Getting Started with a Plex Media Server

General Discussions
1

Hello, I am very new to the Plex and Media server game. But after researching and viewing a home that had a media server I started to want one for myself.

I have never built a PC/Server before so forgive my ignorance.

I am looking at getting a server built for my media (mainly movies) about 20Tb. but I would like to have all my computer files and pictures backed up and accessible as well to all the other computers on my home network.

I want to eventually get a NAS but with the amount of movies I have seems it might be better to build my own.

I am looking for some help in getting the right configuration. Like I said before I have never built a server before so the specs and model number of items will be foreign to me.

I do know I want WD hard drives as I have some already and they work as expected.

any help anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.

I am looking at staying under 1000$ for this build

My current home set up is two windows computers, one Win 10 and one Win7, two Android phones, Cable Internet with a D-Link AC5300 router

Like I said any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

2

Where are your 20tb of media currently stored?

3

Currently on multiple portable HDs

4

With your budget and your requirements you can go in two directions: either you build your own server, with a CPU that’s good enough to eventually transcode (how many streams do you need to play a the same time? are you going to use it remotely?), or you can buy a high end NAS, maybe one of the new models that can do hardware accelerated transcoding.

The issue with the NAS is not the amount of movies, it’s the usually low CPU power that’s not good for transcoding.

5

I will require between 2-4 streams at any one given time. I would like to build my own that way I know what I have can do the job. yes I will be accessing remotely as I do travel quit a bit.

6

I just use my exisiting desktop PC and plugged a drobo into it to hold my media. I do have two other servers I built. One had room for 22 hard drives. But when issues arose it became a pain to diagnose so I went with a drobo and 5x 4tb seagate NAS drives. Just a lot less hassle as I don’t have time to mess with it like I once did. And by using my PC I can run additional apps such as sonarr, couchpotato and others.
I originally had it plugged into my imac and was serving off of there but when that died I built a PC and use that. The CPU i’m using is a Intel 5820 which is a 6 core. No problem at all serving 4+ streams simultaneously. Prior to that I had used an Intel i7 920 and a Intel 2600k and both worked fine.

The issue you run into with a NAS, as has been pointed out, is generally low power CPU’s. To get one to handle the streams and storage you want it would be rather expensive.

Keep it simple. It’s just plex. People go nuts with setups so far above and beyond what is really needed.

7

zpaolo has got it right.

My thoughts

1 Buy an i5 or i7 pc or nuc and connect to a 4,5,or 8 bay low cost (ish) NAS (or even a DAS)
or
2 Buy the best 4,5, or 8 bay high end NAS you can afford

As was suggested the synology 1815+ does most what you want with a few “ifs”
At $850 + drives.

The good news about going the NAS path (2) is you can always make it just a storage unit and buy a powerful NUC if u need more power.

But my options will cost you more like $1500 !!

8

@spikemixture said:

1 Buy an i5 or i7 pc or nuc and connect to a 4,5,or 8 bay low cost (ish) NAS (or even a DAS)
or
2 Buy the best 4,5, or 8 bay high end NAS you can afford

or

3 Buy a “small” server like the HP proliant microserver which has 4 slots for storage and is larger than a NUC, could be a good all in one system :smiley:

9

Thank you all for your contributions… This is giving me good ideas of what I want to do.

10

Even simpler than that!

I recommend getting an I7 laptop or something relatively inexpensive.
For the main system disk have an SSD installed (Improves transcoding when plex configured to use the SSD for temp transcode).

Continue to use your portable HDDs for your media… Then as budget permits, add large HDDs to your server and move your media (I would invest in a multi bay drive enclosure as bare HDDs are cheaper to install)

Set up proper sharing for your disks as required and attach to your network.

You should be able to get up and running for well under $1k and probably stream 4-7 concurrent streams.

Hope that helps, for what it’s worth.

You might find you really do not need to worry about all the Techno-Babble surrounding setting up your server (Just designed to make it all seem much more mysterious and intimidating than it needs to be) . It’s all really very simple and works VERY well.

11

Given your skill level, I’d suggest the 2-device solution where one is a consumer NAS appliance (6 bay min for RAID6) and then a separate computer running an OS you’re comfortable with that is hardwired to the NAS (no wireless!). Having an all-in-one NAS/PMS solution requires a comfort level with building computers and learning something new like FreeNAS (See my sig)

12

LOL
Proves my point!!

Not much can be simpler than a PC and a few HDDs

My Sig.
i7 Laptop 8 gig ram, 256gig SSD
Several HDDs about 80tb
Nitehawk Router (I gb LAN)
20meg up / 300meg down broadband connection

Pretty simple and well under $1k (Excluding Disk Farm lol) and basically out of the box installation (No Techno-Babble)

I serve up over 3300 HD Movies
20000 TV Series episodes
65000 Music Tracks

I have plex Pass and provide remote access to family from Los Angeles to Seattle, New Jersey, and Orlando Florida.

I also (In my home) support 2 Roku 4s, An Android Streaming box, Several Iphones, iPads and android phones and tablets Xbox and P33 and 4…

I can also remote access all my media while traveling on any of my portable devices… Great for in hotel rooms since almost every hotel these days have WiFi. And with an HDMI cable I can always plug it into the rooms big screen TV.

Between Plex and SlingBox… I am usually set for in Room or in Car entertainment or in Motor Home Camping Theater… LOL

The above configuration can stream aprox 5 - 7 streams concurrently. And with properly encoded media, I can stream unlimited 4K media files (Local Only since over broadband 4K will transcode)

For what you say your skill level is… I recommend trying it this way unless you (Like many of us) just like playing with the bits and bytes or playing with Linux boxes etc…

In my experience, Unless I just feel like messing around at the bare metal level, screwing around with all these esoteric configurations just add to frustration, or joy depending on your bent, lol

Plex, configuring on out of box mainstream equipment, is actually easy, painless, and performs amazingly.

13

Don’t forget about backup. Not sure what type of solution you will chose, nor what type of files you will be having there and how important this will be to you - but the long-term solution (if you can’t afford it now, $1000 is probably what 20TB of effective storage costs) needs to handle this too.

I would personally use the current external disks as the backup solution that is kept offsite (friend, relative) in concurrence with @sremick suggestion. If you are truly paranoid (like, ehm, me and hopefully others…) you can also opt in for the really, really important documents (perhaps not movies and tv shows, but photos and documents) and store them in the cloud such as crashplan (there are several, all with their own caveats).

14

@Peter_W
Excellent point.
I personally maintain 3 copies of all my media. 1 Copy on portable HDDs, 32tb worth, for offsite and travel.

As I am sure most of us has found, maintaining large libraries, the biggest cost is disk storgage lol

Your server investment becomes paled,