I am completely new to Plex, and I’m just in the planning stages for my media server. I was hoping to solicit some opinions on the best route to take regarding my actual media storage and server. I’m trying to decide if I should buy a NAS such as the the Netgear RN42800 or if I should try and use hardware that I already have to build from. I’d like to keep costs down, and I plan on having no more that 3-4 media streams going at a time with none over 1080p resolution.
I have an older desktop that we don’t use any more with an Intel I7-4770K, good RAM and a Radeon 970GTX 4GB graphics card. I’ll be needing to buy storage drives no matter which route I choose, so that is a non-factor. The desktop has Win10Pro on it, and I’d likely just stay with that OS and run PMS from there.
What do you all think? Will that I7 desktop give me adequate server performance for a few streams, or should I look to get some sort of relatively inexpensive NAS to serve from instead?
Start with the desktop. It is a good entry server and probably sufficient for your needs.
But stay away from H.265 encoded media for now.
The system might not be capable to use hardware support to decode it.
Don’t consider cheap NAS system for running Plex server directly on them. It’s not worth the hassle, IMHO.
Awesome, thank you very much for the recommendation. I’m going to get to work on it and see how it goes. I guess, after a little bit of critical thinking (not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes), that I should start with what I have and upgrade later if I need to, since the media drives can be moved to another system if needs be anyway…
I agree, start with what you got, get your feet wet and start learning about storage solutions.
You can still go with a nas for storage and run plex on your desktop.
Or if you do eventually decide to go with a single solution nas/plex server, make sure you get one that exceeds your expectations (like most people your library will always grow and rarely shrink). Whatever size you get, you will eventually fill it.
