Help spec new hardware for Plex server?

General Discussions
1

Hi all,

I have been running Plex server on my late 2012 Mac mini with a USB3 2TB drive hanging off it for about half a year now. It is mainly used for Live TV and DVR to a 4th gen Apple TV. Everything was running great and I was loving the new features until the last couple weeks. Something happened with the Mac Mini and it cannot keep up with transcoding anymore. I have tried reinstalling the OS (to 10.9) and turning off updates thinking that it might have been the spectre / meltdown remediation which caused the slowness but it persists. Live TV is chopping and the wife is not happy.

So. I am thinking about new hardware. I would appreciate some help from the folks in the community on how to proceed here. I am looking for something low power that will be able to handle transcoding a couple simultaneous 1080 streams while some background processes are going on (like Plex maintenance or DVR post processing) and with at least 4TB of usable disk space. I am open to buying or building.

Unraid with Plex in a docker container is appealing to me. Any reason not to do this?

What would you do if you were me?

Thanks!

2

It really comes down to your budget and what you’ll be using the new hardware/PC for.

3

I did something similar to your needs - see here

With 1 1080p transcode to a mobile device its sitting at 0 - 25% cpu load and memory looks fine. Plenty of people use these HP microservers in flavor or another so lots of support available on various forums. What it is not though is quiet so if you will be sitting in the same room as the box then you will need to also factor in purchase of quieter fans etc or go for a different solution.