Plex server?

[BiotechBen]

Been thinking about building a plex server with these specs:

Athlon 3000g

Msi b450 pro m2 max (spare Mobo laying around)

5400 rpm wd Blue 1tb

1x8 ram or 2x4 if it makes a difference here (nothing fancy)

400w power supply (would get 2nd hand)

Generic case

 

(All transcoding for the files to get on there would be done by another pc, all files are 720 or 480p h.264, bit depth 8, aac, 30fps, .m4v 4.0)  all devices that would be using that server support that format.

 

Would that be able to do simple streaming of the content? I know that you can run a plex server from a ras pi so this seems kinda overkill to me.

[Haraikomono]

while the system look pretty good for its budget, i wouldnt go an old hard drive like that, why not ssd since its so cheap

for ram, id still go with 2x4gb

aside from that, if you have a good storage system, sure why not

 

[BiotechBen]

I currently have a game library drive that's a 5400 wd blue and see no real bottlenecks with it, if it's only pulling 720 or 480p, is the 5400 going to be a bottleneck if it's sata 3 6GB/s?

@Haraikomono

[Ezel]

You can pull multiple 1080p streams or even 4k streams off a single "old" harddrive with Plex no problem, these drives can usually do a little over 100MB/s read, that's more than enough for some 720p files. Although ofc you could consider a small extra SSD for whatever OS you'll be running.

[BiotechBen]

I was anticipating like a 120gb maybe for windows and then running the plex client. This thing is basically going to just do streaming.

[BiotechBen]

If the OS runs a little slow from the HDD, it's not the end of the world for me

 

[Ezel]

38 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

I was anticipating like a 120gb maybe for windows and then running the plex client. This thing is basically going to just do streaming.

Definitely, if you're gonna run Windows I highly recommend doing so from another drive (can be another HDD, but at that size I'd just go SSD), nothing is more annoying as watching your fav show or movie and it suddenly buffering because windows is downloading some updates or whatever and maxes out your disk's io.

[BiotechBen]

14 minutes ago, Ezel said:

Definitely, if you're gonna run Windows I highly recommend doing so from another drive (can be another HDD, but at that size I'd just go SSD), nothing is more annoying as watching your fav show or movie and it suddenly buffering because windows is downloading some updates or whatever and maxes out your disk's io.

That's fair..... 

If I ran it off my current setup, would I notice any significant hit to performance?

R5 2600x

Rx 480 8gb

2x8 corsair vengeance RAM CL16

ASRock B450 pro4

WD blue 240gb SSD boot drive

2tb wd blue HDD

 

[ccarofino]

2 hours ago, BiotechBen said:

I was anticipating like a 120gb maybe for windows and then running the plex client. This thing is basically going to just do streaming.

unless you plan on doing other things with this thing, i would suggest just using linux.. its fairly easy to use a cmd only linux distro and install plex.. from there its all gui based from the browser.. windows is too bulky if all you are doing is installing plex

 

ive ran my emby/plex servers off of an old R710 server for a long time.. in my defense its got 2x 6-core xeons but im not running any gpu's.. I have a few people i share it with and 1080 is what most of my content is and even some 4k.. its ran ok.. when i start getting 5-6 people on at one time i notice some studdering.. also this server shares a few other containers and even 2 vms (one being my work windows machine).. so thats not bad.. i think i have 2 cores and 24gb of ram allocated to my emby container... plex i just use for my playstations (since emby isnt on them).. that thing has 2 cores and 8gb of ram in total and plays like a champ

[BiotechBen]

9 minutes ago, ccarofino said:

unless you plan on doing other things with this thing, i would suggest just using linux.. its fairly easy to use a cmd only linux distro and install plex.. from there its all gui based from the browser.. windows is too bulky if all you are doing is installing plex

 

ive ran my emby/plex servers off of an old R710 server for a long time.. in my defense its got 2x 6-core xeons but im not running any gpu's.. I have a few people i share it with and 1080 is what most of my content is and even some 4k.. its ran ok.. when i start getting 5-6 people on at one time i notice some studdering.. also this server shares a few other containers and even 2 vms (one being my work windows machine).. so thats not bad.. i think i have 2 cores and 24gb of ram allocated to my emby container... plex i just use for my playstations (since emby isnt on them).. that thing has 2 cores and 8gb of ram in total and plays like a champ

So like if I wanted to run it from my main machine above, would I notice a performance hit on it?

[ccarofino]

3 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

So like if I wanted to run it from my main machine above, would I notice a performance hit on it?

you should be just fine, unless someone else is trying to watch something while you are doing something like gaming or something on your rig.. Also, the key to all this would be wired internet.. dont run plex server off of wifi.. you would just be asking for trouble

[BiotechBen]

1 minute ago, ccarofino said:

you should be just fine, unless someone else is trying to watch something while you are doing something like gaming or something on your rig.. Also, the key to all this would be wired internet.. dont run plex server off of wifi.. you would just be asking for trouble

Oh god no for wifi. mine has enough trouble going through multiple layers of plaster and cement board just to offer a connection. So with the 6c/12t cpu I have, streaming plex and gaming would choke it? The most demanding thing I usually play is forza horizon 4 or maybe battlefield 1. Lately I've been running emulators.

[ccarofino]

Just now, BiotechBen said:

Oh god no for wifi. mine has enough trouble going through multiple layers of plaster and cement board just to offer a connection. So with the 6c/12t cpu I have, streaming plex and gaming would choke it? The most demanding thing I usually play is forza horizon 4 or maybe battlefield 1. Lately I've been running emulators.

im not the expert on this part but if anything it might choke your gaming experience i would think.. i mean plex is super easy to set up, why not just throw it on your pc and test it.. im sure you could have something up and running and testing in like 10 mins

[BiotechBen]

44 minutes ago, ccarofino said:

im not the expert on this part but if anything it might choke your gaming experience i would think.. i mean plex is super easy to set up, why not just throw it on your pc and test it.. im sure you could have something up and running and testing in like 10 mins

I'm currently doing handbrake to get my movies up there so it can just go. Will check in tomorrow to give an update.

[BiotechBen]

Update:

Super frustrated and totally lost.

I can't add a library and I don't know why. The included help was like: "you just click add and select the folder, and it just works."

Now I accidentally unpinned the movies tab and it's gone and I for the life of me can't figure out how to get it back. The error message I kept getting was "you must be lost, there's nothing here"

It also decided that one movie I had was not the correct movie and replaced it with one of the same name but totally different.

@ccarofino any help would be appreciated.

[BiotechBen]

Sorta got most of those issues figured out.....

 

[Ezel]

8 hours ago, BiotechBen said:

That's fair..... 

If I ran it off my current setup, would I notice any significant hit to performance?

R5 2600x

Rx 480 8gb

2x8 corsair vengeance RAM CL16

ASRock B450 pro4

WD blue 240gb SSD boot drive

2tb wd blue HDD

 

No, you'd only notice when you start transcoding, that's when Plex is gonna hit your CPU to get the file in the right format for playback. But since you won't be transcoding on the server I think the performance hit wouldn't be noticable big.