PLEX on (2x) X5570

[cyrryanc]

I mostly use my HP DL160 for CSGO server hosting but I am thinking of trying out plex! I currently have 2 x5570 with 24GB of ram and as of right now 2 240GB ssd's in raid 0 but I will be investing in some hard drives in the near future. I have a few questions tho, how many streams do you think I can run with my current hardware? I will mostly be having 2-20 Mbps movies/tv shows and for the most part I will be streaming in my home network and very rarely to a client over the internet. Also what hard drive's should I invest in? I was thinking the WD reds or maybe the purples because I herd the purples are used for surveillance and designed for multiple 1080P streams at once. 

[leadeater]

With those CPUs you won't have to worry about hitting stream limits. I currently use a 2x L5630 ESXi host and the Plex VM has 4 vCPUs assigned, there is about 4 different people that use the Plex server and a very high bit rate video uses about 15% CPU of the VM so with that configuration 7-8 streams would happily run just fine. Your CPUs are quite a bit better and of course you can add or remove vCPUs as required.

 

Far as storage goes I use 3 WD Reds.

[cyrryanc]

Just now, leadeater said:

With those CPUs you won't have to worry about hitting stream limits. I currently use a 2x L5630 ESXi host and the Plex VM has 4 vCPUs assigned, there is about 4 different people that use the Plex server and a very high bit rate video uses about 15% CPU of the VM so with that configuration 7-8 streams would happily run just fine. Your CPUs are quite a bit better and of course you can add or remove vCPUs as required.

 

Far as storage goes I use 3 WD Reds.

Awesome! And yeah I was kinda leaning twords the reds since it will be up 24/7, are you using those drive in raid and if you what raid type are you using? 

[spiralfuzion]

8 minutes ago, cyrryanc said:

I mostly use my HP DL160 for CSGO server hosting but I am thinking of trying out plex! I currently have 2 x5570 with 24GB of ram and as of right now 2 240GB ssd's in raid 0 but I will be investing in some hard drives in the near future. I have a few questions tho, how many streams do you think I can run with my current hardware? I will mostly be having 2-20 Mbps movies/tv shows and for the most part I will be streaming in my home network and very rarely to a client over the internet. Also what hard drive's should I invest in? I was thinking the WD reds or maybe the purples because I herd the purples are used for surveillance and designed for multiple 1080P streams at once. 

people can be very iffy with different types of drives especially with the blues, blacks, reds, and greens. I think reds are a great idea but I've been using blues in my r710 as of recently and haven't had a failure in a while. It depends on how long and much you run yours? haha I started a war almost on here when I asked what drives I should use for my first server

[spiralfuzion]

1 minute ago, cyrryanc said:

Awesome! And yeah I was kinda leaning twords the reds since it will be up 24/7, are you using those drive in raid and if you what raid type are you using? 

24/7? reds ftw!

[Droidbot]

Purples/Reds are similar, just purchase what is cheapest in your locale. Around one 1080p24 stream will take around the performance of 1000 PassMarks CPU-wise, so with a dual-X5570 rig you could do around 8-10 concurrent streams. 

 

 

[KemoKa]

You can run a Plex Media server on a raspberry Pi. What you have there will run more streams than you could ever possibly need

For storage, I lean towards HGST NAS drives. But I generally avoid using spinning rust if I can at all help it.

A guilty admission of mine is that I have a fibre channel SAN with 16 seagate drives... and that's what I'll be using for my own storage server ;-;

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, cyrryanc said:

Awesome! And yeah I was kinda leaning twords the reds since it will be up 24/7, are you using those drive in raid and if you what raid type are you using? 

My setup is a bit odd, for other reasons. I use Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces on a dedicated VM with an IBM M1015 HBA passed through with 2 SSDs for tiering/multi-resilient virtual disks and present iSCSI back to the ESXi host for datastores, a 3rd SSD is used for the storage VM.

 

Edit:

Storage configuration wise the SSD tier is 2-way mirror and the HDD tier single parity.