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
I run my server off an old college laptop. You can set up Plex to only allow direct streams to remote devices witch I force so there is no hw transcoding of video only problem with it so far is old Roku devices can’t play hevc files. I’m by no means an expert but I see no problem running Plex on something low power. Again I’m by no means an expert though.