I am in the process of (re)building my latest family Plex Server.
PMS #1
Intel 4790K
16GB RAM
Various HDD
Worked well, but had some problems with explosive growth… and some challenges with multiple users
PMS#2
Intel 8580
32GB RAM
External Seagate 8TB USB Drives.
Worked well, until I tried to stream more than 1 4K Movie and transcode…
Current Build:
HP DL380p G8
Dual 2690 2.9GHz processors
128GB RAM
12 NAS Seagate 8TB Drives,
1TB M.2 (OS, and temp space)
So far, my CPU remains at 0% most of the time even with 1 or more transcodes (haven’t done 4K transcode yet).
I’m thinking of adding a P2000 GPU but don’t know if this is even necessary.
Has anyone done any larger builds of PMS that can offer any advice?
Why Did I get here:
External USB hard Drives are fine, until they sit on a shelf for a long time and eventually (with the Seagate ones) the USB cable sloooowly works it self out and the drive goes off-line. Easy fix, until the 100th time this happens and is now loose… an easy fix is to remove it from the external housing, and put inside the chassis, but then you need a very large tower for all the drives… and those drives don’t live very well inside the chassis. (I’ve had two die on me)
Transcoding. Sure this is an evil word. No places like Netflix don’t transcode because they have multiple copies… but that kind of makes my head ache, to think of keeping many copies of the same media… So transcoding I will do. 4K transcodes OMG that will stress test a CPU.
Why the DL380P G8? If you remember when the 2690 CPU was released, that was a game changer. 8Cores, 2.9GHz. Many major corporations installed those killer CPU’s for many workload intensive servers. The DL380P G8, has 12 3.5 HDD slots, so thinking for future 12x8GB (or larger) is nice, has a great RAID card… So very economical storage space, protected.
I had to try a few M.2 PCI cards (The HP G8’s don’t support M.2 Boot) the solution I found was to use the M.2 as a SSD (Vs NVMe) and use the optical ATA port on the motherboard to the PCI card. So the M.2 is really a SSD on performance. I get about 500GB/s transfer rates…
So following some normalized best practices I put the boot and OS partitions on a 1TB M.2 SSD stick, and told plex to use that as temp space. I’ve never seen it breathe very hard (even on boot or transcode) so while I would have preferred to have NVMe working - I’ve not found a way to make the G8’s do that.
I did consider the SD card slot for boot, but 32GB is fairly light space wise; and the HP SD cards are silly expensive, and there are lots of blogs talking about how 'non-hp SD cards) don’t work. Also in the time period when the G8’s were released, SD boot was a new thing, and not so reliable.
In researching and running PMS, I’ve found that GHz is more important than cores… so the 2690 became an obvious choice when looking at enterprise grade processors.
Expensive? OverKill? Maybe or maybe not. $500 bucks gets you the HPDL380pG8, CPU’s Memory, power supplies, four 1GB Network ports, shipped to your door. Building a new PC, would cost that. Drives? The same regardless. $150 bucks for new 8TB Seagate Drives.
I did spend an extra $20 Bucks on the second riser card for the chassis, and another $20 bucks getting 1GB of Cache for the HDD controller. $40 bucks for the PCI M.2 Card, and $100 bucks for the M.2 stick… and $100 for the HP drive trays. Makes the “server” around $800 (excluding storage drives)
While $800 for a PMS might seem expensive to some (when you can do this on a raspberry Pi for $50… $800 isn’t overly expensive compared to the cost of my first two builds. Its actually cheaper than my second build I did. And I’d love to see you try to Transcode on a RPi… 
So not really expensive.
Overkill? Well if you’ve only got $50 in a RPi box, or if you’ve ever seen your CPU hit 100% on your PMS… or if you’ve done something “else” other than PMS for your cord cutting needs… then you know a cheap low end server will not have the horsepower you need.
What’s Running on this server?
PMS
Emby (both run great side by side)
xTeve for Live TV as well as a
SD Home Run also connected for live TV
Various scripts (for FileBot, Tiny Media Manager, etc)
As far as the TV’s… I’ve got FireSticks, Roku, LG, Samsung, all with the PMS App. I’ve also bought a $100 MiniPC that runs windows 10, and Kodi. (I’m testing out if I would rather use a Kodi client attached to my PMS, vs the PMS app) Live TV was one of the major reasons. (Kodi has a broader and wider support for live TV.)
Ultimately I need the user experience to have a high “WAF”. Like flawless. (WAF: Wife Acceptance Factor). while I would be fine with 300 remotes, a keyboard, and 99 apps on the client side to see media; she on the other hand, wants just the cable remote that turns on the TV, and allows the food network to play in the background.
The Jury is out, as I still have a cable bill (that has a WAF of 100% with one remote for one TV to do everything).
I do applaud Plex for continuing to improve its Live TV experience.
I have to say, playing movie, or watching live TV and seeing the CPU at 0%. is amazing.
On this thread, at the family retreat by the lake, we also have a PMS out there that I’m rebuilding as well. At present using a Rosewill 15 slot chassis and a dual 5675 CPU’s. The overall cost will be similar to the HPG8; but the physical footprint of the G8 won’t work at the retreat, while the Rosewill chassis will work fine. I’ll be curious to see the performance of Nehalem vs Westmere where PMS is concerned.
To anyone starting out, Yes this configuration far exceeds what is “required”. to anyone who has completely cut the cord, and is using Plex to the max… you know how I got here, and I would be curious any other pieces of advice or experience you have.
If any Plex developers are reading this… one request regarding “Live TV”. Sometimes you don’t know what you want to watch… and some times its easier to put on HGTV, Discovery, or Food on in the background… Plex requires you think about your show and select it… what if, Plex Randomly put shows on by Genre. As in 10 “stations” that randomly and constantly play content. You could have a Western station, a romance station, Home Improvement station. It would display a “guide” like interface to show you the stuff that is playing on the “stations” so you would end up starting Ferris Bueller Movie 18 minutes into it, at 8:18PM if you picked the comedy station. etc… A little integration With Alexa or Google becomes “Alexa turn on Living room TV, on Comedy station” Then would start the TV at some point in time, on some comedy movie. THAT would be cool.
