NAS for Plex use... Again
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@stacksofplates That is what I did the last time. Bought empty caddies and SATA drives.
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My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
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@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
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Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built my server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
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@dafyre said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
I don't think UnionFS is actively developed anymore, MergerFS is better solution.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@dafyre said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
I don't think UnionFS is actively developed anymore, MergerFS is better solution.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll check into it if I go that route again.
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@DustinB3403 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
I've always thought having a Plex server would be useful, but then though where would I get content?
Where are you guys getting your contebt to house on your systems?
Torrents, private trackers. Deezer for music. Some use usenet, but you need to pay for indexers and/or server access. At that point it's just better to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr to manage and automate all that. There are extra helper apps like Bazarr for subs, Oscarr as your dashboard, Jackett to index all your trackers, etc.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
I only mentioned paid streaming services as an alternative to usenet. If you have to pay to pirate media, you might just spend that money on legit services.
There's AppleTV and iOS app, WatchAid TV Show Planner, it tracks your TV shows and links directly to streaming services. Not perfect and not a complete solution as it doesn't support movies, but it's a start.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
I only mentioned paid streaming services as an alternative to usenet. If you have to pay to pirate media, you might just spend that money on legit services.
There's AppleTV and iOS app, WatchAid TV Show Planner, it tracks your TV shows and links directly to streaming services. Not perfect and not a complete solution as it doesn't support movies, but it's a start.
Yeah I just recently made the transition. Just letting people know my experience
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal,
Except when it isn't. There is a conflicting fair use law that says you always have the right to defeat DRM for fair use. It's actually, effectively, random.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
I currently have 2 ReadyNas 2100 units with 5 TB. One is primary and the other is a backup copy. They are used strictly as storage for Plex. I am out of space and need more. I can upgrade the drives for more storage space but the NAS is not very fast, taking into consideration that it is an older unit.
My thoughts were to set up a new server with samba to serve Plex, and re-purpose the older NAS units as backup targets for the new "solution". Plex runs as a VM and there is not enough storage on the existing host. I need another solution.Would a new NAS be a better solution or a linux server with samba shares for movies and music? Is there a better solution?
With a NAS you get the OS they decided on and the hardware they picked.
With a server you can get whatever you want both software and hardware.A NAS is consumer components all the way through unless it's a high end unit with a high end price.
A server doesn't have to big or bulky or noisy or power hungry just because they commonly are. Plenty of other options around other than an old R710.
And there is also the possibility of assembling something yourself using server components or a mix of server and consumer components. For instance you might want to have remote management capability which you only have on servers but you don't need hot swap power supplies. Perhaps you want hot swap drive bays or you are fine mounting the drives internally. Perhaps you only need 2 or 4 drives for data but you want to have SSDs for running VMs. Or you need 24 drive bays but want it to be low power.
There is also the educational aspect of building and using a server versus a NAS which might matter. While a NAS is plug and play and often cheaper, your ROI might be higher using a server.
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@Pete-S I turned off the R410s and 510 last year. I'm currently running a newer "entry-level" server as my VM host. It has a low-end Xeon and maxes out at 32G of RAM. I have been shopping around for a while for a more robust host but can't decide on anything.
The ReadyNAS units were free and new from a relative's business that shut down. They are EOL now and slower than I would like. I plan on a similar setup to what I have now - Plex as a VM and the new storage server as a VM with an NFS share for Plex. I don't believe I will need hardware transcoding for Plex.
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
Roku's search feature allows you to sub to services and search across them to find what you want and go straight there.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Pete-S I turned off the R410s and 510 last year. I'm currently running a newer "entry-level" server as my VM host. It has a low-end Xeon and maxes out at 32G of RAM. I have been shopping around for a while for a more robust host but can't decide on anything.
I don't believe I will need hardware transcoding for Plex.
You will need some transcoding, no matter what, so plan for it, and if you want to share your libraries, you'll need more cpu/gcpu.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built by server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
Has anyone priced out storage and/or services through Vultr?
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@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built by server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
Has anyone priced out storage and/or services through Vultr?
It really depends how much storage and CPU you need. If you need lots of storage, nothing beats unlimited, and I think only G Suite Business is viable option. I know lots of people host Plex with Hetzner, Vultr is probably attractive option too.
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@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built by server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
Has anyone priced out storage and/or services through Vultr?
I'd imagine that a smallish Vultr instance with Wasabi storage would be about ideal if you want everything online.
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@travisdh1 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built by server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
Has anyone priced out storage and/or services through Vultr?
I'd imagine that a smallish Vultr instance with Wasabi storage would be about ideal if you want everything online.
I already have my video library synced up to Wasabi too, so I could probably build a Plex server on my Hetnzer box and see how that works.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
It really depends how much storage and CPU you need. If you need lots of storage, nothing beats unlimited, and I think only G Suite Business is viable option. I know lots of people host Plex with Hertzner, Vultr is probably attractive option too.
I had a look and it looks like you need 5 minimum users on G Suit Business to get unlimited TBs. If it's $12 per month then that becomes $60 per month. Under a five year period that's $3600.
Not saying it's the same thing but for the exact same money you can buy 9 x 16TB enterprise drives with 5 year warranty. That's about 100 TB of actual storage.
Using Drive makes sense in your case but if someone only needs say 10-15 TB, I'm not sure it does. And 10 TB may not sound like a lot but if we are talking about H.264 video it's more than 3000 movies/5000 episodes. Even if you binge watch 5 hours a day, every day, it will take about 3 years to get through it.
