Hi
I have been running my Plex server on a Mac mini but that machine is slowly dying. I am sure 2020 will be the year or new hardware for Plex. The Mac is very loud when 2-3 people use the server at once (seems the transcoding part is causing that). So I would like to get hardware that:
Has no issue with multiple transcoding at the same time. I read some Nvidia cards seems to be really good combined with a good intel chip.
Machine that can stay on 24/7 with no real issues
I always ran mac Plex server because this dual cpu Mac mini was free for me but I am open to run windows or Linux. Are there performance differences ? Are all updated equally or are some better than others ?
For drives I was debating to do a drobo or other nas to store content. I like the drobo because of ease of use but I could also use a wd that my work is getting rid of wd ex4 so I am not sure.
I use inexpensive desktop hardware from amazon. For attached storage space to this server I mount and use 2 western digital mycloud 4tb devices which act like the file server For a total of 8tb of storage space. For hardware I just buy cheap i5 with 8 gb ram remanufactured off-lease lenovo small factor on amazon for less than $200 installed linux ubuntu headless. Both myclouds were about $300 in total. One from ebay for $120 and the other i got on sale for $179 at walmart. I store movies on 1 wd and tv on 1 wd. My idea was to spread processing power out among hardware not to have all eggs in one basket. Each mycloud has dual arm processors so 2 mycloud x 2 arm processors = 4cpu + 4 cpu in the Linux plex desktop/server = 8 cpu all working together to serve content. So there you have it $500 for years of faithful service for my home media needs. Since plex doesn’t appear to support any kind of load balancing, I actually have 3 plex servers but these three share the same 2 wd 4tb myclouds. The myclouds are headless file servers do not need hardly any ram, and never spike over 20% even in heavy use. Technically my full setup is (4 arm cpu + 4 cpu plex server + 4 cpu plex server + 4 cpu plex server = 16 cpu 26gb ram) for about $1000. I love this cheap setup and if has worked for years. One time, one of the lenovo desktops just died. I bought a new one off amazon for like $150…took the harddrive from the dead one, and put in the new lenovo and linux booted first try and ubuntu recognized the new hardware/model and I was up and running in minutes. Of course there is always plenty to figure out with an ubuntu setup…mounting and setting up static IP’s and blah blah. Anyway…hope i gave you some ideas. For me, the trick to plex is getting the movie content in a good format first so that it hardly ever transcodes. I use handbrake sometimes to make for example an avi file into a format that doesn’t transcode.
