Building a new server and I have a few questions

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Hi all,

Building a new server and I have a few questions to ask.

  1. I’m aware of the ability of Plex to make use of Intel QuickSync technology, can it use a similar technology with AMD? I’m interested in trying the AMD CPUs given their reduced cost for greater performance (according to CPU Benchmarks site).

  2. If it is to be Intel, I was looking at the i7-8700 (aiming for around 15’000 on the CPU Benchmark), however I was still wondering if this is perhaps overkill given QuickSync will give a few more concurrent transcodes. I’m aiming for 10-12 1080p streams (I understand that it varies depending on the source media, but I’m looking for an indication). If this will be overkill, please suggest another CPU that will cost less yet achieve 10-12 transcodes.

  3. Mobo-wise the limitation is storage. I’m going to have 2 Samsung Evo 860 SSDs in RAID 0 to host the OS and Plex Configuration/Transcode files, then another 6 WD Red HDDs (either 6TB or 10TB - explained later) in RAIDZ. The choice of Mobos that support 8 SATA 6GB/s connections is limited and expensive. My thought was, I could drop that to a “normal” level and buy 2 SATA expansion cards for the WD Red drives. Question here is, does anyone run them with something like FreeNAS/UnRAID, and if you do, do you have you experienced any bottlenecks caused by the cards? My thought was to get 2 expansion cards and plug 3 HDDs per card.

  4. Storage-wise, the total cost of the build excluding a RAID card is roughly £1342 (at the moment). I already have 3 of the 6TB drives, which means I only need 3 more for 36TB of raw storage at a cost of £524.85. However, these are currently a fantastic deal on Amazon. If I get rid of the 3 6TB drives I don’t have and buy 3 of these at a cost of roughly £1200, rip the HDDs out, and put them into my server, that’ll give me 60TB of raw storage at an increase in cost of £650. My question is, do you guys think this is worth it?

  5. I’m currently running PMS on a Server 2016 instance and I like it because I’m comfortable with Windows and it fits in with the rest of my network (updates/management/security monitoring, etc.), how do I implement UnRAID/FreeNAS along with Windows Server 2016 without going down the Hypervisor? I ask as there are issues with allowing QuickSync/GPU passthrough on an ESX host. Should I just drop Server 2016 and go with FreeNAS with Plex installed (heard great things about the performance on this)?

  6. I’ve read about the benefits of a GPU like the P2000. Would you say I should get a lower-cost CPU (even as low as an i3 or something) and pay for a GPU instead to do the heavy lifting on Transcoding? It is my intention to get a GPU eventually when my 4K library becomes bigger.

  7. Anything else you recommend.

Best,

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This is the latest configuration. I’ve swapped out the i7 for an i5-9600K.

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