Choosing server hardware

Plex Media Server
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I need to get my PMS off of my gaming system. I’d like to get something a lot more energy efficient. 4 drive bays would be a minimum. I’m also considering using this system as a backup device, and possibly monitoring/recording some IP cams for security. No set budget but my first thought is that $500 without HDs should be close.

I’m also interested in learning Linux. I have some Linux background but have never had enough of a need to maintain a systems to really learn the command line interface.

I would build a dedicated PC, but I would want to have a know good build to work from. Battling hardware compatibility issues and learning Linux at the same time doesn’t sound fun. Is there a place that publishes builds for this type of computer?

I like the small size of an NAS. If went this route would I still be using linux? I’ve been looking at the QNAP TS453Be, and the TerraMaster F5-421. QNAP does not list the OS and TerraMaster says TOS 3, but that could just be a proprietary Linux distro.

Edit: I should have said that I have as yet never streamed anything outside my home, or to a mobile device. I would generally have at most 2 x 1080P streams going at a time. I picked these 2 NAS mainly for future proofing.

If the resounding silence is because I seriously underestimate the price tag of a DIY system, then I will probably buy one of the 2 prebuilt NAS. Does one have a distinct advantage over the other?

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I own both DIY systems and name brand nas units. what do you like to do? are you the type that want to buy something and have a known experience, something easy to get going? if so get a nas like a synology 918+ and some HDDs.
Are you the type that like to play around, and put in the hours to get good deals, and end up with a faster and less enpensive system, but way more hours invested? if so DIY something. do you live in a small appartment and something small and good looking is important? then NAS, if its in a closet or basement and you care nothing about the cosmetics, then DIY!
if you want to DIY, I suggest a intel i3-8100 CPU is a great option. 4 real cores, great power for software transcoding when you need to. It also supports excellent hardware transcoding if you have a plex pass, for an excellent over all experience. motherboard almost doesnt matter, other than I always like intel NICs. Case and PSU, up to you.

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I fogot to add, virtually all NAS units in the consumer space are a linux base. buy something intel based, and you will have tons of customization options with docker and packages etc.

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I like to tinker.

I’d like to keep the size down to a mid tower. The main thing is to keep the power requirements down.

The i3-8100 looks like a great value processor. At 65 watts it is about a third of what it is running on now, but it not the most economically. I’ve spent most of the afternoon looking at CPU specs. The one that caught my eye was the i5-8400T. At 35 watts 6 cores and has a higher passmark score. But a little more expensive. Would it work as well as the i3-8100?

I’m a bit gun shy about coming up with my own build. The last time I ended up with a lot of components that were very highly rated but were not well suited to what I was doing. My 6 core 12 thread i7 processor was wasted because at the time no games would use more than 4 threads. This might be the same kind of thing.

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Passmarks = greater ability to burn subtitles & convert audio simultaneously.

Any CPU -7xxx or -8xxx will give you a wonderful image.

I personally have an i7-7700 and an i7-8509G . I can’t tell the difference but the i7-7700 is a lot cheaper. (almost half the price)

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I think you are confusing cooling requirements with power usage. while they are of course related, they are not equal. in a given family idle is pretty much idle, and with intel the family is still basically skylake from 5 years ago :slight_smile: also dont forget that while faster CPUs burn more energy per time unit , the work required is fixed, so they return to idle faster, cancelling out much of the difference. T series chips are not more power effecient, they are power capped, so they just run not quite as fast for a little bit longer. The take the edge off performance to cap the peak heat generated so than less effective cooling solutions are an option. In a plex server the cpu can be busy for quite a long time, minutes not seconds. You also have a mix of single threaded tasks (audio I believe is an example) and multithreaded tasks (software video decode and encode) so it is important to consider both. Given the CPU will need to run for long periods of time, they will tend to spend more time at their base frequencies than their max frequencies. 8100 is 4x3.6 while the 8400T is 6x1.7. if your motherboard follows intels guidelines (most don’t) you would be far better off with an 8100 IMO.

That said, nothing magic about an i3-8100. It is just the cheapest solid performing real quad with top notch hw transcode built in. I see them used for sometime 75$ and you can use then on many boards that are also available used for about the same cost.

