I began using Plex years ago during the bleeding edge of the app. Back then, it was hard to find help or someone who did what I was trying to do. To begin, I purchased a WD PR2100 NAS which “was” capable of running the server and housing my shows/music in one nice neat box.
As soon as HDHomeRun came out with their tuners that were compatible with Plex, I purchased one with 3 tuners so we could watch or record directly from cable since my wife was traveling a lot at the time. This would allow her to watch our cable or recorded shows from anywhere via Plex. Of course I have to pay a minimal monthly charge for a card to allow the HDHomeRun to access my cable.
The PR2100 comes with 2 drives. I started out with two 2TB drives and setup RAID so one drive would backup the other. I ran out of storage space after a couple years and swapped each of those drives for 6TB. That was easy enough since they were hot swappable. The RAID recognized the other drive had changed and automatically copied itself to the new drive. Once that was done, I replace the other 2TB drive and once again, all the data was copied. Now I have 6TB of storage space.
Shortly after that, I felt the PR2100 didn’t have the guts to be worked as hard as I was working it so I purchased a Windows 10 Pro with I7 processor which gave me plenty of computing power. Running the Plex server on the PR2100 along with storing data was becoming very problematic and crashes would occur regularly. So I installed the server software on the Win10 machine which really works great! I had the bright idea of allowing the NAS Plex server to run and only use it for music.
What do I need all that computing power for? I record lots of movies and TV shows. Once they have finished recording, they are saved to a 2nd hard drive on the Win10 machine. I then use a program called MCEBuddy which watches this folder and automatically strips the commercials, changes the quality, raises the volume, creates a subtitle file, changes the file format to MP4 and finally moves the saved show/movie to the NAS drive in their various folders such as Plex/TV/Seinfeld or Plex/TV/Big Bang where Plex keeps watch. By the way, Plex does a great job of recording an entire series. If you set up Plex to record all the old & new shows in a series, when it finds an episode that it doesn’t have, it gets recorded. I have the entire series of MASH, NCIS, Big Bang, Seinfeld, etc. Yes, I know Plex can strip commercials but I like the other capabilities of MCEBuddy.
One other thing I’ve done to help Plex in my setup is to hardwire everything. Yep, even the smart TVs have CAT5.
What is your Plex setup like?
