@Breezytm said:
Since you are a Plexpass member go to the cloud with Plex Cloud. Problem solved. The only downside is you will need to purchase online storage. I currently have a QNAP. Over the years it kept getting slower and slower, which is understandable. I went full blown Plex Cloud when it first got released in beta and I haven’t looked back since. It works fairly well. Granted it is not public release worthy but it works for me 85%+ of the time.
This is a viable option if your library is small, your upload is fast or you are willing to wait for a long time to get your library up to the cloud.
I tested Plex Cloud and found that it worked well enough but I also found that my pretty large library of TV shows and movies would take over a year to get fully uploaded. While my upload is advertised at 4-6 mbs I get only 1-1.5 in continuous use and sometimes a good deal less using any tool I have tried including Rclone.
The other drawback is that your media must be stored in the cloud totally unencrypted. While that is not a problem legally for any one of us that own our media (excepting the US laws that forbid striping copy protection from media we own) it is a simple problem of privacy.
I was offered access to a high speed upload to get my media up to the cloud but I decided that Plex Cloud was too insecure and unreliable to make it worth the trouble.
What I have done is use a decent desktop computer with currently 50tb of USB attached storage pooled with StableBit’s DrivePool and running Windows with Plex’s server installed. That is mounted on an inexpensive rolling shelf and of course in on its own UPS. I tuck all that away in a converted bedroom that I use as a workshop. Noise, (which is pretty low anyway) heat and the myriad flashing lights are no problem because they live in another room.
The only drawback of my setup is power costs and as I calculate it that is a small part of my overall power use so not really a problem.
Unless you are sharing your library a lot all you need is a decent I5 processor in your server and you can get a good I5 desktop quite reasonable now. BTW: If you get your media in a format that plays on all your clients without transcoding then the need for a powerful processor drops way down and servers can run well on very low powered systems. (If you decide to use a low powered system it probably would be a good idea to turn off creating index files as that takes some power even without transcoding.) I know of a few folks that have their servers on systems with processors having passmarks in the hundreds like one I know of with a passmark of 685. But if you want transcoding then you do need more power.
The largest cost is storage and the price for storage has dropped pretty low.
I also have a Shield TV Pro that I have configured as a server using the storage attached to my main server. The Shield is NOT, at this point, a good server and it has some fairly serious bugs but it does have some advantages and it would work as a fallback should the sever part of my main system becomes unusable.
The choice of a server or server system is the largest and most complex part of setting up or restoring a Plex system and it is good to build as much redundancy as possible into whatever system you choose.
BTW: The server is not the place to try too hard to save money. The server is the heart of the system and should be strong and robust so the rest of the system can be strong and reliable.
