New user, first time build advise


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Hello all.  I am completely new to unraid, and to the forum,  so I apologize if I am posting in the wrong space.

 

I'll be using the server as a Sonar/Usenet/Plex machine.  I will be using 2 - 3 Shield TV's as my Plex clients.  I wouldn't mind playing with VM's for a windows install for BD ripping software but it's not required.  I have included a PCPartpicker link, does my build seem adequate for what I'm wanting to do?

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/mwt7Gf

 

Thank you in advance!

 

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Agreed, the Atom C2750 is appropriate for basic NAS duties and a couple of lightweight dockers.  It's possible the Shield TV's won't require much transcoding, but you've got some inconsistencies with this build.  Plex transcoding means lots of CPU, VMs means lots of CPU, and while the Atom is a decent little CPU it seems like you are targeting more than it can handle.

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The general benchmark for measuring CPUs for unRAID performance is Passmark.

 

Plex, and the general topic of video transcoding is funny.  Even when you configure Plex for DirectPlay to a highly capable device like the Shield TV you can still get transcoding.  If you don't H.264 encode, if you have oddball audio or video codecs, if you include subtitles, etc., all can trigger transcoding.  If you're quite careful with your media formats you can probably avoid all that, but that's the big question - do you want to control your media formats so it will play properly on your players without transcoding, or do you want to give yourself enough server capacity to allow for transcoding.

 

As a minimal starting point you should get a CPU with 1000-2000 Passmarks for unRAID and a couple of lightweight plugins or Dockers.  Add some more Passmarks if you want any of your Dockers do some heavy lifting.  And finally, the general rule of thumb is 2,000 Passmarks per 1080p stream for transcoding.

 

If you don't do any transcoding and only plan for lightweight Dockers, you can get away with a 3,000 to 4,000 Passmark CPU (i.e. that Atom or a Pentium G4400).  If you want some more flexibility and the ability to transcode a stream or two, head up into the 5,000 to 6,000 range (i.e. Core i3).  And if you're serious about 3 concurrent streams of transcoding and a Windows VM then I'd go 8,000+ (Core i5/7 or Xeon).

 

Hope that helps.

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