Plex Home Server Bottleneck

[Rogers24]

I'm trying to figure out the bottleneck on my home Plex server.

Intel i5 8400

asrock z390 pro4

GeForce rtx 2070 super

Windows 10 raid 5

home plex server application

using various drives.

Total pool is 25.9 tb 

usable is 16.5tb

The drives run through a PCI-E 1X Interface 3.0 10 Port SATA Card

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DYVX5VJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

I want to be able to stream 4k high-bitrate movies and still have to ability to game when I want. 

How would you fix this setup?

 

 

 

[johnt]

You want to stream 4k content over your lan and use this machine to game locally?

[Rogers24]

Yes

[LIGISTX]

10 minutes ago, Rogers24 said:

I'm trying to figure out the bottleneck on my home Plex server.

Intel i5 8400

asrock z390 pro4

GeForce rtx 2070 super

Windows 10 raid 5

home plex server application

using various drives.

Total pool is 25.9 tb 

usable is 16.5tb

The drives run through a PCI-E 1X Interface 3.0 10 Port SATA Card

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DYVX5VJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

I want to be able to stream 4k high-bitrate movies and still have to ability to game when I want. 

How would you fix this setup?

 

 

 

That should be fine... streaming content is not intense for the plex server to do, its just streaming data at a marginally low bandwidth (for internal networking and harddrives its very low bandwidth.......). Transcoding takes a lot of power, but that would not be "streaming 4k hihg-bitrate movies", that would be transcoding them down to not 4k.

[johnt]

4 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

That should be fine... streaming content is not intense for the plex server to do, its just streaming data at a marginally low bandwidth (for internal networking and harddrives its very low bandwidth.......). Transcoding takes a lot of power, but that would not be "streaming 4k hihg-bitrate movies", that would be transcoding them down to not 4k.

Nearly all mobile devices require transcoding. Even playing in Chrome requires transcoding. Technically the 2070 should be able to take care of that, but I am not sure if that requires a paid version of Plex these days.

 

Also, depending on the game and where it is located, the CPU could be a bottle neck for demanding games, and the storage is going to be a big problem with the RAID5 overhead for modern games.

 

I think it's a decent spec machine for gaming or Plex streaming, but both at the same time is going to be a stretch for the CPU.

[Needfuldoer]

18 minutes ago, johnt said:

Nearly all mobile devices require transcoding. Even playing in Chrome requires transcoding. Technically the 2070 should be able to take care of that, but I am not sure if that requires a paid version of Plex these days.

Yes, hardware transcoding is a feature you need Plex Pass to enable.

 

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

 

The i5-8400 also supports Quick Sync Video, so if there's any concern about adding transcoding to the 2070's workload, you can have the otherwise idle iGPU do it instead.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I wouldn't be surprised if that SATA card is a huge bottleneck too.  There's a reason its recommended to use old SAS RAID cards in HBA mode rather than cheap SATA cards.

 

I'm also quite baffled at the use of a bunch of different sized drives for a RAID5.  Seems like a huge waste of storage space.

 

Personally I avoid RAID altogether, carefully grouping my genres per drive and doing regular backups.  As a bunch of random drives might save on the cost of drives, but then what about backups?

[johnt]

4 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I wouldn't be surprised if that SATA card is a huge bottleneck too. 

...

As a bunch of random drives might save on the cost of drives, but then what about backups?

There are a few best practices that could be improved in this situation. I'm not going to look up each one of those drives, but if he has data on blue and green WD drives, or running newer games from a 5400rpm drive, and with RAID5 overhead... yikes... His board supports NVME or M.2 connections in general. Hopefully that's what he is using for OS and games.

 

I think the RAID configuration is supposed to provide the back up, no? RAID5 can lose one disk and still rebuild. Though with this many drives, it's possible to lose another drive during the rebuild.

[Alex Atkin UK]

54 minutes ago, johnt said:

There are a few best practices that could be improved in this situation. I'm not going to look up each one of those drives, but if he has data on blue and green WD drives, or running newer games from a 5400rpm drive, and with RAID5 overhead... yikes... His board supports NVME or M.2 connections in general. Hopefully that's what he is using for OS and games.

 

I think the RAID configuration is supposed to provide the back up, no? RAID5 can lose one disk and still rebuild. Though with this many drives, it's possible to lose another drive during the rebuild.

Well as they say, RAID is not a backup.

 

Also when striping, I believe different models and sizes will have an impact as the speed and latency could be wildly different between drives.

Its one of the reasons I never bothered with RAID, as I built up my collection of drives slowly over time.

[johnt]

11 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

one of the reasons I never bothered with RAID, as I built up my collection of drives slowly over time.

So how do you back up?

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, johnt said:

So how do you back up?

 

Two of these with a bunch of drives of matching capacity to what I have in my NAS so I can do a 1:1 backup of each drive using rsync, at the same time.  As not all drives will have changed, and some will be large and others small files, using USB is not a huge bottleneck.

[johnt]

5 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Two of these with a bunch of drives of matching capacity to what I have in my NAS so I can do a 1:1 backup of each drive using rsync, at the same time.  As not all drives will have changed, and some will be large and others small files, using USB is not a huge bottleneck.

Oh that’s a lot more than what I was expecting lol it’s a great idea though.

[Alex Atkin UK]

41 minutes ago, johnt said:

Oh that’s a lot more than what I was expecting lol it’s a great idea though.

It was never practical for me to do RAID as I could only afford to add more storage as I needed it.  A RAID is only useful if you have redundancy, which means not only do you lose some of the drive space to that redundancy, you also can't expand its size without increasing the size of the ALL the drives at the same time.

 

Then to backup that RAID, you need a duplicate RAID with all the same problems.

 

Using RAW drives has the drawback of not having redundancy, but for home use this is a minor problem as if you keep regular backups a single drive dropping out only loses the contents of that one drive and doesn't degrade anything on the others.  In fact if you keep a 1:1 backup, you could just temporarily swap in your backup drive.

 

Its a more manual process but as I've been using Linux since before home NAS devices existed (I had Linux as a router on dialup and this expanded into a NAS and web developer server over time), its something I'm used to and I trust more than something more automated.

 

So while I can totally understand RAID saves time and requires less user effort to maintain, I don't think you can beat knowing exactly what's going on and so know what pitfalls you can run into.  It also helps that I write my own web apps to manage some of the data I hoard, so its all part of the hobby rather than the average user where a NAS is just something they need to "just work" without thinking about it (but can also lead to data loss by not having a backup strategy).

[johnt]

5 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

So while I can totally understand RAID saves time and requires less user effort to maintain, I don't think you can beat knowing exactly what's going on and so know what pitfalls you can run into.  It also helps that I write my own web apps to manage some of the data I hoard, so its all part of the hobby rather than the average user where a NAS is just something they need to "just work" without thinking about it (but can also lead to data loss by not having a backup strategy).

Dude you're on another level. I started looking into software RAID and it seemed too complicated and untrustworthy. Even a RAID1 configuration is problematic because it's only as good as the computer and OS you are running it on. Moving a RAID config from one device to another did not work for me in my testing. Plus hearing about how RAID5 and 6 have slower write speeds really made me worry. Plus RAID5 is prone to errors during the rebuild. Forget it.

 

Synology is the only ecosystem where I've seen someone take drives out of one machine, connect it to another, and the OS picked it up and everything was up and running again normally. But it's not worth the price tag.

 

I do like the simplicity of your devices. Having multiple simple back ups does seem like a great approach. I'm hoping the volume mirroring method in Windows won't screw me if something happens to one of my drives. My setup is really simple for the time being.