NAS Build for Plex (1:1 Blu-ray rips)

General Discussions
1

I am trying to set up a system for a new home I am building. The purpose of this setup is to have 2 methods of streaming from a centralized Plex Media Server. Here is my plan:

I am going to be using a Middle Atlantic RCS 35U rack. I am going to be setting up a home theater with a TV, receiver, and surround sound. That will be my primary use case for this media server. I will be ripping my blu-ray collection in lossless 1:1 format to maintain all of the functionality and quality. I want to be able to leverage all of my high end features such as HDR or 4k or whatever it might be down the road, as UHD ripping becomes a thing (if). I am going to be using an NVIDIA Shield as the client for the home theater and may use Plex as the client app or Kodi with a Plex addon. I use subtitle a lot, but I want the home theater quality to be direct play and not transcoded if at all possible. I want it to be flawless essentially…no pixelated scenes, no delays, no pixelation in dark scenes, etc.

The second stream will be the rest of the house. I will be using PS4s in multiple rooms, using the Plex App as clients to the same media server. I am not too worried about transcoding here or quality. As long as I can push 1080p content and possibly surround sound audio to the multiple TVs in the rest of the house (3-4 streams max). This would all be going over a Cat6 LAN. So obviously the build needs to have enough horsepower to handle all of these use cases and still have room for expansion down the road as quality gets higher.

I am looking for help with a build (parts list) or instructions on how I could set this up. I looked online a lot and have found SOME builds but they are all very random and are not aimed at my specific use cases. I was hoping to get some input on what hardware I should get that is currently available. I am looking for a rackmount chassis that is quiet, fan upgrades that make it quiet as well. I want hot swappable bays and I want a configuration similar to that of an actual NAS. I have a secondary PC that I would be migrating to a rackmount chassis as well, and could use that to manage the NAS externally. I am mostly looking for something to be relatively quiet, cool looking (aesthetics are important to me too), and to have the hardware horsepower to be functional and expansive down the road.

Being a NAS, I also need to have some form of backup mechanism for safety, so improving my current gaming PC to act as the backup is also a possibility. Could someone point me to a solid build or provide me a recommended parts list and explain the reasoning behind the decisions (so I can understand why and how it all works as I go).

Thank you so much in advance for the help!

2

Hm… I don’t think that plex is able to push blurays without transcoding when the movie contains subtitles (I’m looking for that since a long time). If I’m wrong, please correct me.

The setup question (I can tell you what I’m using):

  • Self build “server” with an i6700k (I’m able to transcode 6 1080p streams at the same time, but I think it’s almost the maximum. But it’s working with no interruptions.)
  • Synology DS 1815+ (8 Bays, security of 1 Bay, Hot Swap etc. is possible)
  • Fire Tv and a couple of Fire TV Sticks
  • Some friends are using Plex Apps to stream from my server

If you have any further questio, feel free to ask.

3

@reyxd said:
Hm… I don’t think that plex is able to push blurays without transcoding when the movie contains subtitles (I’m looking for that since a long time). If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Depends on type of subtitle. For instance, if it is a text-based sub then there should be no issues on most clients (and you can create those from your disc).

4

@reyxd said:
Hm… I don’t think that plex is able to push blurays without transcoding when the movie contains subtitles (I’m looking for that since a long time). If I’m wrong, please correct me.

It is perfectly able to do that - provided you use a client which understands these types of subtitles.
But there are not many which can do that. PMP, OpenPHT and Kodi can do it.
The native Plex App on the Shield can do it as well under some conditions.

5

@Peter_W & @OttoKerner thanks for your answers.
Unfortunately I don’t like the interfaces of these players. So I think I’m fine with transcoding. :wink:

6

@OttoKerner said:

@reyxd said:
Hm… I don’t think that plex is able to push blurays without transcoding when the movie contains subtitles (I’m looking for that since a long time). If I’m wrong, please correct me.

It is perfectly able to do that - provided you use a client which understands these types of subtitles.
But there are not many which can do that. PMP, OpenPHT and Kodi can do it.
The native Plex App on the Shield can do it as well under some conditions.

