Looking to Buy a Plex Server, Is this adequate?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Hi,

I am brand new to this and was interested in setting up a Plex server in my house.

I am also thinking of using the new server as a FreeNas as my current NAS is on it’s last legs.

I would only have one stream at a time viewing media from the server.

I am interested in buying a refurbished server from ebay and as I am not familiar with it I was wondering if some people could guide me in the right direction,

I have found this server on ebay and was going to configure it with 2 x5650 processors and upgrade to 32gb ddr3 ram. Does this seem appropriate?

Cheers

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For one stream you can use virtually anything, especially if you are direct playing. Even a Raspberry Pi would be sufficient for that.
I don’t know what you are planning to do with the server apart from Plex, but if one stream of Plex is your only requirement, I wouldn’t go for this old, power-hungry beast.
A NUC with an up-to-date Intel i3 CPU would already be more useful for Plex than this one, especially since it is able to use the built-in hardware transcoding capabilities of the iGPU of the i3, which your Xenon does not have.

If you plan to use this as a FreeNAS server hosting your files, additionally running Plex and you don’t care about your electricity bill, sure you can use this. Single-Thread performance is not outstanding (1200 passmark), which might create a bottle-neck for some transcode operations.

Depending on which CPU you take and how much electricity costs in your country, electricity costs can be as 500 €/year (Germany in this case). The nuc would be 1/5 of that.

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My next NAS would be one with a lot of bays.

Putting PMS on my NAS was understandable, but with hindsight, I’d put it on a NUC next time.

That keeps the fileserver low power, but uses the NUC to come online with all sorts of power based on need. Easy to swap it out, but the NAS remains.

I think Plex suggests a 9500 passmark as a target for good performance.
It’d be in their website articles.

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Your plex clients capabilities more than anything else determine what you need in your plex server. A close second is your media. I can see the draw of enterprise gear but they are big, expensive, noisy, power hungry. I really like the current gen quad i3 with top quality integrated graphics hardware with qsv to hardware transcode. A basic ssd for OS and 4-8GB of ram will give an excellent plex experience and handle multiple sessions effortlessly. with this plex server you can continue to use you underpowered NAS.

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