If I had a really huge 1 PB library… of music and movies TV shows in lossy, lossless, highres, SD, HD and 4K quality.
Lets say for instance:
10x Synology Disk Station DS2415
120x WD RED Pro 10 TB HDDs
1 homebuilt “server” for transcoding with lots of ECC RAM, 1 Threadripper CPU, 1 Quadro RTX 8000 and a decent Intel LAN network card.
NAS:es would be connected to the processing “server” using 10 gb ports. The “server” would be connected to a Asus RT-AX88U router using network aggregation.
Would PLEX a good option for such huge library? (still for personal use among friends and family) IF I had such “media” library consiting of lossless music, DVD, HD and 4K movies and TV shows… What about the PLEX userinterface? Would it workout or would it be hard to search/find/organize?
While I don’t have any experience with any (hypothetical) library of even close to that scale, I think Plex would not care two much. There’s “only” a few aspects that are closely linked to library size as far as I am aware:
Initial setup (scanning folder, collecting metadata etc) - will probably take quite a while.
Generating video/chapter thumbnails - will take even longer once and if turned on (off by default).
PMS data directory (contains metadata, posters etc.) - will be “a few” GBs large and you will want to store this on SSD(s) in order to keep performance.
Maintenance tasks - will most likely take quite some time due to size of the data directory and database.
Manual fixing of movie/tv show matching mishaps - will take you a lot of time unless your filenames tell Plex what movie/tv show episode this is without any doubt.
I think the web app should mostly do fine with the size since most of the content is being loaded piece by piece rather than all at one. Not sure how other clients would fare though.
Honestly, I probably wouldn’t - hypothetically - use Plex (or any other software) for a lib that size without testing.
As for someone who owns a PB+ of content on the cloud, the only time my Plex Server truly struggles is when more than 4 people try to stream 4K Content at the same time. My support servers don’t have the umpf to power it.
OK, here’s my beef with PMS and Music. It sucks. Don’t use it. It needs the biggest bloody overhaul of the century. PMS App also rapes your phone battery like it was going out of style. I use Airsonic to host my music, I also have a dedicated server specifically for it. I did a price check on what you’ve got or claim too, you’d be better off running multiple Supermicro 36Bays than those Synology NAS. The setup I have is by far more advanced than the average users build, and requires a bit more monitoring but for what you spent, I could almost add 25% more capacity.
The reason for that statement, each server can contain a motherboard, processor, etc… You can also upgrade the compute power without having to swap complete chassis and rebuild your arrays.
You’d be better off using an intel i7-7700K + 32GB Memory, and a couple SSDs for the storage. That’s my 2 cents.
Lossless should really only apply to music and audio files. You would never want to to consider that for video files.
I concur with dredstarx that Plex for a large music library sucks. I had about 60,000 albums in Plex but removed them as it just slows down the server to much and takes far to long doing maintenance with all it’s updates. The organization IMHO isn’t that good and neither are the clients for music. I think Emby is much better for music and has good client support. I used to use Subsonic (what Airsonic was ultimately branched from) but shut that server down as Emby was better for it.
For the video files the amount of space used to store things in is irrelevant. A movie is a movie to the database. A 50GB rip or a 1GB compressed H.264/H.265 file will require the same DB entries.
What you will want to test is what formats you NEED for smooth client playback. Pure rips rarely work well for remote users and will transcode degrading the quality. Your UPLOAD bitrate will also play a huge role in this as well.
But the bottom line answer to your question is yes, Plex will work with a couple of petabytes of storage if you need it to. You’ll want to probably use a few SSD drives in a RAID (not storage) array for quick processing for meta-data and DBs.
4 4K streams should not be a problem at all unless they are transcoding and there is NO POINT in this. You would be better of direct streaming a quality 1080p version then a transcoded 4K version as it will be of higher quality and not need to transcode.
I agree with what cayars said. Though, I haven’t messed with Emby too much, I do love how air sonic handles things. Frankly, when you’re pushing 50k+ albums, and 200k+ songs, it tends to be ridiculous. My music collection is severely lacking, but my TVShow and Movies collection is not. Of the 27k movies I have in my Radarr DB, I have about 17k to 18k of them. Nearly all of my TVShows and Movies are 1080p because 720p is a joke.
Host wise; HIGH Clock Speed, and low core count will make your streaming blazing fast. To test that theory out, I put an i9-9900K + 64GB DDR4 2666Mhz memory in a server, and I was able to handle 8x 4K Streams, and 5x 1080p Streams at the same time. No problems, no buffering, nothing.
