Building my own PLEX server

General Discussions
1

Hey everyone,

I’m looking at building my own PLEX server for internal and external usage, problem is, I’m not really any good with server builds as I generally only ever have to build “Office” or “Gaming” setups which are vastly different.

Budget wise I don’t really want to go any higher than it already is, preferably if I could drop it to around £600-700 while not sacrificing to much that’d be great!

My requirements would be as follows:

  • Low Power (24/7)
  • As quiet as possible (due to where its located)
  • Good Heat dispersion (again, due to where its located)
  • Able to support roughly 4 - 5 streams at once (Likely to be 1-2 internal with another 1-2 external)
  • Small Form Factor (due to where its located)
  • Good storage / expansion options

I’ve had a stab at making my own build which be found at: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/sW9NNN

Not sure how good / over-kill this is, the parts I selected were for the following:

  • CPU - I read that you’d need roughly a 2k Passmark score per stream, this has a passmark of 10992 which should be good for 5? Might be overkill though
  • Cooler - Fairly quiet and should be good for calling, I did look at going Fan / Passive but not to sure.
  • Mobo - Didn’t really pay that much attention, it seems to have everything required
  • RAM - Cheap RAM (PLEX doesn’t need that much?) Also leaves a slot for expansion
  • Drives - Not sure if I should stick with the 2 500s or switch over to a 2TB HDD, will likely run Debian so boot times aren’t an issue
  • Case - Its a case, looks good, small
  • PSU - Again, cheap but not bad quality, does the job

Any suggestions / critiques / comments would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance!!

2

After reading what you have found, mine’s not as powerful as yours, but server + memory upgrade + 20TB storage, came in about the same price. But seeing that form factor (size) would be an issue for you, this route probably wouldn’t be for you.

What I did for my server:

I went to eBay, bought a used server for around $200. I started off with a server that had 2.5" drive bays but 2.5" drives are more expensive and quickly moved to a server that uses 3.5" drive bays.

  1. Dell C2100 FS12-TY Server 2x2.13GHz E5506 Quad Core Xeon 8GB - It’s 2U in size, 1 power supply and is pretty quiet, with the exception of the start-up. The fans will spin up to max RPM during boot but will spin down afterwards. I keep it in my living room and the volume of the TV can easily over power the sound of the server without being too loud and the heat would be an issue in a smaller room but it dissapates quickly enough in my living room.
  2. added 32GB more memory
  3. 128GB SSD boot drive (I use Debian and like to mess around and sometimes might bork something. This allows me to re-install the OS without having to worry about touching the data storage array). I’m only using 11G of 112GB for “/” and probably ~10G of that is Plex’s database.
  4. 10x 2TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s (19T-avail 6.0T-used 12T-free 35% /storage) I still have a lot more encoding of my personal collection to do but probably at around 60-70% capacity, I will start thinking about getting a second server and put 4+TB drives in, once those come down a little more in price, and move over to using the newer server.

Also, on this server, I run my own DNS cache server, SAMBA server, and whatever else I’m in the mood to play with. :slight_smile:

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@Taimaishoo - Thanks for the reply! Size wise the smaller the better, I might be able to go Mid Tower size which could help a bit on costs / ease of building but defo won’t be able to go up to a blade server due to space. I know how loud the servers are on boot after working with them for 2 years aha!

With regards to the RAM, was that due to PLEX or just personal choice? I’m under the impression PLEX is more CPU intensive rather than RAM.

Highly likely I’ll go down the same route as yourself with a separate boot drive as I’ll also be running it on Debian and will almost definitely break everything at some point, would rather not delete all the media in the process!!

I’ll likely only have PLEX running on it at the start, might turn it into a NAS Backup drive and maybe go down the route of having a AD style setup internally for everyone to have their own logins on anything easily, maybe even stick a small web-server on there and have an intranet to!

Did have a play around with a revised build for now http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Mattch23/saved/KqFFf7 might knock the RAM back up to 16/32gb

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Hello, I had space limitations and needed a quite machine. Here’s my setup for reference.

OS - Windows 10 Professional
MB - Gigabyte H87M-HD3 Intel(R) HD Graphics 4400
Processor - Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4150 CPU @ 3.50GHz
Power Supply - CORSAIR RM Series RM450
Memory - Corsair Vengeance 8GB
Vantec 4-Channel 6-Port SATA 6Gb/s PCIe Card
Case - Fractal Design ARC-MINI-R2 MicroATX
Extra case fan - Noctua NF-F12 PWM Cooling Fan
ICY DOCK TurboSwap MB171SP-B Tray-Less 3.5" Mobile Rack with 80mm Cooling Fan
Disk (B:) (3 TB) (Hot Swap Drive) - I back up to this drive.
Disk (C:) (Samsung 850 EVO - 120GB) (OS & Plex Database Backup)
Disk (D:) (Samsung 850 EVO - 120GB) (Plex Data)
Disk (G:) (3 TB WD Red)
Disk (H:) (3 TB WD Red)
Disk (I:) (2 TB WD Red)
Disk (J:) (Future)
Disk (K:) (Future)
Disk (L:) (Future)
5

@astrofisher - Thanks for that! Out of interest, how many streams would you have running at once for the i3? How do you find the performance and whatnot?

