NAS RAM & CPU

SeanWilkes87 · July 2, 2015

Hey Guys,

I want to make a 6TB NAS for Plex. There will be about 4 users outside my network. I was planning on buying an Intel Celeron G1840 and some DDR3-1333. Is that enough? I'm not going to use the computer for anything else but what I stated earlier.

kkpatel87 · July 2, 2015

-snip-

Should be alright...i would get at least 8 gb of ram though.

Goose Legs · July 17, 2015

What are your target devices? If your devices support direct play, you won't have any issues but if that server needs to transcode, you might want to get a beefier CPU otherwise you'll take a big quality hit.

Goose Legs · July 17, 2015

Should be alright...i would get at least 8 gb of ram though.

At least 8, 16GB if you need to transcode.

SnafuPossum · July 17, 2015

I have never had a problem with running out of ram when plex was transcoding with a 8gb system, sometimes it was transcoding 3 hd streams at a time. plex slowly transcodes on the fly so it isnt trying to do the whole movies as once. cpu is much more important for when its trying to buffer up some more of the transcode for the stream.

d3sl91 · July 18, 2015

Hey Guys,

I want to make a 6TB NAS for Plex. There will be about 4 users outside my network. I was planning on buying an Intel Celeron G1840 and some DDR3-1333. Is that enough? I'm not going to use the computer for anything else but what I stated earlier.

How many streams will you have, and what type of content? A Celeron will be good for maybe a couple 720p streams or one 1080p at best. If you look at builds on the plex forums or plex subreddit - many run i5 and i7 systems if they have more than a couple people streaming 1080p content at once. Ram is fine at 8GB or so.... but id highly reccomend AT MINIMUM an i3.

Plex support page on server CPU's https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201774043

Plex support page on more info, and ram info: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200375666-Stand-Alone-Server

A rough esitimate is 2k+ passmark score for each 1080p stream. according to http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php that celeron is at 2900. So, your cpu would be close to full usage just to transcode one 1080p stream. So, if you want to play content on a couple devices at once or want more headroom for lower CPU usage, higher res future content etc - again, I'd reccomend spending 120 ish on an i3 instead.