I’m looking for hardware suggestions for a new Plex server and storage. I currently have a Pi 5 (SSD) with a 1TB external HDD running as my Plex server which doesn’t do too bad but I’d like to upgrade. My films are all ripped using MakeMKV and left in that format. For the most part they are DVDs but I’ll be moving onto ripping my bluray collection eventually.
Streaming for the most part will be just one or two films at once. My collection will probably run to about 10TB.
I’m happy to be corrected on any points and all suggestions welcome. Hopefully I’ve been clear and apologies if not or if I should have posted this elsewhere. Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any help.
Thanks! I assume an external USB HDD would be fine but what NAS would you recommend? I don’t want to go overboard. I think I’d I went that ropey I would probably use it for backing up documents as well.
Not going over WiFi is trickier in my house and so I would probably look at the powerline plugs although I’ve never tried so it’s need to look into them.
If you can’t avoid WiFi then so be it. In that case be certain to use a good WiFi AP.
I don’t know how well a powerline interface would work but remember that most homes have two-phase service. If the devices are on opposite phases, it means the signal must transit to & through the big transformer outside which will impact performance – so wifi might still be the better choice.
As for NAS selections, the two most popular vendors are Synology and QNAP.
Synology is pricey. QNAP is having product issues.
( I have both )
Not knowing how fast you intend to grow or if any budget constraints,
recommend you take your time for now and get settled with the new machine and look at all the NAS options. Look at what you’re doing now with media, estimate where you’re be in 3 years, now double it (it happens far to easily) and eval that estimate.
Are you looking to be able to transcode on the fly?
If not, and using Direct Play/Stream then a pretty low end device will be fine. I would suggest your existing Pi5 is more than enough to run the server. I ran mine as a virtual machine on a old Lenovo Tiny PC (cost me about £120) from Ebay. 2 Core + 12Gb RAM. Never had any issues with that. I have moved it to a Geekom Mini PC but that is because I am running more VMs now, not because the Lenovo was having any issues.
My media is all stored on a Synology NAS (DS223j with 2x 6Tb drives in RAID0), running minimal other apps. As said above, main thing is having a decent (preferably wired) connection to the server. I can happily stream 4 things simultaneously on my setup with no transcoding.
If you are looking at around 10Tb required that is likely to be your biggest expense.
Thanks all for the responses. So sorry for not replying sooner. Work life exploded with lots too of work and plenty of stress. Yay… I would be transcoding on the fly and as my home PC is considering on giving up on existence and heading off to silicon heaven I went with a mini PC as it will hopefully stand in as a home/work PC in the meantime.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance to get Plex set up at some point. Sleep is overrated right?
, it will do very well reading media over the LAN. (Don’t use WiFi for a server)
