I have a few beatup laptops that can probably perform as my Plex server, but can anyone give me a reason to not just use my main desktop PC? The one laptop I was using was solid, but I’ve needed to bring it back into service for work.
I’m just using a WD Blue in a dock with USB 3.0. My PC has more horsepower than the other machines, but I was wondering if there were any reasons that I’m too inexperienced to think about?
Thanks in advance. Plex has changed our house!
I use my laptop and have no issue. I would if it was mine.
While there are cost and power issues that many people have to take into account I, personally, do not believe that a Plex server should have any other duties except for things that are needed for the server to run like pooling software or other maintenance stuff.
Plex is designed to coexist comfortably with other programs it is just not what I consider “best practice” to risk unexpected interactions that might crash Plex or corrupt the Plex database.
Of course, as I said, people do have other considerations they must take into account but a Plex server works best if serving Plex is all it does.
Just recently I have switched my primary server to a Shield TV and I think I will stick with that but I also am not using the Shield for any other function not even as a client mainly because, at least for now, I do not like the performance and layout and functionality of any of the Plex clients available on the Shield.
Plex is, in its core functionality, a quite stable and robust piece of software but I just do not like it to have to compete for resources with other software.
My mac mini is both my server and my (only) home computer. I’ve never had a problem.
There is no problem. When I started using Plex, I ran it from my desktop. However, I have 3 HD TVs and needed Plex to be on 24 hours a day. So I eventually graduated to a NAS. Only you know what your needs (and expectations) are.
On a side note and for future considerations, the CPU horsepower isn’t the number one factor in performance. My desktop has a 5960x, 64G of memory, the media was stored on a single disk and a 1G Ethernet port. My NAS has a much slower i5, 8G of memory, a RAID 10 array and supports port aggregation. The NAS blows the desktop away when it comes to Plex performance. It’s not even close. The RAID and port aggregation make a huge difference (especially with multiple clients).
If you expect to run multiple streams and record a TV show simultaneously, then using a single disk will most likely become a problem. If you create separate libraries for recorded content and put them on a separate disk, that would help.
Plex is awesome.
Thanks for the input! I think I’ll use my Desktop for temporary duty until I can rotate my laptop back into exclusive Plex Duty. The whole situation is a good problem to have and I appreciate the help.
Just to add, I think it depends on your use scenario. I used to use my desktop as my Plex server, but if it was transcoding while I was playing a AAA video game…then, yea, there’d be massive stuttering in said video games, and task manager would show 100% CPU usage between the the Plex transcoding process and whatever video game I’d be in the middle of.
Outside of similar usage scenarios (maybe you’re a video editor, as an example), I’m guessing there wouldn’t be much of an issue.
