Help building a Plex Server, looking for an alternative to a Mac Mini with a Direct Attached Drobo

General Discussions
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Hey Everyone,
For the last few years, my Plex server has been a mid 2011 Mac Mini server (2.0Ghz QC i7, 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM) attached to a 8 year old droboPro with 8X2TB (16TB total, 14TB useable) WD Black drives installed and attached via Firewire 800. I have no complaints with the setup, it works just fine for me, but!, the issue is now, I’ve just about reached the capacity of the drobo (13.5TB). So I have a few options, I could buy 2 more 4TB drives, install them into the drobo for 2TB more of space. Or I could build a PC tower Plex server (I kinda like this idea best) I’d like to get acase that holds about 16-20 drives and fill it up with the drives I have and more, and blah blah blah. anywho. Question is, what OS do I use? I read that the best one to use is what I’m most familiar with, personally I could do anything really, I’m more fluent with Mac, then PC, then Linux. But I’d like something that could handle the amount of drives I intend to install in a RAID setup that I can mix and match drive sizes and manufactures, as well as redundancy that if a drive dies I won’t lose data, as well as I can insert a new drive to increase storage. Pretty much a OS with the drobo’s best features. I’ve used unRAID and I think it would do what I’m looking for, just not a huge fan of plex running in a container VM. Is there software for Windows or Ubuntu (or another flavor of linux) that will manage my drives/RAID the way I’d like?

thanks in advance!!
~John

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Well, I’m a big FreeNAS fan, feel free to come to that side. :slight_smile: A lot of us consolidate the PMS and NAS into one box, putting Plex in a “jail” which isn’t a VM but just an isolated sandbox that still is running direct code so there’s no performance hit. FreeNAS can certainly handle that number of drives (and much more)… it’s picky about hardware, but do your homework and the payback is big.

Not a fan of unRAID. It’s not “RAID” and rather wonky/low-end. Too many compromises and missing features for me. Nor Windows, which has no place as a server being the bloated, unstable, insecure malware magnet that it is.

That said: a chassis that holds that many drives is going to be a rackmount one that will be noisy as all hell, so make sure you locate it properly. You won’t want to be doing anything in the same room.

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@sremick said:
Well, I’m a big FreeNAS fan, feel free to come to that side. :slight_smile: A lot of us consolidate the PMS and NAS into one box, putting Plex in a “jail” which isn’t a VM but just an isolated sandbox that still is running direct code so there’s no performance hit. FreeNAS can certainly handle that number of drives (and much more)… it’s picky about hardware, but do your homework and the payback is big.

Thanks for the reply! I was using unRAID for a bit, but I like how freeNAS is , well, Free! Looking more into it.
So far here’s my plex server.
Corsair 750D case
12X2TB Hard drives
1X256GB SSD (will set it up as a cache drive)
AMD 9590 Processor 8 Core 4.7GHz
Corsair H115i AIO liquid cooler
16 port RAID card
Cooler Master V1000 Power supply

The Server was just recently built and I’m still toying with the OS/Software side. Week 1 I used unRAID since Byte my Bits on YouTube gave it a very great score, but recently he just tested FreeNas 9.10 and it blew everything out of the water, so I’m working on setting up FreeNas now.

It’s going great! Way better performance in my “Beta Server Builds” then I ever got with the Mac Mini + DroboPro setup

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@JohnnyPhantom said:

Thanks for the reply! I was using unRAID for a bit, but I like how freeNAS is , well, Free! Looking more into it.
So far here’s my plex server.

Well, AMD is not advised for FreeNAS/FreeBSD as they play too fast and loose with low-level hardware specs/design. Consumer/gaming motherboards in general are bad choices. Liquid cooling is a novelty in 99.9% of cases and not needed while opening you up to numerous new catastrophic failure scenarios. And you need to ditch that hardware RAID card if you’re going to use FreeNAS.

As for unRAID, it’s not really “RAID” and while it can seem very tempting, what it really offers falls quite short of the real thing.