How much ram do you really need for Plex? Currently I have 8Gb but I originally got that for gaming, not plex.
Also whats the best harddrives for a Plex server thats running off of a computer?
Does RPM matter?
Whats the ideal specifications for a Plex Server running Windows from a computer?
For hard drives, if the drives are going to be left on 24/7, look to the better quality drives.
If you want crisp response, the 7200 RPM drives are always better but at the cost of extra heat so plan cooling and power accordingly.
I personally use 7200 RPM NAS drives for anything which is associated with my server. Between what I do on the NAS and PMS serving the house, it runs 24/7/365 and is on battery backup 
I’d only use a 7200 rpm drive for the Plex data/system drive.
All others can be energy-efficient drives with low rpm and heat dissipation.
Everyone’s install is unique, and what is right for me may not be right for someone else. The main part is does it work for you and fit your budget?
Consider using an SSD for your OS boot and Plex install, then 5400 RPM drives for your media. If you are streaming off a typical PC to a SmartTV or wireless device, then your network speed is likely your bottle neck, not lack of a 7200 RPM drive. Otto is correct, along with higher rotation speeds comes heat.
Now, if you are transcoding a lot of media, or supporting multiple playback devices at the same time, then 7200 rpm (or higher) may be a need. Difference in cost may be minimal for a single drive (say $20-40 each), but can add up when you are talking four (4) drives in a RAID setup.
I disagree that drive speed is at all important for video access. Both reading and writing video is not particularly hard for any reasonable drive. Even transcoding does not much task drives.
Transcoding is processor intensive but it is not drive or drive bus intensive.
Any reasonable drive, even hooked up via USB, is plenty fast enough for Plex. The only time it might matter would be if there were multiple streams being transcoded at the same time and even then it is probable that the processor would max out well before the drive read/write speed would be approached.
The exception would be startup where a fast drive does impact the time it takes to get everything going. (Which is why my Plex server machine will never get an SSD. Startup time for my server matters very little.)
My recommendation is to not worry about speed but get the most reliable drives you can find in your price range and use some form of pooling (I dislike traditional “raid” solutions so I use DrivePool) to get reliability maximized.
With Plex reliability is much more important than speed once your processor and network are fast enough to handle Plex with good room for extra overhead.
Of course I am sure that others will disagree but that is why there is diversity in the Plexiverse. It is common for different approaches to arrive at equally good but different results to solve the same problems.
@ChuckPa said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
(I dislike traditional “raid” solutions so I use DrivePool) .Quoting the DrivePool site: StableBit - The home of StableBit CloudDrive, StableBit DrivePool and the StableBit Scanner
1. Pool Combines multiple physical hard drives into one large virtual drive. Stores everything in standard NTFS files.Just making sure it’s clear, This is RAID… without the Redundancy/recovery ability inherent to the underlying structure.
It is not traditional Raid because of several things. The most obvious thing is that if you completely turn off Drivepool and remove it from your system you can still access all your files with little trouble. All the files are stored just like they would be without Drivepool. Also redundancy/recovery is more than covered by the duplication feature where you can have more than one copy of a file/directory that are stored on different drives. With duplication at X2 you have two copies and X3 gives you three and all those are accessible without Drivepool if needed. The drives can even be moved to a different computer and accessed there if needed.
I do not think traditional raid solutions are as flexible or as good in recovery but each to their own. I find raids excessively complex but many folks really believe in them so they can’t be all bad they just do not fill my needs for easy reliable storage and expansion.
Good point and why i removed my comment. I thought through again after commenting.
It’s drive spanning, lose a drive and you lose a portion of your data. Can’t have RAID without Redundancy… (And yep, I know about striping and how it’s called RAID-0, as in zero redundancy…) But there is a place for drivepool and the like.
Amazing how many different ways we can manage to pipe entertainment into our eyes and ears. Coming soon, PlexPlax plug-in - entertainment for our teeth! 
LOL…
Meanwhile, Back to the OP’s question…
Do you see how flexible and dynamic the solution possibilities are? It all comes down to personal preference, what you know / are willing to learn, and what you can afford to spend.
@Elijah_Baley said:
It is not traditional Raid because of several things. The most obvious thing is that if you completely turn off Drivepool and remove it from your system you can still access all your files with little trouble. All the files are stored just like they would be without Drivepool. Also redundancy/recovery is more than covered by the duplication feature where you can have more than one copy of a file/directory that are stored on different drives. With duplication at X2 you have two copies and X3 gives you three and all those are accessible without Drivepool if needed. The drives can even be moved to a different computer and accessed there if needed.
