Plex NAS build

[H.B]

Hi, I'm looking into purchasing or building a rackmount NAS which will primarily be used for plex, and I may run some VM's off it too, I have just finished upgrading my home to 10g ethernet and I think its time to ditch my old PC that's currently hosting my plex library, I need about 4/5 max concurrent 4k streams with hardware transcoding and the possibility to add further storage later down the line, I have a budget of up to around £5,000 can some one please point me in the right direction I don't mind building or buying a ready-made system. Thanks

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much storage do you need? 
 

How much do you care about power?

 

I'd probably just get a premade 2u/4u server. Get some big hdds 18tb or simmilar, and get as many as you need for the storage.

 

The dual xeons aren't low, but at plenty fast for transcoding, and support lots of ram and io.

[H.B]

 

12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much storage do you need? 
 

How much do you care about power?

 

I'd probably just get a premade 2u/4u server. Get some big hdds 18tb or simmilar, and get as many as you need for the storage.

 

The dual xeons aren't low, but at plenty fast for transcoding, and support lots of ram and io.

I think about 20TB should do for now, Power I'm not really too bothered about

[LIGISTX]

16 hours ago, H.B said:

I need about 4/5 max concurrent 4k streams with hardware transcoding

Do you want to be able to transcode 4-5 4k sources at once..? Or just direct play 4-5 4k files and be able to transcode 1 or two at a time? Transcoding 5 4k streams is a very non trivial task… and probably a non starter. 

The current recommendation is to store 4k files and 1080p files of the same content so you can more easily transcode the 1080p version when required.

[H.B]

55 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Do you want to be able to transcode 4-5 4k sources at once..? Or just direct play 4-5 4k files and be able to transcode 1 or two at a time? Transcoding 5 4k streams is a very non trivial task… and probably a non starter. 

The current recommendation is to store 4k files and 1080p files of the same content so you can more easily transcode the 1080p version when required.

Will be mainly direct play of 4k files and then the 1-2 transcoding

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, H.B said:

Will be mainly direct play of 4k files and then the 1-2 transcoding

In that case, you don’t need much CPU power at all. I was able to do this on my old i3 6100, which had 6+ VM’s running, Plex server, truenas, etc. 

 

But depending on your needs and wants, I’d look at used xeons or potentially newer ones if the user market where you live isn’t great. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, H.B said:

 

I think about 20TB should do for now, Power I'm not really too bothered about

Do you plan on upgrading storage in the future? I'd be tempted to go ssd only with that budget and only 20tb of space.

 

Hardware wise, you can get something like a used dell r730/r740 or simmilar rack server. Should have plenty of cpu power and io.

 

You can also go with a desktop part like a 13700 or simmilar. That igpu will probably get close to enough for those transcodes, depends on the codecs your working with.

[H.B]

I may further down the line add additional storage but for now I think 20tb should do the job, I wouldn't mind going SSD only 

[H.B]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115864818321?hash=item1afa14d291:g:e40AAOSwPRpkt54h&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAAwJKS5PE%2FPjBe6F3XnHF8lpdkNKzwNPd9sJEVPzoCG6CX4djdZYa3xd0aqVmM9IsXoofyYyEtV8nZ8Lt6yYnZE9EnTfJK3cpOGqVkziywLbfThRGDqQipZAsV2wcVZhUM5eRW8BEyeso1uLR4CIprpyJtmcf3I9ZW9xpbh8coBo9DEi10bggqNUvd410GNvB0VPdESI%2FnHki0NIGOKmTAbN3XXKBs1ejLf47%2FGT9xndxxk2I6mu%2BA5p7UuheW77SexA%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR9Tv-d-xYg

 

Would this be okay?