Purchasing NAS or PC for Plex Server

General Discussions
1

Hi, I’ve been running Plex on the low-level PC which has now ‘Crashed’, and is unretrievable. The good news is all of the movie/tv files are on an external HD.

I now want to set up a much better Plex Server. I will need a reasonably good one as I have up to 5 users that are external to my home network. The unit I set up will be for Plex only, and I’m looking for a NAS or PC that I can purchase for that purpose. I want to buy a basic one off the shelf and add further enhancements as needed.

So, I’m asking for advice on purchasing a base unit (PC or NAS) to be a Plex Server, where to purchase it online in Australia, and approximately how much.

2

Hi SolomonMedia,
first of all, what do you want/need; Budget?
NAS is useful if you try to set up Plex with the least effort, though usually Performance when transcoding is rather poor.
A dedicated server (I use one with FreeNAS) has the advantage of being way more flexible with connectivity to as many HDDs/SSDs as you want or with different programs you can run and so on, but they’re usually more expensive and there’s and a LOT more maintenance to do.

3

I built myself a 12-core AMD box (AMD Ryzen R9 3900x, Asus Prime X570 Pro motherboard and Sapphire Radeon 5700XT video card) with 64GB of RAM and tons of disk space last January. It has enough horsepower to serve as my main desktop and run Plex Server.

4

all you need for a basic plex server is a 7000 or newer series intel cpu, with 600 or newer integrated gpu.

no external gpu card is needed.

8 or 16 gig ram, and a decent size SSD (I’d recommend 1tb or larger so you don’t have to worry about upgrading it any time soon).

1 Like
5

I would go for a PC, storing metadata in the SSD and movies in HDs (or a nas apart). You will see great improvements in the library navigation.

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