I would like to upgrade. However, I don't have too much extra money laying around, but thanks to some friends donating to me some parts plus the older case I already Have, I'm moving across to an AM4 platform.

 

I'm currently purchasing a 2400g to use as the main cpu, which I will probably upgrade later on. (the parts: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Yn37YH)

 

My issue is that I would like to run my harddrives (currently 2 3TB) in a raid mode that would allow me to just insert new disks and have it expand. As well as run Ubuntu with several applications such as Sonarr/Plex as well as Gitea and NextCloud.

I figured I'd try to use something like FreeNas, but the amount of information is overwhelming and I'm not even sure if it too much for my use case. I would also like for the Vega component of the APU to be accessible by Plex.

From what I saw on reddit FreeNAS doesn't allow gpu passthrough?

Should I just stick with software raid on a Ubuntu setup, so that the GPU component would be accessible by plex?

Any help would be great as I am not sure which direction to go from here. Thank you all very much.

[Salacious B Crum]

9 hours ago, ilookbetterfromafar said:

Hey everyone. last year I repurposed an old Athlon II X2 dual core into a home network server. As I have gathered more media and installed more applications (read: sonarr/plex/gitea etc.) the dual core, and its old networking, has been struggling. I attempted to use Plex to help encode some of my newer HQ/HD rips for viewing, but Plex lagged all the other services on the server and basically brought it to a halt. I had to remove Plex to restore my auto downloaders/cachers etc.

 

I have decided that I would like to upgrade. However, I don't have too much extra money laying around, but thanks to some friends donating to me some parts plus the older case I already Have, I'm moving across to an AM4 platform.

 

I'm currently purchasing a 2400g to use as the main cpu, which I will probably upgrade later on. (the parts: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Yn37YH)

 

My issue is that I would like to run my harddrives (currently 2 3TB) in a raid mode that would allow me to just insert new disks and have it expand. As well as run Ubuntu with several applications such as Sonarr/Plex as well as Gitea and NextCloud.

I figured I'd try to use something like FreeNas, but the amount of information is overwhelming and I'm not even sure if it too much for my use case. I would also like for the Vega component of the APU to be accessible by Plex.

From what I saw on reddit FreeNAS doesn't allow gpu passthrough?

Should I just stick with software raid on a Ubuntu setup, so that the GPU component would be accessible by plex?

Any help would be great as I am not sure which direction to go from here. Thank you all very much.

Look into unRAID there is a small cost for the os but its worth it my my 1 server is doing just that plex, radarr, sonarr, lidarr, jackett and runs like a champ

[Donut417]

12 hours ago, ilookbetterfromafar said:

Plex to help encode some of my newer HQ/HD rips for viewing,

So your transcoding? Not sure if you have enough horsepower. 

[2FA]

14 hours ago, ilookbetterfromafar said:

I'm currently purchasing a 2400g to use as the main cpu

Plex does not support hardware transcoding on AMD GPUs at all in Linux. Only Intel QuickSync and Nvidia NVENC are supported.

 

EDIT: Actually just looked into this, Plex supports AMD GPUs for HW transcoding but only if the server runs on Windows, maybe FreeBSD (not sure on that).

[ilookbetterfromafar]

16 hours ago, mrbilky said:

Look into unRAID there is a small cost for the os but its worth it my my 1 server is doing just that plex, radarr, sonarr, lidarr, jackett and runs like a champ

I kinda wanted to avoid spending money. But the more I look at unraid the more it looks like what I'd probably want.

13 hours ago, Donut417 said:

So your transcoding? Not sure if you have enough horsepower. 

From what I've seen on reddit, the 2400g was enough for 2-3 streams. But I'll only be using one stream at any given time really.

11 hours ago, 2FA said:

Plex does not support hardware transcoding on AMD GPUs at all in Linux. Only Intel QuickSync and Nvidia NVENC are supported.

 

EDIT: Actually just looked into this, Plex supports AMD GPUs for HW transcoding but only if the server runs on Windows, maybe FreeBSD (not sure on that).

WHAT. How did I forget to check the offical Plex support. Sigh. Well I got 8 threads hopefully it could do something with that.

Thanks for the suggestions and help everyone.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, ilookbetterfromafar said:

WHAT

That’s for hardware transcoding. My setup as well doesn’t support this. So I just use software transcoding. It works. 

[ilookbetterfromafar]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

That’s for hardware transcoding. My setup as well doesn’t support this. So I just use software transcoding. It works. 

I should have just gotten the 2600 in that case lol. Well I'll move the 2500g to my HTPC when I upgrade from my Raspberry pi I guess