I have run plex servers with atom d2550, i3-8100, i3-8350k, i5-9600k, i7-6700k, i5-6500k, E3-1225v3, and E3-1275v3. All except the atom where very close experience, with the exception being that the units older that 7xxx series have more limited hardware transcoding ability. that is more significant than 4 core , 6 more etc etc.

PS you could have saved a bit of cash on your gaming system with a step down in CPU, saying it was not well suited or wasted is a bit of a stretch is it not? ignoring hyperthreading (its value varies highly task to task) you had 4 of your real cores contributing to your game. you had 2 that were available for the od windows service or AV file scan etc, some extra to make sure your game always had the full attention of the 4 it was able to make use of. I think you made a slight over purchase, and would have been fine with the 6 core no hyperthreading alternative, but not something I would call a mistake.

PS Chuck, as always is right on the money.

here is a related thread

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Thank you!!! This is exactly the information I needed.

Yes you are correct about my gaming rig. It just meant I spent a bit more on the processor than I should have. There was also an issue with too much really fast RAM. The motherboard was good for the amount of RAM, or the Type. Just not the combination of the two. It was a learning experience.

I’m currently using 2 x 8 TB Ironwolf NAS drives. I would like the redundancy of a Raid. I would also like to be able to add additional drives if I need more storage. To me that means RAID 5. Do I want to get a motherboard with on-board hardware raid, or would I be better off running a software raid.

I’ll probably look for an HDMI out on the motherboard in case I decide to connect it to a TV for direct play back.

Are there any other features, or chip sets I should look for in the motherboard?

PS: If this post appeared under a different name at first it is because I created a second PLEX account for testing some security stuff. I accidentally ended up replying from a different account. I thought that might be confusing. So I deleted it and posted again correctly.

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with Intel CPUs paying more for faster RAM hardy ever is a value proposition. You need much better RAM for a tiny actual improvement. thankfully PLEX is not a memory hog and you can get away with 4GB if you are controlling costs, so you dont need much of it either. perhaps you can steal some from your gaming system for your plex box? :slight_smile:

RAID is fine if you are buying it for the right reason, and that is primarily uptime AKA availability. In other words if one disk fails, your plex server is still functional while you purchase, install, and repair your array. It can also help with performance as an array of disks can perform much faster than a single disk.

RAID is not there to save your data, that is your backups job. RAID is a POOR backup. RAID only protects your data in one scenario, drive failure. It is no help at all with user error, with theft, flood, loss of physical access, malware, fire, lightning, catastrophic system failure etc.

Your backup will usually be a USB attached disks that you attach when needed. this gives you air gap, not powered up, can go offsite, etc etc. part of your backup plan might include snapshots,

In my mind, for data like plex uses, you do backup as the first priority, then RAID as a second priority.

You don’t need to use raid to grow your storage, plex handles multiple single drives just fine.
That being said, I hear you and like the flexibility that RAID gives you, and the ability to grow it over time. You don’t need to use raid 5 to be able to grow it over time. a mirror (RAID1) can expand to RAID 10, and sometimes to RAID 5/6 once you add enough disks (5 needs 3, 6 needs 4) if you were OK with buying additional disks to start, sure, do 5/6 right from the beginning. ignore all ideas of hardware raid, for home usable software raid is what you want. just but a MB with SATA count that will meet your need for SATA disks, and M2/PCIE slots to meet what you may want for high performance NVME SSD (not absolutely required, but add options)

This is a plex server, not a plex client, I would bury that idea if I were you. inexpensive clients give a superior experience and mean you dont have to have that big ugly case / KB / mouse / USB remote hassle. Apple TVs, Roku, smart TV built in apps, way better IMO. Not so much luck with the amazon fire stick / cubes yet, I would avoid those.

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If I don’t have memory laying around I can afford at least 8 GB.

The back-up thing is something I need to take care of. Everything except the M2 drive in my current system is in hot swap back-plane modules. The last time we had to evacuate I had 6 Drives in my backpack when we bugged out. It probably would have been safer to just take the whole computer. The second 8TB drive I have was supposed to be my back up and make it’s way to the Safety Deposit box. It never got there.

