Who else has a Plex server?

Joined
Apr 15, 2017
Messages
4,398
Location
Napa, CA.
Ditched Netflix and Hulu and set up another Plex server (had one a couple years ago).

Currently have about 305 movies (4.3TB) and 202 TV shows (37.7TB) and many more to come. I share it with my housemate and a few friends and family. Although honestly I find messing with it far more interesting than actually watching the content.

Server specs are currently a junky old AMD FX-8320 CPU, only because I had it floating around and the motherboard I have for it had 6 SATA III ports onboard and a ton of PCI-E x16 ports for more SATA HBAs, 16GB of RAM, and a GeForce 750Ti 2GB for transcoding.

As far as drives it's a hodgepode of both old drives I had floating around with over 60K hours to brand new drives to random laptop drives pulled from laptops that were upgraded to SSDs. I'm running all of them in DrivePool with no file duplication because if a drive fails and the data is lost I can just rescan the disks with Radarr and Sonarr which I'm using for media management and acquire the now missing episodes and movies easily. No point for RAID or Storage Spaces or anything when it's just a bunch of "Linux ISOs" *cough* on there anyway.

The biggest challenge has been... how do I fit all these drives in one case. Well, I kinda can't. My current case is a huge Nanoxia case I got for free used. Currently have a bunch of 3.5" drives in there as well as a few 2.5x" drives. Then I have two more drives connected via USB. I have to find the right screws but I do have a 3x 3.5" to 5.25" bay adapter already in there so I can move all those USB drives inside. Then I'm in the process of custom fabricating an external drive enclosure for up to 8 more 3.5" drives complete with its own power supply and fans. Once that's complete I'll reorganize everything, do proper cable management, and mount all the drives properly. So I don't want to hear anything about "that looks messy" haha. I also have two more drives on the way, a 6TB WD Black I got for free that was bad but under warranty so I RMAd it with less than a week left on the warranty, then a 4TB WD Red Plus that arrived DOA and I'm going to get a replacement for. Currently due to the Chia Crypto craze larger drives 8TB+ aren't a good deal, but eventually I'll run out of space completely and start replacing my old/used/small drives with larger capacity ones.

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Huh. Didn't know the Wraith Prism worked on AM3 boards. My wife's computer was that exact same setup before I built her a new one. I'm frankly amazed at the longevity of the 750 Ti as a general use GPU. Wife played FF XIV on that computer for ~3 years and it honestly worked perfectly at high settings and 1080p.

I had a Plex server running on it for a bit but I couldn't be bothered to pirate content that I could otherwise pay $20/mo for a couple of subscriptions to watch. This was a while back so perhaps Plex has addons that do the pirating for you now?

I honestly found Kodi to be a simpler solution but if I'm not mistaken that was cracked down on pretty hard a few years ago, wasn't it?
 
Interesting. How is Plex different than say using SMB on Windows, or other media server?

Most of my "media" is stored on a SATA SSD and attached to my router's USB 3.0 port (5K 60fps VR video). Another one on my USB 2.0 port depending on how much speed I need.
 
Huh. Didn't know the Wraith Prism worked on AM3 boards. My wife's computer was that exact same setup before I built her a new one. I'm frankly amazed at the longevity of the 750 Ti as a general use GPU. Wife played FF XIV on that computer for ~3 years and it honestly worked perfectly at high settings and 1080p.

I had a Plex server running on it for a bit but I couldn't be bothered to pirate content that I could otherwise pay $20/mo for a couple of subscriptions to watch. This was a while back so perhaps Plex has addons that do the pirating for you now?

I honestly found Kodi to be a simpler solution but if I'm not mistaken that was cracked down on pretty hard a few years ago, wasn't it?

Yeah, AM4 cooler, AM2 bracket, AM3 motherboard. Match made in heaven, or just everything I had floating around, who knows :D

As for content, you're right, it's a lot easier to pay $20/month for Hulu and Netflix but if you want the latest movies and TV shows you end up spending a lot more than $20. And it's waaaay more fun to play around with the server than actually watch the content LOL.

For acquisition of the "Linux ISOs" I use Radarr and Sonarr which automatically search for the files and send them to NZBget, once they are downloaded they are then moved to the data drives.

Interesting. How is Plex different than say using SMB on Windows, or other media server?

Most of my "media" is stored on a SATA SSD and attached to my router's USB 3.0 port (5K 60fps VR video). Another one on my USB 2.0 port depending on how much speed I need.

Using Plex I can access it all from any smartphone, computer, smart TV, at home and abroad, securely and easily. My Plex server handles transcoding the content from full HD to less data-intensive formats if I'm streaming on my phone on my lunch break at work, for example, because on a phone the difference is barely noticeable.

And LOL no 4K/5K content here... I don't bother downloading anything above Full HD. It's just pointless for me since I don't have a 4K TV and even if I did, it simply uses too much disk space.
 
We were never big TV users at our house, but once we got a Chromecast, we all just organically just stopped using our home media server for the most part, and just started casting from phones and laptops.. Eventually, I ditched the Kodi box and just parked what media files we have on a backup file share machine. Except for a few things, no one would notice if I deleted most of it.
 
And LOL no 4K/5K content here... I don't bother downloading anything above Full HD. It's just pointless for me since I don't have a 4K TV and even if I did, it simply uses too much disk space.
I found that for VR headset going 4-5k and 60fps makes all the difference, and 5GHz wifi too.
 
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