Hey guys, I’ve never used Plex before but am looking to set up a server this week for me and my family as streaming bills are getting out of control. I have a small library of legally acquired media that will work as a good test before I go sailing for the rest.

I have a Thinkserver TD340 desktop with dual xeons and space for many hard drives that I was going to use simply due to its HDD capacity

(12c24t combined and 64gb RAM)

However they’re sandy bridge Xeon’s and not very power efficient. However I can put a Quadro P2000 GPU in it for hardware accelerated transcoding

The other idea I have is I have access to an HP SFF PC with an i5 8400T and a few external hard drive mounts I could plug into power in the wall and USB to the PC

This is smaller and saves power but forgoes GPU acceleration leaving me with only Intel UHD 630 graphics. It’s also only 6 cores/threads but they are much faster.

I also want whichever system I use to run pi-hole for DNS level ad blocking. But that’s very light and shouldn’t be an issue to run at the same time.

Am I overthinking this? I have access to both systems. Which would be best. At most maybe 3 people would be accessing it at once. Across iPhones, smart TVs etc

  • Anomalous_Llama@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Alright so I was definitely overthinking it. I’m gonna set it up tonight on the SFF PC.

    I can get several terabytes of storage on it. If I end up making heavy use of this I can migrate the library to a NAS using the Thinkserver afterwards

    Thanks!

    • bluespin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Worth noting that certain clients such as the PS4 and PS5 apps have terrible format support and will result in transcoding if you’re storing, say, MKVs. Something to look out for, but everyone else in this thread is on the money: don’t worry too much about performance at this stage. That’s a bridge you cross if and when you reach it

    • jws_shadotakEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I used to run everything on a 4 TB and found it filled up really fast. 10-14 GB for a good quality 1080p movie, 3 GB per episode for the good shows, etc. It all added up really fast and I’d have to clean out old stuff pretty frequently.

      I ended up buying a refurbished 14 TB HDD and it’s been smooth sailing since then. I think I’m a little more than halfway through it right now.