Plex Media Server on Freenas Advice

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

I’ve been running Plex Media Server on a Mac Mini with 30TB of direct attached raid storage for years now but was given a bunch of drives so decided to have a play with Freenas (now Purenas I understand).

I’m going to have about 96TB of raw storage on the NAS so believe I’ll be looking at around 48TB with drive protection but I’m not sure how I’m going to be best off running the PMS.

I believe my options are to run the plugin in a jail, create a Ubuntu Server VM and install PMS or just continue to run PMS on the Mac Mini and use the NAS purely for storage?

The Freenas box has a i5 6500T processor (2.5ghz iirc) with 8gb ram - was also wondering if it’d help matters sticking in a dedicated ethernet card for the PMS jail or VM. I dont want to have to buy more processing power but not the end of the world if more RAM is the answer.

The Mac Mini is the latest and greatest 3.2ghz 6-core i7 with 64gb ram.

My main concern is that having the server and media on different boxes - virtually or phystically is going to cause some big bottlenecks as I’m mostly watching 4K media taken directly off the disc down to very, very large mkv file. I have to do the odd transcode but its very very rare that at any one time my PMS is serving to more than 2 people at any one time.

I’ve got a fully cabled up gigabit network at home and use a Shield Pro to watch content.

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If that is the case, personally, I would run separate NAS and PLEX servers…

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Thanks @bjs59, is that down to the transcoding resources of the plugin/virtual machine?

I’ve got the NAS up and running now - purely as a NAS and can see that the processor is handling things fine but lacking in memory so have ordered another 8gb.

Going back to the original question apart from being able to take the Plex Media Server installer and run it directly on a Freenas virtual machine is there any other considerations, benefits or drawbacks on the plugin vs virtual machine query?

Dan

5

The CPU/GPU will determine if you will be keep up with any needed transcoding… The ZFS file system used by FreeNAS will do better with more RAM but it will run with as little as 2 GB with the correct settings despite what is said to be required by the folks on the FreeNAS forums…

As far as the plugin compared to virtual machine, I have no idea… I just prefer to keep my NAS and PLEX server on separate boxes…

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