Need advice for plex server

Moldorm5 · August 14, 2022

Hello,
I have an Nvidia shield with a 8to drive plugged in and Plex running. I'm running out of space and so I am looking to build my own server. I want to have some kind of protection, just in case one of my drives fails (I know that the only true protection is backup + ups, but I am really on a tight budget and I just want to have at least some protection, my data isn't that important, it's just time-consuming to download 8To of files again). I read about raid 1/5/10, I also heard that unraid have some settings for data protection, and I am not sure what configuration would be the best for my case. That's why I am posting here, hoping someone more experienced than me can give me some advice. Thank you ahead for taking the time to read this message and maybe taking the time to answer me :D.

LIGISTX · August 14, 2022

7 hours ago, Moldorm5 said:

Hello,
I have an Nvidia shield with a 8to drive plugged in and Plex running. I'm running out of space and so I am looking to build my own server. I want to have some kind of protection, just in case one of my drives fails (I know that the only true protection is backup + ups, but I am really on a tight budget and I just want to have at least some protection, my data isn't that important, it's just time-consuming to download 8To of files again). I read about raid 1/5/10, I also heard that unraid have some settings for data protection, and I am not sure what configuration would be the best for my case. That's why I am posting here, hoping someone more experienced than me can give me some advice. Thank you ahead for taking the time to read this message and maybe taking the time to answer me :D.

Unraid does offer lots of flexibility as it isn’t actually RAID, but for most home users this is worth the trade off. But, we can’t just tell you exactly what makes sense for you, you sort of have to figure that out on your own… mainly need to identify what your budget is, and what you want out of the nas/server.

If you have an old PC laying around, it’ll work, if not you will need to either build something new or find a used PC - this type of machine can be literally anything made within the last decade. Then you just need harddrives, and how many discs worth of redundancy is up to you. The general recommendation is single disc redundancy is no longer “viable” since the likelihood of losing a second disc while your rebuilding one that already died is actually very much a non 0% chance. Thus, dedicating two drives to parity may be worth it, depending on budget and your tolerance for data loss/down time.

Id suggest reading some unraid threads and how to’s, and watch some YouTube videos. There is lots and lots of info out there, need to just start digging into it and then asking questions where you get confused or have questions.

voyager_ · August 16, 2022

Unraid works really well for plex, it does support GPU transcoding (you do need plex pass for this feature) and using Ram to transcode rather then the drives. Unraid's method of storing data is much more flexible than RAID or using something like trueNas. It is very easy to add additional drives one at a time or to swap out a failing drive You can figure it with either 1 or 2 parity drives and cache drives to speed up transfers. Dockers can be set to only use the cache, this works great with Plex since it will store all of the thumbnails and databases on the SSD rather then the Array and makes a big difference in loading time. It's worth checking out Byte my Bits and Space Invader on youtube, they both have great content on setting up unraid and configuring Plex.