6

Most of my media is capable of direct play (mp4, h264, web optimized, high profile, level 4, with aac and ac3 audio, so number of streams is not an issue - the i3 was a good fit for my situation. I do have some mkv’s in my library that might require transcoding and have been able to transcode two streams. I only use Plex on local network and the max number of streams I would expect is 4.

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Check out my build for an example box that is extremely small, but can hold 6 drives of your choosing with more than enough horsepower to both run the NAS and PMS and handle many streams at once, while also being nearly silent and only using 40-45W idle.

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Here’s a link to mine. https://pcpartpicker.com/b/qbJV3C

Different, in the sense that I built mine around FreeNAS recommendations, due to wanting to use the ZFS file system, in an appliance style machine (ZoL would have definitely been another option). Just looking at the case, PSU, CPU and ram, it was approx $650.

I’m loving the Fractal Designs 804, which is a small, unobtrusive cube case that accommodates 10 3.5" drives and a micro-ATX board, while running at 80W idle. Again, different that what you’re looking for, but it never hurts to have other builds to look at!

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@astrofisher - Ahh okay, a lot of mine is MKV Format, I may be able to convert it to mp4 but some of if I defo can’t. Thanks for the info!

@sremick - Thanks for that, will give it a look over a might steal a few parts aha!

@ahughes03 - Interesting case, didn’t even consider it but will probably use that instead for the ease of access for the bays and whatnot, will need to find a board with enough SATA on it though, most I can find for a decent price is 6 due to the socket I suppose, might look at using a Xeon but not sure how that’ll effect it (does the clockspeed matter that much?)! Lots of room for expansion then depending on what I do with it :smiley:

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@Mattch23 said:
@astrofisher - Ahh okay, a lot of mine is MKV Format, I may be able to convert it to mp4 but some of if I defo can’t. Thanks for the info!

@sremick - Thanks for that, will give it a look over a might steal a few parts aha!

@ahughes03 - Interesting case, didn’t even consider it but will probably use that instead for the ease of access for the bays and whatnot, will need to find a board with enough SATA on it though, most I can find for a decent price is 6 due to the socket I suppose, might look at using a Xeon but not sure how that’ll effect it (does the clockspeed matter that much?)! Lots of room for expansion then depending on what I do with it :smiley:

here is mine

http://www.michons.us/2015/12/09/file-server-hardware-update/

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@mattch23 - frankly, i really don’t know how much of a difference clock speed makes when it comes to transcoding. I routinely handle transcodes for 3-5 clients, with my transcoder setting at “make my CPU hurt.”

If you’re looking for extra ports, you could look at SATA/SAS Controllers. My system has a Supermicro X10SL7 motherboard, which has an onboard SAS controller, giving the board 14 SATA ports built in. I have another LSI 9200-8e PCIe card that allows for another 8 drives (or more if I used an expander in conjunction with the controller card).

Point being, you’re definitely not limited to the number of SATA ports that come on your motherboard. Heck, even a 6 port mobo + a 4 port PCIe controller card would let you use all 10 spots inside that Node 804 :slight_smile:

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@starbetrayer - Thanks for the link, will have a look at it now :slight_smile:

@ahughes03 - Completely forgot that PCIe cards exist in any form apart from GPU’s and wireless when I posted earlier sigh Looking around, it doesn’t seem that the clock speed matters much as the passmark score takes it all into account so I may end up going for the Xeon, not entirely sure yet aha

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@Mattch23 said:
Looking around, it doesn’t seem that the clock speed matters much as the passmark score takes it all into account

Comparing chips via clockspeed is like comparing cars via RPMs. It’s of virtually no value given all the other variables.

so I may end up going for the Xeon, not entirely sure yet aha

Xeon is the best way to get ECC RAM support without sacrificing speed. They’re solid chips.

14

@sremick said:

Comparing chips via clockspeed is like comparing cars via RPMs. It’s of virtually no value given all the other variables.

Good point, I still have the habit of Clock Speed > Majority of everything else after it got hammered into me while I was building up a load of “Gaming” rigs.

Xeon is the best way to get ECC RAM support without sacrificing speed. They’re solid chips.

For sure, although not entirely sure on what benefit ECC Ram would give me in this case, I suppose the main benefit would be its error detection / reliability but would it really be worth the extra spend in this scenario. 6700k is roughly £200-£300 but for an equivalent Xeon I’d be looking at spending around £300 for something with a Lower Passmark, or £600+ for something with a slightly higher passmark

15

@Mattch23 said:
Looking around, it doesn’t seem that the clock speed matters much as the passmark score takes it all into account so I may end up going for the Xeon, not entirely sure yet aha

If you have the choice between several cpu’s with comparable passmark scores, picke the one with the fewest # of cores i.e. the one with the highest ‘single thread performance’.

cooler: I regularly recommend the bigger ones from Arctic Cooling. Require a bigger case, of course. But if you value a “quiet” box, it is easier to manage with big fans and low RPMs.

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@OttoKerner said:
But if you value a “quiet” box, it is easier to manage with big fans and low RPMs.