I do not think traditional raid solutions are as flexible or as good in recovery but each to their own. I find raids excessively complex but many folks really believe in them so they can’t be all bad they just do not fill my needs for easy reliable storage and expansion.
The X2 and X3 are a nice easy way of doing CYA, for sure. Pretty cool that you can define a subset (folder and/or file based?) to run off SSD for speed.
File level dupe has it’s place, RAID does have the benefit of OS or file system independent backup. Now that even inexpensive NAS devices support iSCSI and such interesting tech, it’s easier than ever to build up a RAID set and drop different live mounts or Virtual OS’s on the thing without worrying about how to manage your data. I started working with iSCSI when the cards were EIGHT GRAND each! Now I can get that off a $400 NAS. Insane. (Don’t ask me how much my first 10 Meg MFM/RLL drive was…)
So much cool tech to play with out there!
@TrixR4K1ds said:
How much ram do you really need for Plex? Currently I have 8Gb but I originally got that for gaming, not plex.Also whats the best harddrives for a Plex server thats running off of a computer?
Does RPM matter?
Whats the ideal specifications for a Plex Server running Windows from a computer?
8GB is fine dependent on what else the server is used for. My dedicated PMS has 8GB. My Desktop PMS has 16GB.
When it comes to transcoding, the CPU is the issue. This can be mitigated by preparing the media before putting it into Plex’s database. By preparing it, I mean to transcode it (a 1-time effort) into a format fully or at least more-readily usable by the target players directly. When PMS transcodes during playback, this is an on-demand, non-saved, event. When you play it again, it will be transcoded again hence why preparation is important.
Any good rules of thumb for transcoding? And does PMS take advantage of GPU’s when it can, or does it stick only to the CPU?
Seems like subtitles are a weak point in my experience for lower end CPU’s during transcoding.
PMS does not currently use the GPU on a regular desktop computer.
The new WDPR4100 NAS, with Intel QuickSync hardware, does use hardware acceleration.
There is always a great deal of discussion about this. The problem is the diversity of graphics cards and permutations before we even get to the Cuda / OpenCL issues.
I don’t really understand “Raid” I know there’s different numbers of Raid, But what I don’t know is which raid would be good for me. I originally used to think that there was only one raid, and that raid was 1 or more drives being pooled together, So I thought that if you had three 4Gb drives then you had a 12Gb pool for all your media. What I also thought was that if you lost one drive you still had the other 2 with their data still on it and still be ready for use. Turns out I was wrong.
Right now I’m looking at two of these 4Gb drives, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B99JU4S/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3G5CPHFYN72C8&coliid=IM0BBQGQVWII7&psc=1
Would they be good? Does someone have a better suggestion?
Here is a nice primmer on RAID. http://www.pcworld.com/article/194360/raid-made-easy.html
In a Pool, you are correct, you can lose a drive and its data without recovery. RAID provides this recovery by way of parity.
The quick answer here is: Raid 5 gives ‘single drive failure’ parity. This means you can have a drive completely fail and the RAID will still operate. That said, should you lose another drive before rebuilding parity on the replacement drive, the entire array is usually lost. RAID 6 (double parity) covers this.
All this comes at a price. RAID 5 costs “1 drive worth” of space. RAID 6 costs 2. Also, the size of the smallest disk will govern the size used. e.g. 3x 4TB and 1x 5TB yields 4x 4TB for the RAID to use. the last 1T will be unused until all drives are minimally 5T.
Think of the usable space this way for Raid 5: ( Number_of_drives - 1 ) * Storage size == raw size before formatting.
Raid 6 = “Number of drives - 2”
This help?
So if I am understanding correctly, To get what I am after, Which is what I consider a “pool” in which I want to combine my HDDs to increase its size I.E two 4Tb drives combine both to make a 8Tb drive. I need to use either JBOD or Abstracted Raid, correct? According to the the article you provided.
I would not use JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). I would use the Abstract Raid first. It allows you to use different size drives as you grow while affording you the protection of a RAID. It’s the equivalent of Synology’s Hybrid RAID.
You can also manage without pooling if you only have up to ~8 drives.
Every Plex library can ‘watch’ several drives.
Just the backup has to be done separately from these drives.
You are doing backups, don’t you?
And no, RAID is not a backup.
I actually haven’t done a backup yet, I don’t have a hard drive big enough to backup all my media. Between all my Anime, Music, Movies, Tv Shows, I just don’t currently have enough space.
What should I use for a backup drive? Should I get a external hard drive?
Also what does everyone think about the two 4Tb hard drives that I listed that I was thinking about getting?
