I currently run my plex server on a windows desktop and I have an older readynas with about 12 TB of media. The nas is setup as simple jbod so no raid. I have a couple 8tb usb drives that I use to periodically do a full backup. I also have a UPS for the readynas to facilitate a graceful shutdown if I have a power issue.
I’m planning on building a new dedicated plex server in a 2ru chassis with a 20th gen i3 so I can have hardware acceleration.
I was considering retiring the old readynas and just moving the media drives into the new dedicated plex server. One of the reasons I was considering this is that there are updates for the readynas anymore. It doesn’t support SMB3 with is a pain for newer windows computers. I do like the drive accessibility though of the drives doing in a nas.
I’m looking for some advice on what people think about this. A couple questions:
Will I have any space issues with a 2u chassis?
Can/should I run unraid for the plex server?
I’ve tried running plex as a docker image before and it was a bit of a pain. It was slow, never got hardware acceleration working etc…
Would it be better to run on a basic Linux server install?
Any comments/suggestions would be much appreciated!
I built my Unraid server using a 70 dollar tower that has 10 drive bays.
I used a B450 Tomahawk motherboard with a AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with 16 gigs of ram with one 250 gig m2 which I use for a cache disk and data storage for the dockers and vm image.
I run a number of dockers including plex with 1 Windows 10 vm which I use to access my Ceton Infinity cable card tuner with Ceton proxy so the tuner looks like a HD Homerun to Plex. I do not have any issues with plex being slow.
The normal server load is about 10-15%. I don’t transcode very many steams probably no more than 4 at a time and have no issues. Just for the fun of it I transcoded a 4K HDR 80 mbit move down to 720 2 mbit and my cpu was only running at about 25 to 30%. So I really don’t need a GPU.
Now if you want to use a GPU you can by running a Windows vm and passing through the video card to the VM and run plex on that vm.
I have been running Unraid for about 6 years now and had several drives fail over the years and have never lost any data.
Thanks for the response. I was planning on taking advantage of the build in quick sync of the i3 10100 for acceleration.
I’m not sure if I’d need to run much else on it, so I’m wondering if setting up containers would be overkill. The only other thing I might run would be something like Graylog to use as a central logging server for my devices.
How many hard drives are you running and what disk config do you use?
The data drives are using reiserfs and the cache is xfs. I have 7 drives currently and planing to add another here after Christmas.
As for the docker, there are many useful apps you can install. I have a reverse proxy, dynamic DNS updater, Plex, xteve, pihole, nextcloud, redmine, crashplan to name name a few.
One of the cool things you can do is assign how many and what CPU cores are assigned to each docker container or vm. Crashplan likes to use a lot of CPU time so I limited to two cores so it does not bog anything else down. Plex has all but the first 2 cores because Unraid itself uses the lower cores. That way Unraid always has at least 2 cores available so nothing is lowed down.
Looks like there is a instruction on how to use quick sync with unraid and plex here.
