I am upgrading my PC and want to use my old one as my Plex server. I currently have unlimited cloud backup through a service that only allows one computer per account. To circumvent this and not bottleneck my new computer with Plex server activity, I was thinking of attaching my Plex media drives to my new computer and having my old computer running PMS access my media through my wired home network. Is there any disadvantage to doing this? Would I be better of just using my new computer as the Plex server?
It’ll come down to the question if your home network is up for the increased traffic (network drive → router → new PC w/ PMS → router → client/app). Otherwise this seems like some very common scenario (similar to other use cases where the media is housed on a NAS while the PMS is on some other PC / VM / container / …)
Theoretically, yes. In the real world, your network or internet upload will cause a bottleneck way before the HDD does. Some exceptions might apply e.g. if you’re a video artist, running tons of 4K/5K encodes
That is pretty much exactly how I run Plex. I have a PC with a good amount of storage attached. (The drives are combined using DrivePool) and another where Plex runs. In fact I have a second server on my Shield that also accesses my media via my network.
I have only noticed problems very rarely and those, generally, have proved to be not directly related to how things are connected.
It is quite common for Plex to be run on one machine while all or some of the media that is streamed resides on a different machine. Some people even store their media in the cloud but I would not recommend that because I do not like depending on the inconsistencies of the internet for my streaming.
It should be noted that streaming video is not particularly sensitive to network speed within reason. Only very large files have ever given me problems at all.
I strongly recommend getting all your media in a form that will direct play on your server/client combo. It takes a bit of time to get that done but it can, mostly, be done in the background and, once completed, it makes for much more reliable streaming.
Also you might want to, if you have large media files (above 4gb or so), experiment a bit with Handbrake or some such to reduce the size. You just need to experiment a bit and test the result to see at what level of compression you see a difference that matters to you.
I find that, generally, I do not start to see unacceptable artifacts or other compression problems as long as I do not reduce the large files much below 3.5gb.
It is a matter of preference but if you cannot see or hear a real difference then the difference matters very little.
