Hi ! I’m currently running Plex Server on a Windows VM under Proxmox on a big computer. Takes lots of place and use lots of power. CPU is Intel i5 4440.
I was lucky enough to find an old Mac Mini in the trash the other day. And even more lucky because it still works after swapping the drive for a SSD. It only has 4Gb of Ram and it’s a Late 2014, but hey ! It was fairly cheap
Is it powerful enough to run Plex Server ? My media are mostly 1080p, and will be stream with an Apple TV, Xbox, Web, iPad. Meaning I’m not sure if it will do any transcoding.
Im asking because my plan was would be to use Time Machine to backup my media. I would like to increase the storage for my Plex but I want to have a backup of that. And with my actual setup (Proxmox + Windows VM) it’s not that much easy.
My setup would be :
Mac Mini running Plex, with one external USB drive for media
A small old PC acting as a NAS to which Time Machine send the backup.
I run a 2014 Mini Mac i5 with 8GB memory and 1TB internal SATA drive. Macs love memory and the performance of my Mini really lags compared to my similar era Mac book w/16GB memory. The Mini set up works great for streaming music, but I find video playback performance to be unstable and videos take too long to load with a lot of buffering on hi-res movies. Live-TV and DVR performance are worse. Also, the latest compatible Mac OS (Big Sur 11.7) and UI are pretty sluggish when you log on to perform admin tasks on your server. This era minis are not memory upgrade-able either. The best performance upgrade available is to replace the internal SATA drive with an SDD to speed-up memory swapping. But that’s a pretty expensive upgrade for a machine that’s close to EOL. Bottom line, I don’t think your 2014 w/4gb will be able to meet your requirements.
