Plex server build

Personally, I would bump the ram up to at least 16gb , ditch the external drive and use the on-board raid controller to run either a raid 1, 5 or 10 on internal sata drives.

 

First, it is one less thing to clutter up the area around your pc. If you are just going to be using the drive for the plex server media then there really isn't any advantage to making your storage external. It is just one more possible point of failure.
Second, running a raid setup will give you fault tolerance and serve as a better way to maintain a backup of your files. If the external hard drive dies with your entire media collection on it, you are screwed without a backup. So you are left with being forced to maintain two copies. With a raid if a hard drive fails you just replace the drive, rebuild the raid, and keep on trucking.

So a raid provides a single solution for both storage and backup while eliminating the need to have external components.

 

+1 on using internal HDDs. they are faster, cheaper, and more modular than external storage.

I have 4x 4 TB drives in my plex server right now and I really like it.

 

While an ssd has some advantages versus a single sata drive, I would still go with the raid. A single ssd still doesn't offer any fault tolerance. While they may not die as easily or quickly, solid state drives do die. Which means you have to use another backup solution in addition to paying for a higher priced ssd. The one advantage they really offer, faster read/write times, is going to be offset some by the fact the a striped hhd raid will have faster read/write times than a single hdd. An ssd raid would be awesome and the best of both worlds but would be expensive even if you go with raid 1 (mirroring).

 

I'm really not sure if 16 gigs of RAM is necessary unless you're planning on pushing a lot of encoding.

 

That is the same thing people thought about having 1 gb of ram, then 2 gb, and so on. For the most part, computers become out dated due to either inadequate cpu speed or inadequate ram. That much ram really isnt needed today for a simple media server. However, for $65 extra dollars I would rather double the ram and know that it will handle whatever I needed to do both now and in the future.

 

Good to know!

 

I remember my uncle thinking it was ridiculous our first computer had 13gb hard drive. Now some games are multiple times that size haha

 

Yep. I didnt get a computer until I was around 21. A year later I started tech school and built my first. It was a bad mofo running something like 512mb or 1gb of ram, an 64mb video card, and two 20gb hard drives in an ide raid because they were the largest drives that were actually affordable. Those of us who had already passed our certifications got an automatic A in the class so we brought our "rigs" to class and played counter strike, which was still a half-life mod.

 

It's not the encoding that gets ya.. it's the transcoding especially for high resolution. eats up a heap of hardware resources.

I'm going down this same road but plan to go with a QNAP TS-251 unless something better comes out in the interim before I manage to follow through.

 

8GB is not enough I think. A 16GB OR 32GB would do much better. I didn't do this my self, I helped a friend build a Plex server so I learned a lot. I don't usually do such things, even though I have a piece of experience in technology. I didn't think I would need a Plex server, however, I looked for the best-reviewed NAS for Plex Servers on https://prizedreviews.com/best-nas-for-plex/ and I think I might get one for my self. The idea of a personal home library of videos, images, and music seems pretty compelling.