I have been looking at a couple of tutorials on how to run Plex on a Raspberry Pi but using an external drive, which is formatted to NTFS.
I’ve read some people have made it work and it’s fine, but there was someone else who said it corrupted their drive. I don’t have a way to transfer data off of it to reformat to FAT-anything. It’s currently connected to Windows.
I don’t stream outside of the LAN of my house (although I may start opening my server to family, but they probably won’t use it much at all).
I generally only watch one thing on one TV at a time, up to 4k formats.
I don’t have a Plex Pass and don’t think I need one for what I currently use Plex for.
I don’t use Linux or Pi’s so I’m way out of my depth. Luckily, the tutorials I have seen are literally telling me what I have to write to set this up.
Firstly, will a Raspberry Pi work for my needs?
Secondly, how does the Raspberry Pi deal with Dolby Vision, HDR content - or is this the client side?
Is there anything else I should be aware of if looking to transfer to a Pi?
The driver for this is low power use.
I considered a Mini PC with N100 processor but I’m not sure whether that’s a half way house or whether my current PC is really using that much power.
The second driver is space.
If I can get away with mounting this on the back of my TV or something, that would be a huge reduction - even though the current Plex server is in an Node 304 case - so not huge.
I don’t mean to be dismissive, but I would not recommend your first experience using Linux to be setting up Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi using an external drive with a foreign file system (NTFS). You’re setting yourself up for a lot of trouble.
I’d recommend going with a mini PC running an OS you’re already familiar with. N100 systems are great for PMS. By all means, run Linux on something and become familiar with it, it’s a great OS.
I’ve run PMS on Pis in the past and it’s worked fine. As long as absolutely no transcoding was required. The requirements and formats you’ve described are almost certainly going to require transcoding under some circumstances (largely depending on the clients you intend to use) so chances are it would fall over fairly quickly.
While the drive for the metadata can be a USB drive , that is the second step AFTER installation.
In ALL cases, the best results with Linux are when using the OS-default ext4 or xfs file systems.
PMS will install to /var/lib/plexmediaserver which is in the root filesystem of the installation. This is where Step 2 allows you to move it to another filesystem.
Regardless, PMS requires file locking and permissions control which NTFS will not provide
NTFS is perfectly fine to use as a read-only source for your media.
(Not advised but it will work well enough)
