I already bought a box, Silverstone DS380. Have 4, 4TB NAS hard drives. Need a MB, ram, power supply and os recommendations. Price is always an object so please no $1000 motherboards. I’m no linux expert but I have installed Ubuntu a few years back but didn’t use it much. I’m a mac guy at heart but am willing to learn to configure other OS’s. Ease of install, configure and maintenance is always appreciated. Love Plex on my Mac.
(Don’t overlook the official guidance)
PSU will likely need to be in the 450 W to 600 W range, depending on your future expansion plans and choice of CPU.
Choice of CPU will be down (in large part) to how many concurrent transcoding sessions you expect to be doing. Each of those needs (roughly) a CPUmark of 2,000. Your choice of motherboard will then be shaped by that. If you can tell us that, we can steer you further.
RAM size will partly be shaped by your OS choice. If you use FreeBSD/FreeNAS and ZFS then more RAM is good. If you want to use the server for more than just Plex, more RAM is good 
Otherwise, 2 GB and above will be fine for any Linux install, 4 GB and above for Windows.
Personally, I’d suggest that FreeNAS (9.10, don’t use 10 yet as it’s still in beta) is probably the lowest maintenance option, and comes with a nice web interface.
See my signature for my setup, which uses the DS380 as the case. I’ll warn you now that the case is very tight internally and there’s not a lot of room to play with. There is definitely a correct way of assembling the components, and a way that makes life hard
I could just follow what you did with your Media server because it seems to have everything that I need. Any advice on assembly to avoid the hassles you allude to?
so I couldn’t find your exact motherboard but how is this? newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813599009
So I think I see you use a raid card, instead of software raid? Do you use an SSD to hold the OS?
Well, I don’t really use a RAID card, the card has been reflashed into IT mode (basically, a slightly expensive stock storage controller) and I use ZFS to provide RAID like features. That allows me to fully populate the bays with storage disks, and use the onboard controllers for the OS. If you’re thinking of adding any other storage controller, do read the section on Additional SATA/SAS connectivity here, and this post on Highpoint controllers.
The OS is on a couple of Samsung 850 Pro units (mirrored pair), but if you go with FreeNAS then you can run from a USB stick. I’ve also got a couple of Intel DC S3500 units to provide a ZIL (a write log, so that if things aren’t fully written to the spinning rust when a power outage happens you’re less likely to lose data). I’m not really running a write heavy enough environment for the ZIL to matter, but I like playing with the tech
The OS SSDs were chosen after reading the SSD endurance test writeups. The previous generation failed gracefully with sufficient warning and after a really impressive life. The ZIL disks were chosen because they have the appropriate capacitors to ensure they write everything if the power goes out without warning, and I’m massively under-using them.
As for the motherboard, I deliberately went with one that has a LOM (lights out management, aka IPMI) unit so I can reach the console from anywhere. The one you linked to doesn’t support it, but if you’re putting the server somewhere easily accessible it won’t matter. Mine’s in the garage, so the LOM mattered to me. That said, Newegg also lists “my” motherboard.
Oh, and regardless of the OS you chose, the recommendations on the FreeNAS forum are worth a read. You don’t have to use EEC (error correcting) RAM, regardless of what you read there. I do, because the cost difference wasn’t massive and given that this is my primary store for all my data, that data not being corrupt matters to me
Assembly challenges… yeah. The main ones were:
- Best practice is to add components to the motherboard after you fit the motherboard to the case - there’s not enough room so I ended up mostly assembling it before installation
- The CPU cooler needs to be low profile to fit - I went with a Scythe low profile cooler, but after fitting I realised that the only way I can replace the fan if it fails is to take the server apart (since the fan is in the middle of the cooler). If I was doing it again I’d go for the Noctua NH-L9i. The Noctua isn’t quite as quiet or as effective according to the reviews, but the difference is minor and well worth the ease of replacing the fan if/when it dies.
- A PSU with modular cables is critical - there’s not enough space to curl up unused cables. I went with the Corsair SF450, after having crunched the numbers carefully to ensure it was sized appropriately. It’s better to err on the high side if you’re at all unsure - higher wattage PSUs don’t increase your idle power draw.
- If you’re using the rear (internal) drive bay, you have to cable everything up after you install the drives. You can’t cable up the hot swap bays and then fit the rear bay, or vice versa. Indeed, you may need to cable up the motherboard after you fit all the bays.
- The stock fans aren’t awesome, and mine were clearly suffering from bearing damage from the rattle. Replacing them gives you the choice of trading noise for cooling (the disks in the hot swap bays are at risk of running warm to hot). I went with fans that pushed a bit more air, for a bit less noise and I’m aware that when I fully populate the bays the disks won’t sit at +10°C ambient any more. If you dig at the many forum posts about the case you’ll see people complaining about the disks getting a bit hot, and lots of folks have used cardboard baffles to direct airflow. I haven’t bothered - recent studies have shown that moderate temperatures don’t have any negative impact on failure rates (the sweet spot in that report is actually between 40°C and 45°C, so my disks are actually a bit cool).
- The extra cable length from the front panel connectors, fan cables etc has to go somewhere. I did carefully cable tie them out of the way as best I could, but I ended up having to fit some fairly open metal fan grills (finger guards) on the side intake fans to stop the cables rubbing on the fans.
Wow, a man that really knows his stuff. Thanks so much for the detailed steps and pitfalls. I may come back here for more advice if I get stuck.
Have to say, you’re really going about this backwards. You pick the OS first, which then dictates your hardware.
I’d strongly recommend FreeNAS but I would never do it with just 4 drives or any old hardware. See my sig, or even better jump over the FreeNAS hardware forum for even more-informed discussion and Q&A.
A modernized version of my build would involve:
Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C236D2I
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1270 v5
RAM: Crucial CT16G4WFD8213
Actually I am pretty sold on FreeNAS and I will look there for more help but since they are not Plex specific I thought I’d check here first.
You’d be surprised how many in the FreeNAS forums are Plex users too and are quite familiar with running Plex on FreeNAS and the additional requirements you need to take into account. Far more Plex users in the FreeNAS forums than FreeNAS users in the Plex forums.
If you can live with the overhead that virtualization causes, but still want a ZFS solution, the Napp-IT all-in-one solution works well for me (the overhead is quite small since I use a dedicated HBA in pass-through mode). Running it like this means I can run ZFS in its native environment (Solaris/OmniOS) but use Plex in a Ubuntu environment where I feel it is more comfortable (and I use the premium music feature too, which isn’t available under FBSD afaik).
@Peter_W said:
If you can live with the overhead that virtualization causes, but still want a ZFS solution, the Napp-IT all-in-one solution works well for me (the overhead is quite small since I use a dedicated HBA in pass-through mode). Running it like this means I can run ZFS in its native environment (Solaris/OmniOS) but use Plex in a Ubuntu environment where I feel it is more comfortable (and I use the premium music feature too, which isn’t available under FBSD afaik).
Peter,
Wow, I might be able to follow the install instructions but, in all honesty, using the tools installed would just boggle my mind.
And fixing an issue that may come up would require a more intimate knowledge of VM, java, et al, that I care to learn in my advanced age. I can see the benefits of running certain OS’s in a virtual machine and recovery from a crash might be quicker but for me, this creates too many layers. I want simple, at my age.
I fully understand that and respect it even more. Just gave you (and others browsing) an alternative 
