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Anyone Run A Plex Server Through FreeNAS?

iamdarkyoshi

I've got a NAS with an ITX motherboard, very little space in this extremely small case. It currently has an embedded AMD E-350 motherboard in it, and its just used as a NAS, with three 1TB HDDs in software RAIDZ.

 

What I was wondering is if I can replace the motherboard with an ITX 4th gen i3 motherboard and have good performance in plex. The current plex server I use has an i5 650, but the 4th gen i3 scores higher on passmark.

 

Now, I am not a software guy, and even setting up freenas for me was a struggle. Assuming the i3 does a good job running plex, how difficult would setting up my plex server through freenas be? I tried it before but couldn't figure out how to add my RAIDz array to its library.

 

Any ideas? If I can reduce these two machines down to one, that'd be great. Thanks!

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I run a Plex server through FreeNAS on an i3 3220, it performs very well and is stable.

 

Many people advise setting up Plex manually in a jail, but the plugin (which creates a jail anyway) works just as well from my experience (I've done both). Installing it is as simple as just finding PlexMediaServer in the plugins list and click install. Updates are managed in a similar way. 

 

Then just go and add the folders you want Plex to be able to access to the jail storage and you should be good to go. If you have limiting permissions set up on the datasets you're adding, you'll need to give Plex access to those datasets. I believe the way I did it was just create a Plex user (I think the user ID 972 is needed, or it may be specific to your install, I can't remember on that) and make it part of the admin group so it can access the folders it needs to. 

 

Installing scanners and agents can be done by SSHing into the jail or just opening up shell with the Plex jail selected and go from there. I have a message thread helping someone install an anime scanner and agent so I can send you that if you need it. 

 

EDIT:  I've never had a crash and updates have always gone smoothly. It can take a few seconds to transcode (majority of my library is anime so it has to transcode subs. If you hardcode them into an MP4 or something it plays instantly as it doesn't need to transcode). As such, I'll be moving to an i7 or Xeon later (I don't have the time to hardcode subs in MP4s for close to 4TB of video files), but if you have files that can be direct played, CPU performance shouldn't really be a concern. 

 

EDIT2: Also, if you just add the root dataset to Plex's storage sources, you can then go from within Plex's web management and select the folders you want to scan for media. 

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Well I run a small 1TB plex server with freenas with an old i3-2100, seems to be fine. Mind you I'am the only user ever streaming from it So not sure how it would fair with multiple streams. My guess is 2 high quality streams maybe 3 without issue. But I'm not to familiar with freenas and hardware usage myself.  Also the most my server ever does for me is downloading and playback at the same time. I think if you wanted to run VM's and or a a lot of streams having a proper quad core would be critical. 

 

Plex is straight forward, many guides available to assist. Now getting things to download and sending stuff to right locations can get trick for first timers. It took me ages and finally a friend had to walk me through it. 

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