Plex Server

[TetraFlash]

Hello LMG Fans.

 

First time on this forum, somehow only recently starting watching Linus and his team.  See him solve a lot of storage issues for people by going crazy with 45Drives setups.  I have a Plex Media Server running on an old gaming rig via Windows Storage Spaces and a mix of drives totaling 20TB of usabled space and 2 drive fails safe.  Well I have maxed that out.  What I cannot seem to figure out, is if I should build a regular PC with something like an NVIDIA p2000, or go with something like 45Drives.  No matter how much I research I cannot figure how to evaluate trans-coding capability.  Would something from 45Drives be completely overkill?  or not even able to handle trans-coding because of UnRaid overhead?

 

I am hoping for a system with a TON of storage, somewhere near 100TB, 6 simultaneous Transcodes MAX, and maybe a bit of extra for a Terraria or Minecraft server (like 4 to 8 people, nothing crazy)

 

Thanks for any insight you may be able to offer. 

[FloRolf]

I mean technically yeah, you could get a 45Drive Storinator. It's just crazy expensive and you pay for support etc. 

 

You cna probably get away much much cheaper when you build your own and run Freenas on it. 

[Kobach23]

For 100TB of storage I'd definitely start looking at professional solutions (45Drives or whoever) because that's going to be tedious to design/rig with home gear or store-purchasable equipment. If you like the challenge then by all means go home build.

 

Professional or home built I imagine most of your funds are going to go into the drives themselves. 6 transcodes isn't a whole lot, but what matters is the quality you're transcoding to. I have 200down/10up internet at home personally so I keep my Plex set to transcode like 720p 4mb/s to try and allow decent quality while still having a number of streams going.

 

6 transcodes of 720p wouldn't be super hard for me as long as I contacted my ISP and upgraded to 400mb/20mb to accommodate the extra upload bandwidth needed. If you want do something like 6 transcodes of 4k source material to 1080p that'll take quite a bit more processing power.

 

Part of the reason I fall on professional being they can ask all these questions and define better answers depending on their products and your needs. Hope this helped some.

[Jarsky]

You don't need a Storinator/45 Drives for 100TB if you're using modern disks. I have 100TB in my Fractal Design R6.

There are many cases that can support upwards of 12 drives...which would give 100TB raw even if you used the relatively cheap 8TB disks. 

 

As for transcoding, OP could use a 10th Gen Intel i3/i5 and be able to get ~20 concurrent hardware transcodes at a high quality with the new Intel QuickSync engine.