Hi
I hope that this is the right forum to ask a question that may be more than just Plex related.
I am considering changing/upgrading my current storage and Plex server setup. I currently have a Windows PC that has 12 TB of storage (3 x 4 TB), it runs a Plex server, it is used for office work and occasional gaming. StableBit DrivePool is used to pool the drives and duplicate documents and photos across multiple drives. This don’t give me the speed advantage or fail safe of some RAID solutions but the speed I can live without and I have heard multiple horror stories of RAID rebuilds failing. When I have disk problems, I can replace the disk and copy all healthy files to the new disk and the rest I get from my cloud backup solution (Jotta Cloud). My plex server does a lot of transcoding as I don’t want subtitles burned into my movies and this runs very well on my Core i7 6700K and hardware transcoding is supported by my 980 GTX. So, all in all a great setup.
I am considering changing to a more modern setup to avoid having my PC running 24/7 and at the same time getting a simple way to access/sync files across multiple devices for my whole family. My first thought was having a NAS with enough power to transcode movies, but these are expensive. Building my own is an option but I am afraid that I’ll have to use a lot of time experimenting with Linux distros and software setup to get it just right and it will properly consume a lot of power. I have seen people mentioning a setup using a cheaper NAS for file storage and personal cloud and an Intel NUC for running Plex using QuickSync for HW transcoding. In theory this sounds like a great solution with clear separation of concerns. What do you guys and girls think? Any good advice (both hardware and software) for a setup that supports
- Plex 4k video transcoding
- File storage
- Access/sync files across devices
- Mounting the storage as a drive on Windows machines
- Not too expensive
- Not too power hungry
will be greatly appreciated 
