G+_Michael Fullarton Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 Good morning know-it-alls, I am starting to look at piecing together a NAS/Plex PC. I know KH in the past used a old desktop PC with a Raid card and installed FreeNAS to a USB drive. This was a couple years ago now. What I am looking for is either a NAS with Plex capabilities I only need to add drives to or building something low cost. Main concern is something with Raid 5 or 10 that can be recovered if the raid card or drives fail. Any suggestions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_610GARAGE Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 I would suggest using software raid rather than hardware raid. With software raid, you could plop the drives into any computer and easily start the raid back up with no data loss. Hardware raid requires a raid card from the same manufacture with the same or better firmware version. Some raid cards can import other raid configurations, but I would consider it a gamble. And it doesn't seem like you are pounding the drives enough for the small performance gain of hardware raid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 Also take a look at the specs of FreeNAS very carefully. By default it is not a lightweight install in the common manner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 Ben Tyger Yep. FreeNAS is great if you have enough CPU/RAM to throw at a system. For those times you don't have or don't want to spend as much mdadm and LVM provides most of the same functionality with minimal overhead. If someone wants them, I'll dig up the tutorial/walkthroughs that I use all the time for mdadm/LVM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Reese Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 Unless you would rather just buy something. Synology has some nice offerings with Plex support I believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 Freenas pretty much requires server grade hardware, if you want it to be the best it can.nas4free is the same but consumer grade gear. Personally I've had some problems with jails in freenas. Have a look at unraid. Not free if you want to use a bunch of drives but you cab run plex in it as well,which I've had better luck with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Justin Levy (Just Socia Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I use windows server 2012 with plex Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Reese Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I'm currently doing the Windows Server running Plex too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 Just watch CPU speed with plex. Plex can use a lot of CPU if you are on the fly transcoding a lot or a big original stream. If you use mobile a lot, be prepared for higher CPU usage. Mobile devices have a smaller sets of compatible codecs and containers so plex has to transcode them more often. ?Some old machines may not be up to the job. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 Ben Tyger I forget where it was but there was a guy using an e5-6270and had two cores for his plex VM. Overkill I thought but he mentioned transcoding works better on 2.5+ghz cpu. Cpu usage wasn't mentioned though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 Adam EL-Idrissi That person is correct in the worst case. To transcode 1080p in real-time with no hardware acceleration it takes about 2 cores at around 2.5GHz - 2.7Ghz. Luckily most machines (x86/AMD64) have some hardware acceleration for the decoding and/or encoding processes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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