I’m planning to install a Plex server at my new home and can’t decide between two different approaches:
Run Plex on a NAS
I was looking into buying a _QNAP HS-251+ _and a pair of 3.5" WD Reds harddrives. Since I don’t have any of those items at the moment, this would be quite an investment.
According to the Qnap specification, this setup would have a power consumption of about 7.1W in standby (when HDDs aren’t spinning)
Run Plex on an Intel i3 NUC + USB3 Raid
The alternative would be to use an Core i3 Haswell NUC (which I already own) and just add an external USB3 Raid system for storage. I’d “only” have to buy the RAID system and two regular 2.5" HDDs in this case.
The NUC itself is passively cooled and used to be part of my media center setup. The Intel NUC can utilize a so called “Ready-Mode” power state which should cut down power consumption to under 10W when the Plex server isn’t used.
If you look at the CPU’s passmark rating, you’ll see it here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J1800+%40+2.41GHz which scores it at about 1K. If you set up your media for Direct Play and don’t expect it to transcode media at all (including converting media via sync) it should work fine. but this means you are going to need to do a LOT of extra work, or find the means to automate the process to ensure your media is as Direct Playable as possible.
Remember, transcoding 1080p 8Mbps media requires 2K passmarks per stream. And 1500 passmarks for a 720p stream. In all likelihood, if you don’t have something much more powerful you aren’t going to be very happy with it.
You are better off getting a CPU with enough to handle 2-3 streams (5K or more passmarks) and make sure you have enough expansion options for HDD’s. As you get more and more media, you are going to grow out of the drive space you have fairly quickly. I have a comparison of CPU’s for the Asustor NAS models in my signature. It’s older, and doesn’t include the newer models, but it does show that particular CPU in one of them… And it also shows the only model made by Asustor that can fulfill the 5K passmarks I suggested.
The CPU you’ve mentioned is only used in the previous model of the QNAP NAS (the one without the plus behind the number). The newer HS-251**+** uses a the quad core J1900 Celeron.
So just in terms of raw transcoding power, using the i3 Haswell NUC would give be better performance?
How about the longevity of running such a device 24/7? For storage I’d use an external USB RAID1 system that would be able to go up to 2x4TB at the moment. But I’m more concerned about power consumption and how the system will handle being powered on all the time. (If only the Plex clients would be able to send magic packets for WoL…)
That being said, I’d say that the current use case scenario would not require transcoding for the post part. I assume I’d be able to use Direct Play for most of my content (recorded TS of tv and the rest is in h.264/aac/ac3 m4v files) as long as I’m at home.
If you’ve already got the NUC, I’d suggest you just install Plex on it and see how it goes. Just put a couple of videos on it’s local hard drive and let Plex server them from there. If that works well, get the usb3 raid.
I’m in the midst of decommissioning Plex running on my Netgear ReadyNAS which to be honest has always been underpowered for Plex, and now I can’t update it to the latest Plex server anyway. Instead I’ve got an i7 NUC which I’m going to use for the Plex server (it’s already a server for other stuff). It runs linux so I’m going to mount the NAS drives w/ NFS to give it access to all of my media, and it should be good to go. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m hoping it solves buffering issues I’ve had.
Longer term this seems a better option as an NAS is primarily designed for file sharing, so it should continue to do that and not need updating, and when/if I update my NUC server, plex will get a boost.
However I can’t speak to power consumption. Running plex on an NAS designed for lower power consumption may be a big win if you really care.
I ran on an i3 (CPU benchmark 1800) for 2 years, no issues although only one transcode stream max plus use of OpenPHT UI. A transcode could, at times, impact UI usage of OpenPHT but minimal.
Now have an Intel NUC i7 quad core. Pretty powerful, with SSD also - runs great.
Is it “safe” to use a passively cooled i3 as a server? When transcoding is involved the CPU load can go as high as 100% for long times. I read reviews of N3100 (passive cooling) vs N3150 (with a fan) and the former used to hang because of overheating when used as a server…
It all depends on your use of Plex & what clients you have. If like many (maybe most?) Plex users you don’t need remote access & you have decent clients like Amazon Fire TV 4K, Roku 3 or iPhone 5/6/7 then you will have no need for transcoding as you can Direct Play everything. I use a Seagate Personal Cloud which must be the lowest powered NAS on the market & can have four simultaneous 1080p streams to clients locally.
@nigelpb said:
Roku 3 or iPhone 5/6/7 then you will have no need for transcoding as you can Direct Play everything.
Well AFAIK Roku 3 only supports h264 video (roku 4 adds h265) so if you have an MPEG4part2 or VC1 or other formats you’ll need transcoding. Same more or less is true for iOS (I mostly see my server transcoding when streaming old .avi to my iPad) and if you need subtitles.
