Plex Media Server - What should I get

EunSoo · December 3, 2017

Hello! I am interested in setting up a plex server mainly for storing movies and serving them to my phone wherever I am. I have about 200 blurays that I will be converting and storing on it and potentially 3 people could be viewing off the server at a given time. I need advice on what kind of components I should be looking for. Like what CPU, Motherboard, how much RAM and storage I should get. What HDD will last a while and isn't too expensive. I do have a spare ATX case I can use. Thanks!

79wjd · December 3, 2017

For three simultaneous 1080p streams I would look towards a 4c/4t cpu (or more). If you want to future proof and take 4k content into account, then obviously more power. I'd also aim for 16gb of RAM.

The motherboard doesn't matter too much -- just get whatever suits your wants/needs. I would personally opt for a motherboard that has a remote access feature (Supermicro IPMI for example) and integrated graphics built into the motherboard itself. I have a Supermicro X9SCM-F in my NAS and I can remote into the NAS and boot it up/shut it down, go into the bios/make changes, and directly access the NAS itself from anywhere in the world, which is really nice.

As for storage, it depends on how many movies you want room for, how large each movie is after encoding, and what kind of redundancy you want. I'd personally want some kind of parity raid (5 or 6 depending on the size and number of drives) which requires 1/2 extra drives for redundancy (so five 4tb drives in Raid 5 would have 16tb of usable space and in RAID6 it would have 12tb of usable space and could suffer one/two drive losses without losing any data). My personal bias is towards WD Reds, but Hitachi and Seagate NAS drives are good too ($40/tb~).

You also have to consider if you want to go with ECC memory or not, and that just comes down to your level of paranoia.

COUPER MILLAR · December 3, 2017

26 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

For three simultaneous 1080p streams I would look towards a 4c/4t cpu (or more). If you want to future proof and take 4k content into account, then obviously more power. I'd also aim for 16gb of RAM.

The motherboard doesn't matter too much -- just get whatever suits your wants/needs. I would personally opt for a motherboard that has a remote access feature (Supermicro IPMI for example) and integrated graphics built into the motherboard itself. I have a Supermicro X9SCM-F in my NAS and I can remote into the NAS and boot it up/shut it down, go into the bios/make changes, and directly access the NAS itself from anywhere in the world, which is really nice.

As for storage, it depends on how many movies you want room for, how large each movie is after encoding, and what kind of redundancy you want. I'd personally want some kind of parity raid (5 or 6 depending on the size and number of drives) which requires 1/2 extra drives for redundancy (so five 4tb drives in Raid 5 would have 16tb of usable space and in RAID6 it would have 12tb of usable space and could suffer one/two drive losses without losing any data). My personal bias is towards WD Reds, but Hitachi and Seagate NAS drives are good too ($40/tb~).

You also have to consider if you want to go with ECC memory or not, and that just comes down to your level of paranoia.

all of this is sound advise. Personally I run Raid 10 as I also store my games on the storage array too and didn't like the read and write hit that comes from Raid 5 parity. You also need to take into account the upload speed you are getting from your ISP. I'm running my Blurays at 18mb/sec which needs ~150Mbit/sec upload. However if your set up is sufficiency robust it can trans code the files to a more manageable bit rate on the fly when streaming outside of the home.

EunSoo · December 4, 2017

@djdwosk97 @COUPER MILLAR Thanks for your advice. What would be a good power supply. I have a spare used EVGA 500B but I'd get a new one if it will be more reliable than that.

79wjd · December 4, 2017

3 minutes ago, SCGazelle said:

@djdwosk97 @COUPER MILLAR Thanks for your advice. What would be a good power supply. I have a spare used EVGA 500B but I'd get a new one if it will be more reliable than that.

The B1 should be fine since the system should draw very little power. Of course, it's not the best PSU in the world, so you could replace it if you wanted to, but I wouldn't worry about it.