Upgrading my Plex Server (Storage, maybe GPU)

[GoTeamAJ]

Hi Friends,

 

A few years back I repurposed an old gaming PC into a Plex server to start

 

Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI motherboard

i7-5820k 3.30GHz

32gb DDR4

RTX 2070

 

Regarding storage I'm currently using an external Seagate OneTouch Hub 14TB HDD. I know there can be a much better approach to this, but very unsure. I'd like to not only increase the capacity of the server itself, but also set up a simple back up system in case the main drive fails and I can hopefully save some if not all of the media.

 

I guess the first question would be if this is even possible with the current setup or would I need to look into a separate NAS to ensure the quality of the project?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What OS are you using?

 

Do you have space for internal drives?

 

Its pretty easy to setup a backup program, or raid with something like storage spaces to combine multiple drives into one with redundancy. 

 

 

Are you running into limits with encoding?

[johnt]

I would just buy 2 or 4 large capacity hard drives and run free file sync every night to copy the drives. I would look for used drives to accomplish this.

 

Your CPU and GPU are perfectly fine for Plex as long as you have a paid version of Plex so that it can utilize your GPU for hardware transcoding. The free version only utilizes software transcoding. Your motherboard should have at least 4 SATA slots so this method should work just fine. It's simple and doesn't rely on any RAID overhead or complications whatsoever. It's effectively a manual RAID1 config.

 

https://www.amazon.com/HC550-18TB-512MB-Ultra-Renewed/dp/B09NP4Y2JC

 

I've been buying from this seller long before LTT made a video about it. Very reliable company and recert products.

 

Let me know if you need an HBA card to add additional SATA ports to your computer. I'll send you a link. These have gotten expensive over the past couple of months, unfortunately, but still affordable.

[GodlyPain]

Assuming your case and PSU have the room for more hard drives, you could easily just get a few refurb drives from Server part deals, and pretty easily up your storage by a wide margin. 

 

and on the GPU front? You need the paid version of plex to use GPU hardware acceleration. So if you're doing that? The 2070 is a fine card with the Nvenc encoder... If you really wanna change things? You could probably sell it for $150-200ish; and then spend $90-120ish to get an ARC A310 or A380 to lower power consumption and get access to AV1 for effectively a triple win (pocket money, lower energy consumption, and the benefits of the newer encoders like AV1)  and, if you're not using a paid version of plex? You can update your BIOS, and then buy a cheap e5 v4 Xeon to get a generation newer CPU with more cores/threads for pretty cheap like say an E5 2650L v4 which is a 65w TDP chip, a gen newer (broadwell instead of haswell) 14 cores/28 threads (currently you have 6/12) and these are on ebay for $50-70 and that's if you wanna be a big spender for power efficiency, other models like the e5 2650 (non-L) v4 are like $5-20