I am in the design process of building a Plex Server for my son when I came across unraid which appears to be an excellent solution.

Before proceeding I have a couple of questions hopefully someone could answer for me.

I have quite a few bits of old kit around including a HP Proliant 36L, appreciated it doesn't have a lot of grunt, I am wondering if I can use it as either an external exclosure or nas which I could connect to a pc which does have enough cpu power, if possible what is the best way to go about it?

I also have a smart array raid card, is it a pointless addition when unraid is used ?

 

Thanks in advance

An N36L would make a very nice basic NAS box running UnRAID with either 3 drives (free basic version) or 4 drives (using a Plus license).    If you're going to separate the NAS function from the Plex server, it will work nicely.

 

But it does not, as you already know, have enough "oomph" to serve as the Plex Server.

 

I think it'd be a good approach -- but if you'd prefer a single box, then you'll need to build something with a more powerful CPU to handle the add-on chores.

 

As for a RAID card -- you're correct; there's no utility in using that, as UnRAID provides the fault tolerance you're looking for without a hardware RAID card.

 

Thank you for your reply.

 

I intend to run the N36L as a separate Nas solution, in which case do I run unraid on it, if so how do I connect the Nas to the pc that is going to do the work as a the Plex server ?

 

If I am wrong please could you explain the best way to separate the NAS function from the Plex server.

 

Kind regards,

 

Donald

 

You simply connect them both to your router.  Be sure to get a router with Gb ports, as you'll get far better throughput with a Gb network infrastructure

 

I just set up something similar last night.  It's incredibly easy.  The only problem I ran into was pointing Plex Media Server to my UNRAID shares.  I have xubuntu running on the box with PMS and it would not find anything when I specified a path to the share.  I fixed it by mounting the shares to the xubuntu box.

 

You may have no problems if you are using a different OS on your machine running PMS, but I figured I'd give you a heads up.  Super easy fix and I am by no means an expert with networking or linux systems.

 

Good luck!

Thanks I will give it a try and let you know