Plex parity build


Recommended Posts

I've come to a point where my current plex server has ran out of space and I also want to ensure that all my content is somewhat safe without necessarily having to put extended wear on all my drives, hence unraid with parity sounds like the perfect fit for ensuring that some drives that aren't being accessed can be spun down when not in use.

 

I have max on average 3-6 streams concurrently. half tend to transcode. I use a ramdisk for saving my disks health and for speedier transcoding. 

 

I'm wondering if the following hardware setup and strategy will be sufficient with unraid with a parity implementation or if you see any bottlenecks.

 

hardware:

motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3

CPU: AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core Processor

RAM: 32GB 1600mhz

Storage drives:

WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
WDC WD25EZRS-00J99B0
ST10000VN0004-1ZD101
ST10000VN0004-1ZD101
WDC WD25EZRS-00J99B0
WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0


OS drive: SanDisk SD6SB1M256G1002

 

New hardware I picked up but haven't put into the server yet:

 

OS drive: Samsung Evo 970 Plus 500gb (running via m.2 pcie slot expansion card since mobo doesn't have a slot for it.)

 

New additional storage drive:

Seagate 14TB IronWolf NAS SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - (ST14000VN0008)

 

New parity disk:

Seagate 14TB IronWolf NAS SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - (ST14000VN0008)

 

I won't have enough SATA ports to use the two new disks but I will remove all drives first then install the new samsung Evo 970 plus 500gb drive and install the two ironwolf 14tb drives then setup unraid and place one of the ironwolf drives as a parity disk are my thoughts.

 

Once unraid is setup and once I have reinstalled ubuntu for my plex server, then I plan to put the other disks back in one by one and copy their data over into the unraid pool. Once the data is copied off each disk, I will then add that disk into the pool, where the pool will format/prepare it. That is my understanding of how unraid works and how I can grow my pool - if I'm mistaken please clarify/point me to a post/doc I can read that would clarify the steps I should take to migrate my old data into the pool and then re-add the disks I migrated content from into the new pool.

 

Do you see any issues with this setup and or approach? I know parity setup does slow things down but I think my pool will perform fast enough to serve the content still to 3-6 streams worth?

 

thank you for any tips in advance! :)

 

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, trurl said:

No need to have a VM just for plex. Most of us run plex (and lots of other apps) in a docker.

Well I'm trying to ensure that I will be able to also potentially one day use GPU encoding/decoding and I've read it's complicated or not possible with docker image. Still have some time before I need to worry about lots of x265 content but I would like to not put myself in a situation where I cannot use a GPU and would have to reinstall and reconfigure everything again. I'm guessing when that moment comes for hardware considerations, I may stick with CPU/mobo/ram upgrades since CPU transcoding is better quality than GPU, but again, I know that is coming down the road so trying not to limit myself. If you think it's not a concern then I will look into docker / kubernetes.

Link to comment
14 minutes ago, phi0x said:

Well I'm trying to ensure that I will be able to also potentially one day use GPU encoding/decoding and I've read it's complicated or not possible with docker image.

People have been doing iGPU transcoding in docker for a while and recently NVidia support was added.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.