That is why I was opting for Kodi as the client for the home theater and then using PS4/Plex App for the clients for the rest of the house. If it has to transcode to the rest of the house, that is fine. But I do not want interruptions or pixelation or anything like that on the home theater. I want it to play as if it I am playing it directly from the Blu ray. From what you all are saying, this appears to be possible, but what would be an ideal configuration for hardware to build a NAS that could handle it?

7

@Guinea: When you are directly streaming your content every NAS can handle it? Your ethernet connection has to be fast enough (1 Gbit).

8

@reyxd said:
Hm… I don’t think that plex is able to push blurays without transcoding when the movie contains subtitles (I’m looking for that since a long time). If I’m wrong, please correct me.

The setup question (I can tell you what I’m using):

  • Self build “server” with an i6700k (I’m able to transcode 6 1080p streams at the same time, but I think it’s almost the maximum. But it’s working with no interruptions.)
  • Synology DS 1815+ (8 Bays, security of 1 Bay, Hot Swap etc. is possible)
  • Fire Tv and a couple of Fire TV Sticks
  • Some friends are using Plex Apps to stream from my server

If you have any further questio, feel free to ask.

This seems along the lines of what I was looking for, but if you are using a Synology, why would you not just run Plex on it? Is it possible to build a server and NAS into one single rackmount unit? I don’t want it to be a monster and limit its quality or increase its noise. That is why I was curious. I was considering grabbing a QNAP NAS, but the CPUs on it are not very good. And if I get one with a solid CPU, the price goes through the roof. Hence why I was opting to build my own configuration. So are you recommending I get a QNAP only for the storage and build a smaller rackmount PC that acts as only the Plex server? Would I even need to run an OS on it? This is all new territory for me…I have built gaming machines before, but all Windows based and simple configurations.

9

If subs are the only hold-up to Direct Play, I just converted a show’s subs in PGS to UTF-8 (SubRip) with Xmedia Recode (Copy Video, Copy Audio, Convert Subs)… it took 12 seconds. That went so well I put 10 more through the queue in just over a minute. The episodes were 44 mins each.

http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/download.html

10

Flawless and Plex are mutually exclusive these days… sorry to say… they are up to their ears in bugs

And if a particular client - server pairing works magically today… the can break it by tomorrow… I have had serveral client types that worked pretty well up to about 3 or 4 weeks ago… then boom… plex has made changes and now issues abound.

11

@Guinea said:
This seems along the lines of what I was looking for, but if you are using a Synology, why would you not just run Plex on it?

There are not very powerful CPU’s available for Synos
If you must transcode ‘remuxed’ BluRay rips with subtitles, you need a very powerful CPU.

Is it possible to build a server and NAS into one single rackmount unit?

It is certainly possible to mount a NAS and a computer into the same rack :wink:

So are you recommending I get a QNAP only for the storage and build a smaller rackmount PC that acts as only the Plex server?

This is certainly an option.
But if you are building yourself anyway, you might as well start with a bigger PC case and throw some drives into it.
If this is a machine strictly for Plex, you won’t need any fancy RAID configurations etc.

Just make provisions for a periodical safety copy of both your media files and your Plex data folder - which could be stored on a NAS :wink:

Use CPU coolers which are used by over-clockers. (but do not O/C your Plex server cpu.)
Just because these are big and you can mount big fans.
The bigger and more efficient the cooler and the bigger the fan, the slower it can rotate
= less noise + less buildup of dust in the cooling fins.

Don’t forget to cool your drives as well.
Again: use big fan(s) with low RPM’s for less noise and dust buildup

Would I even need to run an OS on it?

Sure, Plex server doesn’t come self-contained. It always needs a machine with an operating system. Which one that is, depends on you. Use whatever you are comfortable with.

12

@OttoKerner said:

@Guinea said:
This seems along the lines of what I was looking for, but if you are using a Synology, why would you not just run Plex on it?

There are not very powerful CPU’s available for Synos
If you must transcode ‘remuxed’ BluRay rips with subtitles, you need a very powerful CPU.

Is it possible to build a server and NAS into one single rackmount unit?

It is certainly possible to mount a NAS and a computer into the same rack :wink:

So are you recommending I get a QNAP only for the storage and build a smaller rackmount PC that acts as only the Plex server?

This is certainly an option.
But if you are building yourself anyway, you might as well start with a bigger PC case and throw some drives into it.
If this is a machine strictly for Plex, you won’t need any fancy RAID configurations etc.

