Server Version#: 1.18.5.2309
Player Version#: Various, Android phone, Android TV and iDevices
Right now I am running PMS on an ancient desktop that I swapped an ITX board into a small case to make a media server:
Windows 10x64
Intel i5-3570k @3.40GHz
8GB of 1600DDR3
128GB Samsung Evo SSD for the OS and app. Just plex and utorrtent.
Various HDs holding content.
I just recently setup a ramdrive for transcoding to hopefully lengthen the life of the SSD and my first question is around that:
How much space should I be allocating for that ram drive? Usually its at most two 720p streams of shows about 1GB apiece or a single 1080p movie that could be like 9gb.
I noticed it looks like plex will take as much space as its given provided the content needs it. Id like to have as much buffer in place as possible so is there any concern around allocating all but 2-3GB of ram for the ramdrive? I just want to leave enough for plex to be able to run 3 streams
Also for the media drive, would a 7200rpm vs 5400rpm drive really be noticeable for 1080 streams for reading (remember transcoding and app are on RAM or NAND?
The motivator for that is right now all of my media is spread across honestly a bunch of drives I just had floating around. A 2TB internal and 4 external USB3 drives.
Im looking to update the drives because of space saving and these drives are ooooollllddd and could fail. I see I can get a 10TB WD Black for $260 or two 6GB WD Blue for about the same price. Those two blues are smaller but I can run raid and be failproof, provided those 5400s arent any realistic bottleneck.
Ideally Id like to maximize speed of startup time (aka selecting the media, clicking start to video playing) and buffer for fast-forwarding/rewinding without getting an error or buffering.
Server his hardwired with gigabit ethernet to the new Netgear Nighthawk system that consistently gets 300+gbit two-way between devices (inlcuding wireless) with no latency so thinking if there are any bottlenecks its gotta be on the plex box itself.
