Currently I am running Plex on an semi-old Laptop. It’s enough to transcode a Movie in 1080p and some Music simultaneously which is fine but I’d like something futureproof. Means: A NAS Server with 4k Transcoding for about 1000€.
I already had a rough look at the compatibility list, it already helped to sort some things/devices out.
However I’d like to know how which device you guys possess, how easy it was to setup and maintain plex and what you paid for your setup. Are you Experience any Issues regarding plex?
Currently I’m mostly paying attention to:
Transcoding options (Processor)
Electricity Consumption (It’s expensive where I live)
Is there anything I’m missing? Do you guys have any tips I should be aware of or I should consider?
HP Microserver G8. I bough it when it was at 180€ without disks with 4GB RAM and with a Celeron processor. Now is quite more expensive because the newer G10 is worst and more expensive, so no one bought the G10 and G8 became even more expensive than G10.
At first I put 3x4TB HDD (RAID5) and 1x120GB SSD, and Plex worked just perfect. Even transcoding 2 parallels streamings at 720p or one at 1080p.
After a year or so, I’ve upgrade it to 12GB RAM , and bought a Xeon processon on aliexpress (found it really cheap, just 80€) and now I couldn’t reach the limit of transcoding. I’ve tried with up to 6 streamings at 1080p without a blink and CPU is laughing at it.
I must say I have arch linux installed and a lot of docker containers to provide all the services I need, being plex one of them, so if some day my SDD dies, restoring it all will take a few minutes.
Celeron processor was fitting my needs because I containerized everything. A friend of mine virtualized and it had some slowness I didn’t suffer, so he began to upgrade and now is like me (with 16GB RAM) and even virtualizing has no problem with Plex or anytthing.
In my opinion the G8 is far the best NAS one home can have. It is (was) very cheap and full featured: sensors, ILO, two 1Gb eths, low consume (17W Celeron, 42W Xeon). Perhaps isn’t too late to find one of them at a reasonable price. The G10 hasn’t ILO and have an AMD processor, and costs around 400€ but is newer and spare parts perhaps are easier to find and is just a bit more expensive than a product from 2012