Just make provisions for a periodical safety copy of both your media files and your Plex data folder - which could be stored on a NAS :wink:

Use CPU coolers which are used by over-clockers. (but do not O/C your Plex server cpu.)
Just because these are big and you can mount big fans.
The bigger and more efficient the cooler and the bigger the fan, the slower it can rotate
= less noise + less buildup of dust in the cooling fins.

Don’t forget to cool your drives as well.
Again: use big fan(s) with low RPM’s for less noise and dust buildup

Would I even need to run an OS on it?

Sure, Plex server doesn’t come self-contained. It always needs a machine with an operating system. Which one that is, depends on you. Use whatever you are comfortable with.

I absolutely agree with you @OttoKerner with one exception. I would not use (in a private home) this data storage configuration. I think that a raid 5 configuration is absolutely enough.

13

@reyxd said:
I absolutely agree with you @OttoKerner with one exception. I would not use (in a private home) this data storage configuration. I think that a raid 5 configuration is absolutely enough.

Once you cross the capacity of a few Terabytes, RAID 5 will become unmaintainable. If a disk goes down, the ‘resilvering’ times will be so long, that the chance of a second drive failing during it will get unbearably high.
You need something else for such a type of array (ZFS or better)
But again, for this type of content this is just overkill. And there is no type of disk array which can replace a backup copy. So what’s the point of an array anyway?

We are not talking about professional datacenters, you know :smiley:

Arrays are primarily a technology for high speed and high availability. Both is not really needed for movies and music.
The sky won’t come crashing down if Plex is down for a day or two.

14

Ok, these all sound like valid points. So knowing what I am looking for, what would be your ideal recommendation to accomplish this? A separate NAS (rackmount) and a separate server (custom built rackmount)? Or a single server /NAS unit that I build myself? And depending on what you recommend…can you point me to some ideal hardware recommendations? Or maybe some builds or blog threads that would accomplish this?

15

Been thinking a bit more about this and it is starting to make sense. So should I be focusing on building a HTPC or something like that with the sole purpose of running Plex and being able to transcode some intense content flawlessly? (or as close as to flawlessly as possible) and then use Kodi as the client for the home theater to avoid transcoding? And just get a standard QNAP to provide the mechanism for storage and redundancy and protection of the drives?

16

@Guinea

I have no idea what your ‘IT’ expertice is or is not… you technical abilities will weight highly in what you comfortable running and administering and what you will need to buy that does it for you or build so you know it works for you.

wanting and having are 2 different things and just because you have it doesnt mean you can operate it. I see rich people all the time here buy these massive boats that they cant drive and play ping pong with the docks and other boats trying to operate it.

that said… you dont sound like a settle for or compromise with kinda guy… which is goign to rule out running plex and storage on a consumer nas. you wont be happy… it is ‘simpler’ in some regards esxpecially handeling the data part but will be woefully underpowered if you are storing native 4k content as plex will have to transcode at some point.

first and formost …this whole exercise needs to start off with a calculator. yep you are going to need to do math… how much inteded storage space, how much backup storage space (raid/zfs is not backup), network bandwith, processor passmark keeping in mind that the number of threads and the passmark of EACH thread will come into play… I have written several posts here already on said subject and plex has a half ass FAQ about it, etc

those numbers are for todays formats… what the future holds nobodys guess… so now you need a fudge factor if you want futureproofing…

personally from a home use perspective having a separate box for plex and a seperate box for the filer are probably not needed, will complicate your setup and add a point of failure… I run an all in one with 12 drives in old corporate server gear you can buy on ebay for pennies on the dollar compared to new. And unlike popular opnion around here you dont always need the latest and greatest CPU to run a powerful setup… again tradeoffs… and we have not even gotten into power usage yet so is $60 bucks a month in electric plaitable… mine if more like $15 a month for my plex/filer on 24/7 and to some that is too much…

a really powerful FreeNAS box ‘might’ be able to accomplish all you reqire all in one box as well as Napp-it, and some other all in one media boxes based with plex in mind as a guest,container, jail etc… but you will need to get your hands dirty at some levels with each…

