Plex Upgrade Ideas

brmood03 · January 23, 2023

Budget (including currency): $750

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex only

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

I am looking at some guidance into upgrading my current Plex setup. Here are the specs i have for now....

M/B: MSI Z97 GAMING 5 (MS-7917) Version 1.0 - s/n: To be filled by O.E.M.

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version V1.13. Dated: 02/16/2016

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 256 KiB, 1 MB, 8 MB

Memory: 16 GiB DDR3 (max. installable capacity 32 GiB)

Currently installed: (4) WD Red 4TB HDDs so about 12TB total and that is getting close to being full.

What I am needing is some tips on budget friendly ways to increase capacity. I do no want to re-invent the wheel here, just make more space. I have 3 more 4TB drives to use, but the case is maxed out. While I know I need a new case, is there any other upgrades I should look at? I have about 15 friends that have remote access to my library, but most of them rarely use it. Id say on average, about 3-4 people use it regularly...but Ive never seen more that 4 concurrent streams at once.

What case is best for more than 4-6 HDDs trays?

Any other hardware pointers?

Will I need a RAID card or HBA to break out of my MB for more HDD connections?

**this is a tower setup, i do not want to migrate to a server rack, don't have the space.

Thanks!!

Gokul_P · January 23, 2023

18 minutes ago, brmood03 said:

Budget (including currency): $750

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex only

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

I am looking at some guidance into upgrading my current Plex setup. Here are the specs i have for now....

M/B: MSI Z97 GAMING 5 (MS-7917) Version 1.0 - s/n: To be filled by O.E.M.

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version V1.13. Dated: 02/16/2016

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 256 KiB, 1 MB, 8 MB

Memory: 16 GiB DDR3 (max. installable capacity 32 GiB)

Currently installed: (4) WD Red 4TB HDDs so about 12TB total and that is getting close to being full.

What I am needing is some tips on budget friendly ways to increase capacity. I do no want to re-invent the wheel here, just make more space. I have 3 more 4TB drives to use, but the case is maxed out. While I know I need a new case, is there any other upgrades I should look at? I have about 15 friends that have remote access to my library, but most of them rarely use it. Id say on average, about 3-4 people use it regularly...but Ive never seen more that 4 concurrent streams at once.

What case is best for more than 4-6 HDDs trays?

Any other hardware pointers?

**this is a tower setup, i do not want to migrate to a server rack, don't have the space.

Thanks!!

NAS Specific Cases do have more than 6 3.5 Inch Drive bays. Server ones are relatively cheap and give you more drive bays but if you dont have the space iam putting some suggetions here