Plex server on NAS or PC?

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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I have the same dilema, I use a Threadripper 1920x 24/7 as Plex Server and mining cryptocurrencies as a beast, flawless, but I was thinking in buying a DS916+ for NAS upgrade, I would have to remove 2x 8TB WD Red HDD and 2x128GB 850 EVO SSD (for NAS cache) from the PC and retire/sell my Dlink DNS 327L.
The answer is: depends, it will depend on your usage, for example, since I use the PC 24/7 here, I have no reason to use a better NAS, also the new NAS would oblige me to upgrade my router to get native LACP support.

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I think I am going to go with the NAS setup. Either way I am looking to spend the same about of money. Either with a building a new PC or building a NAS with Four 8TB HDā€™s. My router supports LACP and I am upgrading my WiFi router today. Going to go with the Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS918+. Wish me luck I will report back once everything get moved over and running again. I am currently backing everything up to Google Drive just incase the worst happens. This is taking a very long time. It has been running since the 1st of January. 10mbps and my service provider cutting me off is not helping. Even though I have ā€œunlimitedā€ data.

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Hi Matt, how did you go with the Synology DS918+. Iā€™m contemplating whether I get one of those or stick with my power hungry i7-4770 server.

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So far the NAS is the way to go. It sends files to my Roku boxes easily. The four 8tb drives are in raid so I do not have to worry about loosing files any more. I have files being sent to back up to google drive as back up. The only thing I am having trouble with right now if remote access and the ability for movie and music files to be able to search for meta date and cover art. On the PC it was able to do this easy. For some reason on the NAS it struggles with this and can not access the web to search for this.

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Several things played a part in my decision.

  1. Not sold on 4k. I have a 4k tv but nothing feeding them (Amazon fire stick, older Apple TV) can dela with 4K anyway and my 58 year old eyes probably canā€™t tell the difference so why bother?
  2. My NAS is an older DS2413+ 12 bay Synology which doesnā€™t have the horsepower to transcode that anyway. Iā€™m not sure ANY Synology box can with any degree of ease.
  3. I had access to a discarded Dell server with 6 cores and lots of RAM so I made that a beefy PLEX server and thatā€™s all that box does. This helps in multiple ways as my regular PC spends most of its time behind a VPN which made accessing PLEX remotely a real pain. full disclosure, I NEVER figured out how to tunnel PLEX through my VPN. So my PLEX box is not on a VPN and that solved that problem for me.

All my media is on the Synology, and the PLES server sits nearby,.

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For some reason my PLEX on the Synology is not building the IMDB data base for Video and Music. Any help or tips on how to set that up?

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This will take a few minutes to go through. At a movie right now. Iā€™ll write up something tonight.

But in general, Plex doesnā€™t want to use IMDb for tv shows, videos, or music.

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Ok thank you for getting back to me. Let me explain whats going on. When I used to run PLEX on my PC in the past. All my videos and music would automatically fund and add album art, ratings, descriptions, trailers, Actor info, etc etc. Now that I have moved all of my data to my Synology NAS and installed PLEX this data has a hard time searching and loading like it used. I can not figure out what I am missing. I have uninstalled PLEX on the NAS.

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Plex uses different sources for metadata and art dependingon the media type you assign a library. If you tell it it has movies in it, it will usually pull from IMDB and work fin (as long as your naming conventions are followed). If you tell it it is a TV show, it will go to thetvdb.com and ignore imdb as it doesnā€™t have as much TV show info. If you say ā€˜videoā€™ it wonā€™t grab from anything as it assumes it is just family vids and stuff you shot yourself. You can assign it to look at IMDB byt it is smoother to just put movies that you can find on IMDB in a movie library. If it is music, it uses last.fm which is good for most stuff but a lot of folks wish there was an allmusic.com agent as it has more stuff. But 99% of the time the reason it canā€™t find something is the name is wrong or yougave that library the wrong media type.

Do you have an example opf a show it canā€™t find and tell me what the media path is to the show and what you called it?

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