Recommendations or Tutorials for New Plex Server and Possible NAS

General Discussions Hardware
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I’m sure this has been asked before. If there is a tutorial, either on Plex support or an outside website, please feel free to direct me there.

TL;DR - Need hardware recommendations for new Plex server that will be accessed over wired LAN from Roku. Prefer Linux, will consider Windows if it’s easy enough. Willing to consider standalone server, standalone NAS, or server+NAS.

More detail:

I had a Plex server running on a very old Linux box (Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM, 1 or 2 GB dedicated GPU). It was serving movies over LAN to a Roku (wired) and music to a Sonos (wireless).

The boot drive crashed. Movies and music are safe on the storage drive.

My immediate thought was something similar to what I have, e.g. a new computer to use as server and storage. (Frankly, the easiest solution is just get a new boot drive and continue to use the old computer.) But looking at spending a few hundred bucks on a computer got me thinking about NAS, for easier expandability and built in RAID. (My old server was not backed up, and I’m not paying for cloud backup of that much data.)

I intend to stick the computer and/or NAS in a closet and just interact with it over the network (except for anything that requires being in the room). The computer or NAS would not be used for anything else except maybe local file backup.

The server would never serve more than one movie at a time, but might serve different music to different Sonos devices, or movie and music at the same time.

I’ve read the articles “Is Plex Media Server on NAS Right for Me?” (https://support.plex.tv/articles/201373793-is-plex-media-server-on-a-nas-right-for-me/) and " What kind of CPU do I need for my Server?" (https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/). Mostly they made me wonder how the hell I got away with running Plex on a Core 2 Duo. Was the old machine never doing transcoding???

Last possibly relevant factor. I’ll be ripping DVDs on other machines and storing MP4s on the server or NAS. The above support articles lead me to believe that using the Plex app on Roku over the local network may mean that no transcoding is required for movie viewing. The articles focus on movies, and I cannot tell from these articles whether music would be transcoded on the way to the Sonos.

I’m willing to put time into the setup. I would prioritize maintenance, usability, space, and price point. (Regarding space, I would prefer a mini-PC, but considering storage requirements would go with a mini-tower if I had to.)

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have you considered NOT using plex?
as you are building a new server you can take the opportunity to unshackle yourself from Plex and all it’s foibles.

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The question stands. If I used different server software, what should I look for in terms of server vs. NAS vs. combination of the two?

Any other suggested server software needs to have a Roku client app. Sonos would be nice but is less important since Sonos can connect to an arbitrary shared file server.

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My setup at home seems like what you’d be looking for, and it works fantastic!
to give you a bit of context, a LOT of people use plex for the ‘cool’ factor… i use it as a tool to help my family save a $h!t ton of money by getting rid of all the cable boxes and subscriptions… and my family is pretty dependent on it, so reliability is paramount, if that matters.

I house all my media stored on a dedicated pc/nas that i built with 7th gen intel parts. 5 HDD’s and it runs truenas core.

for my plex server, i have a ryzen 5 7600 based system running win10 IoT enterprise. it uses the iGPU on the cpu and that’s it. I love this arrangement for it’s flexibility. if my pms croaks, i can rebuild it with my media still intact. i can change the pms os to linux (which i may be doing for security and reliability reasons), and i won’t have to worry about my media. i back up my nas to an external drive from time to time so if i need to rebuild it for whatever reason, all is fine.

vm’ing pms on truenas core or a nas is fine for power and space efficiency, but you don’t have to look hard in the forums to find people trying to get this working with docker or that working with hardware for transcoding, yadda yadda… i don’t deal with any of that… i have my win10 pms running, with a drive mapped to the nas over a dedicated 10Gb connection. the media streams from the nas directly to pms for processing (via dac, nothing else has access to the 10Gb interface), and then streams out to clients over a 1Gb ethernet. transcoding seems to work well, transcoding all 1080p media down to 720p for those who are remote (i only have a 20Mb upload because i’m forced to use comcast, otherwise i wouldn’t need to transcode).

my old pms server was an i9-9900k, it was great but I also download movies via nzbget/sonarr/radarr and the ryzen was available to me for free… THAT is why i have it, otherwise the i9-9900k was more than adequate for all the remote streaming…

also bear in mind i have a massive ramdrive and all transcodes cache to it, and that really does make ALL the difference… i can’t emphasize that enough… use a ramdrive… (the transcodes happen as quickly as the cpu can go, and even with 5 transcodes going at once, the cpu blips to 50-60% (max, and again, that’s with several people accessing at once, otherwise 10-20% tops) for only a few minutes while the media is dumbed-down from 1080P to 720P, then it’s done, with ALL of them…

as i said, reliability of my system is paramount so simplicity is best as there is less to go wrong.
can’t beat zfs for reliability… i’ve had that nas running for 9mos without a reboot and it simply chuggs away… then the power goes out, and all my data is safe… i can’t say that about my old qnap or netgear… power outtages and write holes have been the cause of several lost files that were VERY important…

you can’t beat win10 for ease of use with pms… it’s not nearly as reliable as linux, but it’s simple. that win10 box gets rebooted at least once a week… it doesn’t crash, but windows behaves best after a reboot and considering how heavily the system is relied upon, it only takes a minute to reboot. everything just works and driver installs and updates are as simple as it gets. sure, install it on linux with hardware that’s a few generations old and it’ll quietly run without a peep. just know that some features won’t be available because driver development isn’t as quick as it is with windows, this is especially true with AMD. amd works very well with windows, but iGPU drivers can be dicey with linux.

hope that helps!

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