If I could find a cloud service that would back TBs of data at a reasonable price that would be best. I’ll have to spend some time thinking about how to make backups work, so I don’t become the failure point.

“This is a plex server, not a plex client, I would bury that idea if I were you.”

I have an old PC (i5-4570,8GB,1TB,Win10) that is currently in my media center. We really don’t use it since we got the Roku, except a couple of times recently when I was searching for Covid-19 news updates. It was just easier to have a full keyboard and mouse. I might replaced that with the new plex server.

It isn’t quite up to the spec you set for the CPU, but I could actually just slip the bigger HD into it and give at a try.

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Plex seems to be running alright on the old PC I mentioned. This is just a trial until I can get the parts together for a new build. The case and power supply won’t support the number of drives I would want.

I used PCPartPicker for the parts list. Hopefully the link will be viable.

i3-8100 ATX

It’s not the cheapest I could have gone. But since I already have all three drives. The is still room in the budget for an 80+ Gold PS if I decide I want it.

The only thing I’m not excited about is the case. There don’t seem to be many options for a case less than 17" H x 8" W that I can fit 4 3.5" HDDs and a 2.5" SSD in. I was looking at mini-ITX but couldn’t find case that met the size and space requirements.

Let me know if you have case recommendations, or if I just missed something.

PS: Not sure why the price on the memory isn’t showing. ($74)

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My Plex setup consists of a NAS and a NUC. I like the idea of keeping them separate, upgrading the Server is easy and relatively inexpensive and NAS units that have sufficient CPU grunt for transcoding are also quite expensive. You talk a bit about power consumption, the NUC is always going to be good there.

My NAS is a QNAP TS-431P - can be found for under $500 AUD without disks, and is pretty foolproof. I have 4 4TB WD Red drives, in Raid 5 that gives me about 11TB storage

My NUC is an 8th gen i5, 8GB Ram and 500GB SSD. I have a few remote users, the NUC is not the limit, my home internet upload speed limit is reached long before the NUC limit.

If you like to tinker a bit, and want to keep costs and power consumption down I’d recommend looking at something similar, upspec the NUC if you need, but that NAS (or similar) will be just fine.

1 Like
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This started because I was running my PMS on my gaming rig. I wanted to conserve power. At some point I will have to measure the difference between the two systems running at idle. I’m actually starting to wonder if having a low power system idling while I’m gaming is going to eat up any savings I get from having the gaming system off the rest of the time. I wonder if the same is true about having both an NAS and NUC. No matter how efficient each one is it is still 2 computers doing nothing for most of the day.

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QNAP TS431P and NUK8i5BEH Power consuptions specs.

You are looking at (combined) roughly 16W at idle, and 50W flat out, although I would argue that the NAS would be nowhere near capacity just serving a 4K video. This is pretty low compared to most gaming rigs.

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How are you taking your measurements? I’m getting about ~10-12 watts at standby on the little i5-4570 computer I set up the other night. I’m nor sure I really trust the measurement. I have a clamp on current meter, but the minimum scale is 0-40 amps. I don’t know how accurate is is when the whole load is only 120 ma.

I just ordered some smart plugs that are supposed to measure energy consumption. If they are accurate It should make things easier.

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Those are just screen grabs of the manufacturers quoted specs, I don’t have any actual measurements

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I really should have guessed that from the formatting.

Now I’m really curious what my gaming PC will draw. With that thing running if I print to the Laser printer I swear I can see the lights dim. :open_mouth:

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If it is a decent gaming rig it will not be small, the performance those things have doesn’t come cheap.

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I ran for ages on a same generation CPU as your 4570. I found it good as long as I stuck to h264 files, but as I moved to HEVC files, the hardware assist on the old PC just didn’t get used (limited HEVC compatibility) forcing software decode resulting in a poorer experience over all.

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I have no idea about cases … I use big old full tower cases so I can put tons of drives in. And I hide it in my basement furnace closet :slight_smile:

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To satisfy my curiosity I measured the gaming PC. About 100 watts at idle, and an average around 650 watts with a game running. It peaked at 720 Watts. This wasn’t even a game that over taxes the system.

Going from 100 watts to 10 watts of continuous power draw would save me about $20 a month. It’s not huge but it is a start.