It’s quite amazing what proper cooling can accomplish. You’d never guess my box has 4 fans and 6 hard drives. It’s pretty much silent.

17

@OttoKerner said:
If you have the choice between several cpu’s with comparable passmark scores, picke the one with the fewest # of cores i.e. the one with the highest ‘single thread performance’.

Okay, it’ll most likely be the 6700k as everything around that PM score is more expensive.

cooler: I regularly recommend the bigger ones from Arctic Cooling. Require a bigger case, of course. But if you value a “quiet” box, it is easier to manage with big fans and low RPMs.

Looking at using the Hyper 212 EVO instead now, will get the job done better from what I’ve been reading, will give the Arctic Cooling line a look over though!

@sremick said:

It’s quite amazing what proper cooling can accomplish. You’d never guess my box has 4 fans and 6 hard drives. It’s pretty much silent.

It is indeed, I’m likely just looking to far into the whole quietness aspect as its not really that hard to do if you do it properly

18

@Mattch23 said:
@Taimaishoo - Thanks for the reply! Size wise the smaller the better, I might be able to go Mid Tower size which could help a bit on costs / ease of building but defo won’t be able to go up to a blade server due to space. I know how loud the servers are on boot after working with them for 2 years aha!

With regards to the RAM, was that due to PLEX or just personal choice? I’m under the impression PLEX is more CPU intensive rather than RAM.

Both, really. Although Linux is very efficient at using RAM, at 8GB it would use some of the swap file, or paging file, as Microsoft calls it. My swap file is on my SSD drive so you never notice it, but when it comes a system having to use swap/paging file, I’m a stickler. In my opinion, from days of old, if a system needs to use some of your swap file on a clean boot (or soon after a clean boot), you don’t have enough memory. :slight_smile: In this case, PLEX is a memory hog during the trans-coding process and if you expect more than 2 streams at any given time, I would recommend at least 16GB of RAM. I have seen 90+ days of uptime on my server and as many as 4 simultaneous streams with zero use of the swap file. Also, if you expect to move your CD/DVD/Blu-Ray over and expect a large directory structure, more memory will help in this area too, as Linux will cache as much as it can in RAM. I have a script file that I run every now and then that does a recursive directory listing and dumps it to a text file. If I run it on a clean boot, it takes a noticeable amount of time for it to run. But once it runs the first time, it only takes it a few moments to run it, say 2 weeks later, even if I have added, removed, or changed any files because most of the directory structure is already in memory.

Highly likely I’ll go down the same route as yourself with a separate boot drive as I’ll also be running it on Debian and will almost definitely break everything at some point, would rather not delete all the media in the process!!

I would recommend a separate boot drive to anyone, really, whether it is used as a server, storage or PC. Main reason is that I like to poke around. Try this, that, and OOPS! I shouldn’t have done that after all! Slap an external CD drive on, reboot and reinstall without losing anything on my storage array. One can always make a partition to use specifically for a boot partition but believe it or not, over the years I have seen more boot drives fail than drives in storage arrays.

I’ll likely only have PLEX running on it at the start, might turn it into a NAS Backup drive and maybe go down the route of having a AD style setup internally for everyone to have their own logins on anything easily, maybe even stick a small web-server on there and have an intranet to!

I thought about setting it up as a backup drive but in reference to the above, even my PC has a standalone boot drive so if it were to crash or I mess something up, I wouldn’t loose any games/music/whatnot that I may not have moved over to the storage yet because they are on a separate drive.

Before I started using PLEX, my server was strictly a file server used for storage. I had it set up as a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server and had made my own database listing of my movies and whatnot that I served up on an internal web page and I could add, remove, search, list, etc my movie collection. It was very basic looking as I am not a web designer and making things look nice, well, I’ll leave that up to those that do that sort of thing. :slight_smile: But it did the job! Then I found PLEX, and well, the rest is history (and stored in my archives!). But I wish PLEX would develop an export option to export one’s library to a text or html file as well as make it printer friendly!

Did have a play around with a revised build for now http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Mattch23/saved/KqFFf7 might knock the RAM back up to 16/32gb

Something I’ve learned over the years. Any OS, whatever they recommend as the minimum RAM, double it and make that your minimum. If all your are going to do is tinker with it, 8GB is fine but if you plan on actually doing something with it, such as PLEX, file server, etc? I would recommend minimum 16GB but if it can be squeezed into your budget go with 32GB.

19

@Taimaishoo - Thanks for that, really helpful!

Gonna stick with the 16gb of RAM for now and see how it goes due to budget, can always upgrade to 32 if necessary!
Definitely sticking with the separate OS drive, I try to do it with every build I use in any case as I’m pretty much the same, poking around a lot then breaking everything and having to re-install :stuck_out_tongue:

In terms of other services, I’m still debating what else I’d put on it, I would like to have it as a network backup as I’m currently backing up to 2 external drives which I could use for other things, but at the same time they’re doing the job and I’ve only ever had to use them once when I lost a drive!

My final build is highly likely going to be (Just updated it) : http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Mattch23/saved/KqFFf7 unless something major drops in price and its better or similar.