I would NOT reccomend hardware raid to anyone these days… its outdated and compared to ZFS and other software derived solutions does not protect your data as well and its finicky with hardware and will give you fits… I can assure you. Personally I would stay with a ZFS solution but again… you need to research it, play with it, and see if you are comfortable admining it…

there are litterally hundreds of threads on setups here and elsewhere on the net… every 5 minutes someone blogs about setting up the perfect plex box… there are way too many variables to make that statement but should give you a good idea where to start.

if everything we are talking about sounds like the teacher in a peanuts cartoon… you might need to find yourself a local nerd to ‘IT’ it for you and admin it…

plex is fun and on a small scale its pretty easy… when you want bleading edge, 4k UHD, multiple streams etc etc it can almost become a part time job

17

@dragonmel said:
@Guinea

I have no idea what your ‘IT’ expertice is or is not… you technical abilities will weight highly in what you comfortable running and administering and what you will need to buy that does it for you or build so you know it works for you.

wanting and having are 2 different things and just because you have it doesnt mean you can operate it. I see rich people all the time here buy these massive boats that they cant drive and play ping pong with the docks and other boats trying to operate it.

that said… you dont sound like a settle for or compromise with kinda guy… which is goign to rule out running plex and storage on a consumer nas. you wont be happy… it is ‘simpler’ in some regards esxpecially handeling the data part but will be woefully underpowered if you are storing native 4k content as plex will have to transcode at some point.

first and formost …this whole exercise needs to start off with a calculator. yep you are going to need to do math… how much inteded storage space, how much backup storage space (raid/zfs is not backup), network bandwith, processor passmark keeping in mind that the number of threads and the passmark of EACH thread will come into play… I have written several posts here already on said subject and plex has a half ass FAQ about it, etc

those numbers are for todays formats… what the future holds nobodys guess… so now you need a fudge factor if you want futureproofing…

personally from a home use perspective having a separate box for plex and a seperate box for the filer are probably not needed, will complicate your setup and add a point of failure… I run an all in one with 12 drives in old corporate server gear you can buy on ebay for pennies on the dollar compared to new. And unlike popular opnion around here you dont always need the latest and greatest CPU to run a powerful setup… again tradeoffs… and we have not even gotten into power usage yet so is $60 bucks a month in electric plaitable… mine if more like $15 a month for my plex/filer on 24/7 and to some that is too much…

a really powerful FreeNAS box ‘might’ be able to accomplish all you reqire all in one box as well as Napp-it, and some other all in one media boxes based with plex in mind as a guest,container, jail etc… but you will need to get your hands dirty at some levels with each…

I would NOT reccomend hardware raid to anyone these days… its outdated and compared to ZFS and other software derived solutions does not protect your data as well and its finicky with hardware and will give you fits… I can assure you. Personally I would stay with a ZFS solution but again… you need to research it, play with it, and see if you are comfortable admining it…

there are litterally hundreds of threads on setups here and elsewhere on the net… every 5 minutes someone blogs about setting up the perfect plex box… there are way too many variables to make that statement but should give you a good idea where to start.

if everything we are talking about sounds like the teacher in a peanuts cartoon… you might need to find yourself a local nerd to ‘IT’ it for you and admin it…

plex is fun and on a small scale its pretty easy… when you want bleading edge, 4k UHD, multiple streams etc etc it can almost become a part time job

I definitely agree with what you are saying. I have a technical background. I always built my gaming PCs by hand and I am familiar with basic hardware implementations. The issue I was having is that I am not very familiar with ZFS or RAID replacements in general. I have been out of the PC knowledge for awhile, since I have not had to build anything for almost a decade. Now that I am getting back into it, the terminology was a bit much to digest.

In terms of administration, I can probably handle 99% of it on my own and the rest I can defer to the internet. The goal I have in mind is to put forth money and time to make sure the setup is reliable and functional, with quality as the primary aim, but still expandable. I am not “rich,” but I do make decent money and I would rather put the money forth to make sure it is a good setup. I know you can do budget builds, but sometimes you get what you pay for as well. So that is why I am a bit more receptive to splurging on a crazy setup.

I am open to having a single unit (like a 4U case) that is both the NAS and the server. I am just trying to figure out what route is better. If I throw an HTPC build into a rackmount case with an i7-7700k and dedicated GPU, and also include 10 HDDs, won’t that create an issue with cooling or noise? That is why I was assuming it would be better to just build the HTPC separately and keep the storage outside the server.

