I have a Dell PE R710 that I’m going to use for my Plex server. I’ll be running win 2012 R2. It will be dedicated to PMS and only be use to provide backup for AD, DHCP, DNS ect for my primary server. Media will live on my NAS. I have decided to setup RAID 10 with a hot spare using enterprise SSD’s. I have read where transcoding is hard on any HDD. My question is should I get a SSD just for transcoding that isn’t part of the RAID? Giving my setup what would you do with the cache?
Transcoding is not particularly hard on a HDD but a SSD will improve things all around.
Transcoding is hard on a CPU however if HW transcoding is not available. You didn’t mention the processor configuration of your R710 but assuming it’s dual E5520s I would expect 2-4 concurrent 1080p transcodes. Probably not even one 4K/HEVC.
