Server for plex ... and other things

[jawadalsaeed]

Hello guys .. 

 

First of all I have no idea in this field and I want to learn more about how the servers work. So if you have good sources with simple explanation please provide it me. Thank you.

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I want to buy a server for:

1. Streaming 4K moives via plex media server (3 devices at most).
2. My brother want to Load kontakt libraries on the server to use them in his PC (the average size of one library is around 30GB).
3. Use it as a NAS. 

What are the components that I should make sure that they are powerful enough?. Also, Can you recommend me a cheap server that can handle my needs? 

My budget is 1000$ at maximum.

I saw some dell servers at ebay like DELL PowerEdge r720xd , DELL PowerEdge T30 ,T410,T610. all of them on my budget but I don't know much about the hardware.

 

Thank you for your help! 

[jtaz16]

My current setup is a i7-3770, z77 MB, 1660 super, 3x8TB media drives, and gigabit line to home network switch. 

It really depends on how large the bitrate is on the 4k streams. I have a few 4k movies that i can stream all at once throughout my house, except for avatar which is a 90MB bitrate, my harddrives are only capable of 170MB per second so two stream and its capped. The real issue is the player not the server whether or not it is powerful enough to "Direct stream" no CPU or GPU encoding from the server. My LG OLED brand new can stream 4k but my 2 year old 4k LG tv cannot at full bitrate.

 

Previously i had an i3-3240 that ran plex no issues, its just transcoding 4k movies was almost impossible with that 4 thread CPU. The 1660 super helped out tremendously with this! 

Also I would not recommend transcoding any content that is HDR, Plex does not have the proper programming to display it correctly and it ends up SDR and very washed out.

 

Not sure what a kontakt library is, but i would recommend an SSD for any workload application/Data.