I have done a bunch of research, but none of the builds I found have been NAS + Server combinations aimed at high throughput transcoding and streaming capabilities via Plex or Kodi. The primary source of media will be 1:1 MKV rips of Blu rays. So for now, 1080p will be the primary source. But I do intend to look for 4k content and when 4k ripping becomes a thing, I will start doing that as well. I guess my goal right now is just to find a build that satisfies these needs and explains the decisions behind the choices they made and how to set up the software.

Hopefully that makes sense.

18

@Guinea said:
If I throw an HTPC build into a rackmount case with an i7-7700k and dedicated GPU, and also include 10 HDDs, won’t that create an issue with cooling or noise?

If the case is constructed in a smart way there won’t be a noise or a cooling issue.
Rule of thumb: the smaller a case, the more difficult it is to cool it silently.
That’s why I emphasized the use of big fans above. :slight_smile:

19

@OttoKerner said:

@Guinea said:
If I throw an HTPC build into a rackmount case with an i7-7700k and dedicated GPU, and also include 10 HDDs, won’t that create an issue with cooling or noise?

If the case is constructed in a smart way there won’t be a noise or a cooling issue.
Rule of thumb: the smaller a case, the more difficult it is to cool it silently.
That’s why I emphasized the use of big fans above. :slight_smile:

That makes sense. I am getting a 35U rack, so space shouldn’t be an issue if I wanted to go 4U on the chassis.

20

@Guinea

i can appreciate your predicament

I had my previous plex build running for many many years on a hackintosh build on a e8400… it had 8 drives running zfs and it was getting very long in the tooth and before a motherboard failure or mass drive dyoffs… as my drives had over 50,000 hours on them… I decided to do something new and build an esxi all in one with ZFS serving the datastores for Esxi interally vs using a filer via nfs/iscsi… so week and weeks of reading and learning esxi, linux (plex new host os) etc etc… finding the hardware I wanted … dual l5640 CPUs are almost perfect… low power… 24 threads and each thread is capable of dealing with the dreaded VC1 codec… but without mainstream h265 and 4k standards, clients etc… future proof is a questionmark… bottom line is even if I could fly out there tomorrow and drop a complete setup in your lap… it would probably be down in days… and since you didnt do it for yourself you would not have learned to walk the path and probably couldnt fix it easily…

my ‘suggestion’ and I really mean this poliltely is to repurporse an old PC for now or buy some POS on craiglsist as a learner / junker… your dad didnt teach you to drive in his porsche right…? and play with the plex server and some clients… play with some pre canned all in one setups… play with zfs …that will do much of the setup and heavy lifting… get an idea of what works… how it works… and how to admin it… then when you have an idea how all this works… go dump the coin to make it happen… personally if I were in your technical shoes… I would look really hard at Freenas… specifically 11.1 when it comes out in a couple of weeks… 11 is almost a beta although the latest 9 is really stable just lacks some new features and prettier web pages of the new 11. Freenas has a huge community… many use it as a all in one plex box so you will get excellent advice… and it puts a pretty good wrapper around zfs which is in most implementations a command line file system… its not hard to learn but its mostly commandline… freenas while dumbing it down will mostly keep you safe… and jails, plugins, and now docker I believe you can run almost your entire house IT requirements … plex, file sharing, nextcloud, home automation… etc etc all in the freenas web based environment.

getting a specific answer to a specific question is usually pretty easy around here… but your inital post is well… like going into the buddist temple of the Lama and asking for the meaning of your life… its going to be long, convoluted and may not get to the point of what you actaully want… only you can answer that…

there really is no shortcut here. you have to be able to install and admin all the pieces or you will have a broken setup in notime…

if you REALLY wanted to multipurpose… when plex first came out it wasnt a backend frontend it just ran everyting on a pc… and so you had to have the TV hooked to that box… and it was GREAT…

if you are building a media center / theater into the house and have an equipment closet behind it or decide you can build you freenas box whatever quiet enough to be in your theater rack… hooking it into your tv and runing a openpht or PMP client on the same machine as the server might have its bennifits… direct to the biggest TV for 4k without network latency, and a decent GPU that can also help perhaps your plex server with hardware support when it comes out… just a thougth…