Physical build help migrating my Windows based standalone Plex server to unraid

[polishprocessors]

I also posted this over on the unraid subredit, but I figured I best also start here...

I've been toying with the idea of some sort of containerisation to bring together Plex, NAS, PiHole and other disparate things I've been running on assorted boxes/Raspberry Pis around the house. A bunch of random searches lead me down the unraid rabbit hole and I'm now seriously considering building a box from scratch. I have a somewhat old Asus STRIX-R9380-DC2OC-2GD5-GAMING video card which might be too big but certainly will help if any transcoding offloading is required but that's about all the pieces I've got so far. So I'm left with mostly the processor/motherboard decision. Money's not exactly an object, but I don't need anything bleeding-edge, either, so that said...

1. Should I go Ryzen? Lots of reviews suggest that might be the right choice for power/cost/heat ratios and that's my default thought but I'm not wedded to it.
2. If Ryzen, I was looking at 3700X as a decent price/value point, but the next question is X470 or X570? I'm thinking X470 is good enough for the forseeable future? The entry level for X470-PROs are about 120EUR for me, so no point saving a few bucks to go with the 370s, I'd think.
3. If 470 (or 570) are there any boards I should be specifically looking at? Again, the bulk of what I'm aiming to do here is Plex downloading and subsequent transcoding and streaming-I imagine all the other PiHole/DHCP/OpenVPN processes will be minuscule comparatively. Some of the reviews I've read have gone on about PCIe streams, but I'm a bit confused on where that matters...
4. Do I need/want a RAID controller? The bulk of my read/write is probably going to be more limited by my internet speed of 100/20Mb down/up, so I'm not too worried about speed here-SATA's worked fine for me in the past.
5. Finally I'm looking for as compact a system/enclosure as possible while giving me room for at least 3-4 drives day 1 and maybe expansion (though perhaps externally) later. I saw some nice options from Fractal Designs, but my current system is on an old HP Mini Desktop so it's going to be a step-up regardless, but I'm probably thinking a compact box like the Fractal Node 304, which claims it'll support GPUs up to 310mm (mine's ~280)

Right, that's a lot of questions so I'll stop for now. Thanks in advance for the help and again sorry if a lot of this is repeated but I just don't know enough of what I don't know to start making any decisions yet...

[trurl]

23 minutes ago, polishprocessors said:

Do I need/want a RAID controller?

You DO NOT want a RAID controller. Unraid IS NOT RAID. RAID controllers can actually cause problems with Unraid.

 

24 minutes ago, polishprocessors said:

maybe expansion (though perhaps externally) later

External expansion can also be a problem depending on how it is implemented. Simplest way to get more capacity in a small form is by replacing disks with larger disks. Unraid does this very well.

[polishprocessors]

2 minutes ago, trurl said:

You DO NOT want a RAID controller

Guess it's in the name...don't mind me...

2 minutes ago, trurl said:

Simplest way to get more capacity in a small form is by replacing disks with larger disks

Fair enough-I'll just plan on internal expansion, then-I already have 2x 3.5" drives I'm using on my old Plex server, so while I'm sure I'll have to figure out how to import these properly I figure it should be fairly straightforward...

[polishprocessors]

The first response that came back from Reddit suggests AMD won't work with Plex docker containerisation? And my non-NVIDIA card won't work with that, either? Should I expect running my Plex (and Sonarr/Radarr/Tautulli) on Windows would mean a bit performance hit?

[trurl]

7 hours ago, polishprocessors said:

figure out how to import these properly I figure it should be fairly straightforward...

Unraid must format any disk it will use in the array or cache. If you intend to reuse those disks in the array or cache then you will have to put their data elsewhere if you need to keep it.

 

Unraid can access disks with NTFS and several other filesystems outside the array using the Unassigned Devices plugin.

 

6 hours ago, polishprocessors said:

Should I expect running my Plex (and Sonarr/Radarr/Tautulli) on Windows would mean a bit performance hit?

Are you thinking of running these under a Windows VM? People usually run these apps as dockers on Unraid. There are many hundreds of dockers available for Unraid.

[ramblinreck47]

8 hours ago, polishprocessors said:

The first response that came back from Reddit suggests AMD won't work with Plex docker containerisation? And my non-NVIDIA card won't work with that, either? Should I expect running my Plex (and Sonarr/Radarr/Tautulli) on Windows would mean a bit performance hit?

That is correct that AMD cards/AGPU’s won’t work with hardware transcoding in Plex Docker containers. It’s not so much an issue with Plex as it is a Linux issue. Nvidia is the only brand of card that can be passed through on a Plex Docker container for transcoding.