Building my first Plex Server.

[Kibbles]

Hey everyone, finally decided to build my own server and start putting all my DVD's and Blurays onto it.

Only downside, I don't have a spare PC and I don't want to leave my main one on 24/7 so I'm going to put together a small pc which I can fit in my server cupboard ( haven't justified a room yet )

I've got a intel A310 lying around so seems like it could do the trick for this.

What other specs would you all recommend?

There's going to be around 5 of us using it, maybe one or two more. Most are within the house although 2 are outside ( I have gigabit internet and plan to upgrade it soon ).

I do want to have most things in 4K HDR if available. All my TV's and monitors are now that so might as well use it

[dcoke22]

In my experience a Plex server does not require a huge amount of RAM or a ton of CPU unless you're doing transcoding on the CPU. I assume your reference to an Intel A310 means the Intel GPU of that name which will probably do the bulk of the transcoding work.

A Plex server works the best when it is connected to your network via Ethernet, gigabit or faster.

Servers in general are happiest when they run off a UPS battery backup and can shut down gracefully in the event of a power outage.

The thing a Plex server needs the most is hard drive space. If you have hard drives lying around, you can use them of course, but if buying drives, I recommend getting drives that can handle being powered on all the time. Enterprise grade drives like the Seagate Exos or the WD Gold are designed to run 24x7 in data centers. They'll likely have an easy and long life in your Plex server. And as ridiculous as it might seem to buy a 20TB hard drive (or three) you'll fill it up eventually.

Finally, make a backup. Building a Plex server and filling it with rips of all your movies is cool. Losing it all because of a hard drive failure is disheartening. You won't want to rip all that stuff again.

[Flesh]

I suggest checking out TrueNAS forums - if you got ~4 hours to dedicate to learning, it'll give you great peace of mind in terms of data redundancy.

[Kibbles]

In my experience a Plex server does not require a huge amount of RAM or a ton of CPU unless you're doing transcoding on the CPU. I assume your reference to an Intel A310 means the Intel GPU of that name which will probably do the bulk of the transcoding work.

A Plex server works the best when it is connected to your network via Ethernet, gigabit or faster.

Servers in general are happiest when they run off a UPS battery backup and can shut down gracefully in the event of a power outage.

The thing a Plex server needs the most is hard drive space. If you have hard drives lying around, you can use them of course, but if buying drives, I recommend getting drives that can handle being powered on all the time. Enterprise grade drives like the Seagate Exos or the WD Gold are designed to run 24x7 in data centers. They'll likely have an easy and long life in your Plex server. And as ridiculous as it might seem to buy a 20TB hard drive (or three) you'll fill it up eventually.

Finally, make a backup. Building a Plex server and filling it with rips of all your movies is cool. Losing it all because of a hard drive failure is disheartening. You won't want to rip all that stuff again.

Sorry I made the post at like midnight :p

Yes, It's an A310 Eco so nothing fancy but by all my reading it should be more than enough. Because it's so low power I'm comfortable using it. That's why I'm wondering about the CPU as it seems to handle everything including AV1 so would I even need anything decent?

It will be plugged into my Networking cupboard and I currently have gigabit and probably upgrading it in a few months.

I plan on buying a small UPS for the NAS, I won't be using it when I have no power but should mean I can safety turn it all off.

I am going to start small with two old 4TB drives, then if it seems all fine I'll probably buy a few Ironwolf drives down the line and change it out. I'll also probably do RAID 5 or 6 for the redundancy as much as I want to do RAID 1.


The main thing I'm currently needing is what CPU to go for. I know 8gb of RAM is probably enough especially if I run it on LINUX / Debloated Windows.

Thank you again for all the help!

[dcoke22]

I have an Intel Core i5-12400. It was reasonably priced and available when I was building the TrueNAS server I use (and Plex runs on). It spends most of its life at idle.

Prior to my current setup I successfully ran a Plex server on a Raspberry Pi 4 w/ 4GB of RAM. I did not do any transcoding of files; all my files played back via Direct Play or Direct Stream.

It is a hard question to answer without knowing what your usage pattern is going to be. My setup does almost zero transcoding. But if your library is going to be a bunch of 4K rips that'll are going to get crushed down to 480p on-the-fly to serve out to a phone on a crappy cell connection, then you might need plenty of power. I don't know how many streams an A310 can transcode on the fly. One for sure. Maybe two? But if you end up needing to transcode 5 streams on the fly more CPU is probably better than less.

If you're building a new box for this, any 10th gen or later Intel desktop CPU with 4 cores or more is going to be enough; probably more than enough. If this was your third Plex server build you might know enough about your usage to know that some old & crusty 2-core Pentium Gold CPU that you found on clearance for $20 is going to be more than enough. I'd guess a 14th gen Core i3-14100 (maybe even the low power T model) with 4 cores is probably plenty.

Plex has rough rules of thumb you can reference: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/ Transcoding from 4K down to something smaller takes a lot of CPU, but in your case, quite a lot of that would be handled by the GPU. But then again, you can handle that with multiple version support in Plex. In addition to your 4K rip, you can also store a smaller, transcoded version(s) of the movie in the same folder. Plex is supposed to pick the best version for the client.