I realize there isn’t a “best” option, but, i wanted to pose to the group as I’m a lifetime subscriber and figure I should take advantage!
Currently I run my server on a desktop PC with plenty of power. I run it as a headless unit. My issue now is I want something to take up less space. So, I was thinking of two options:
Run it exclusively on a NAS - ideally a QNAP. In the right environment, I could run plex on it and if i leveraged virtualization station could even run a virtual PC on the QNAP. I know this will work but when you get into the TVS series, it gets $$$.
Keep my data on a cheaper NAS (i have an older my cloud for example) and then I have an intel NUC (the one I have is an i3 so not sure it would suffice) and run the PMS on the NUC. Is there any performance issues using it this way? i.e. storing a movie on the NAS. Is the actually stream coming from the NAS or from the NUC running the PMS?
I’m not opposed to dropping some dough, but a couple thousand or more with drives seems a little excessive for a NAS.
My use for the PMS is media streaming to local TVs and remote less commonly to my phone or web browser.
I personally have a HP Microserver as the Plex server while using a Gigabyte Brix as the media player connected to my TV.
It can handle streaming a bluray mkv at full resolution while streaming a 4MB bit rate to an iphone/ipad. Any more than that it might struggle a bit but it is low power, low noise (for a server) and doesn’t cost the earth.
As for me
I have implemented PMS on an i7 Laptop with 256gb of SSD running Win 7.
(BTW the SSD helps transcoding performance by using it for the TEMP Transcode drive)
This box has a passmark of 9k
A box like this could be gotten pretty inexpensively.
After that add all the USB HDDs you need. (I have 100tb of disk around here all USB connected)
This setup is cheap to start with, performs fantastically, and inexpensively expanded.
I can stream 5-7 concurrent transcodes on this server
I also can stream 4K at the same time since my 4K media is encoded to direct play.
Do not expect to get any box that can effectively transcode 4K. I know of no machine that can do a good job of that without buffering.
This has worked for me great. I virtually have no problems and my server just hums along…
Hope this helps as an alternate view for you. So many folks are hung up on NAS and NUCs and Pis that they often forget the simple solution to this issue…
Basically, if you maintain a disorganized media library with all sorts of codecs and bitrates like I do, a desktop is what you want. Perhaps a Shield, if your library is small, as it has hardware accelerated transcoding.
If you’re ready to put in the effort and transcode everything to h264 lvl 4.0 or 4.1 with an aac 2.0 audio track and an ac3 5.1 track when necessary, then basically anything will do as you’ll never require transcoding. (That can be taken care of with the media optimizer feature).
I like the idea of using USB attached hard drive(s). I would be interested in speed comparison between gigabit LAN with a NAS and direct attached usb 3.0
Like KarlDag mentioned, I have a hodge podge of formats, and have never really payed attention, but, I would like to from now on!
* What specific format should I look for?
* When I’ve used the app on my TV, I’ve seen the option for transcode, direct stream and direct play which I’ve never really understood.
My media isn’t as hodge podged as it once was. I used (still do) Cayas’ script to convert my media - had a bunch of avi’s but not anymore. Most of my media will direct play on all my clients.
@bluria@gmail.com said:
OK, so I’ve read through and have a few questions / comments:
Comment - to be clear, when I’m referring to a NUC, I meant an intel NUC (Intel® NUC Products) - I have an older one with an i3 and small mSATA drive.
I like the idea of using USB attached hard drive(s). I would be interested in speed comparison between gigabit LAN with a NAS and direct attached usb 3.0
Like KarlDag mentioned, I have a hodge podge of formats, and have never really payed attention, but, I would like to from now on!
* What specific format should I look for?
* When I’ve used the app on my TV, I’ve seen the option for transcode, direct stream and direct play which I’ve never really understood.
Generally speaking, you’d want h264 lvl 4.0 or 4.1 with no more than 4 ref. frames files with an aac 2.0 audio track and 5.1 ac3 when necessary. That’s the most compatible format, I think.
Well I can give you my two cents.
My Plex Media Server is running on a Skull Canyon Nuc, Win10 with a SATA 512GB SSD (to take advantage of the media index files). Before I ordered the Skull Canyon Nuc (which totaled with RAM and SSD around 800.- CHF) i was running PMS on my old MacMini from 2011 (core i5 dual core with a passmark of around 3.5k). As the mini wasn’t anymore up for the task I considered the NUC or build a Megatower to also store my drives.
For ease of use, upgradability etc. I ditched the idea of building a megatower and just replaced the MacMini with a new Skull Canyon Nuc.
For storage I am using two 4-Bay Zyxel Nas540. They are quite affordable and give me around 80 MB/s read and 60 MB/s write speed, which is more than sufficient for a PMS environment. They also have the benefit of RAID-5 and therefore protection from a single drive fail which is sufficient for me. As a backup solution I am still uploading everything to Amazon Cloud Drive with an unlimited plan for 70 EUR/Year.
I guess my costs including amortisation of the tech (5 year linear), electricity and Amazon Cloud Drive are around 35 CHF per month plus another 10 CHF for my Usenet Provider.
So my private Netflix with 24 TB of usable space with much more of the stuff I like running on a Skull Canyon Nuc comes in around 45 CHF per Month including amortisations.
If you are looking for a cheaper solution than i will suggest “VOYO V1 Mini PC” as your PMS with USB 3.0 HDD devices. VOYO V1 comes with the latest Intel Pentium N4200 Processor (Kaby Lake) which supports HEVC (decode).
i built an i5 headless mini-itx unit that is placed in my media closet because im always traveling at work and you need something with a bit more hp running the transcodes
Well hopefully this thread provides some good information for others. I’m still playing around with things. I did some read / write tests from my older my world book NAS vs attached USB hard drive and there is a huge difference - 10 fold…and another 4 fold difference between USB 3.0 and the internal mSATA drive on the intel NUC.
So, I’m still playing around with the setup. I’m going to copy my media library to a 3TB USB 3.0 external drive, have it plugged into the intel NUC (with a 4th generation i3 processor) and set up a plex server and see how it goes. As a matter of pure backup, I’ll have Carbonite on the NUC and run a local sync backup to the networked NAS.
If the performance isn’t up to snuff, my plan is to get a latest intel NUC i5 that allows for an mSATA AND a 2.5 inch SATA drive. The setup will be the same except media will be on the SATA drive.
Well from my experience the actual data transfer rates to/from your media storage drives isn’t that important. It will always be more than enough for several streams. A 4K video file has a bitrate from 40-80 Mbit/s that means with 10 MB/s you have more than sufficient speed for playing such file. What seems to be important from my experience is the r/w speed of the drive, where the PMS database and metadate are stored, as well as the temporary folder for the transcoder. You wan’t to have those on a SSD, or if you fear the SSD wear level you probably want to create a RAM-Disk for the temporary transcoder folder.
However as long as your NAS isn’t sleeping you won’t notice a considerable difference when starting to play a file. (I do notice if my NAS has sent the HDDs to sleep, otherwise it really doesn’t matter).
That’s speaking just from the plex experience perspective. Of course you will see some benefits if you have a faster drive access (for instance while updating the library etc.) but imho that doesn’t really justify the tinkering with different storage options.
