I'm New - Saying Hi!

[Skatman]

Hi all,

 

First post - thought I'd introduce myself and ask a few questions.

 

I'm a fairly competent IT professional that has been working on servers and networks for around 12 years now; with about 6 of these specialising more in IT Security. I enjoy computers and smart home stuff in general and have got an office full of servers and equipment (probably like most of you on here). I've been investigating using UnRAID for some time with the use case of a Media Server. Happy to meet you all. I'm currently at the stage where I've installed UnRAID, added my parity drive, added my disks, and my parity-sync is just working its way through (estimated time to complete is 7 hours, but there's nothing on the drives just yet, so I can pause it and start again once I've transferred my films back across). I've I've got a few questions, and I would appreciate any time spent trying to assist me. If the questions below need to be taken out of this post and put individually into separate threads, let me know and I'll do that.
 

1. I've been on the Plex train for around 6/7 years, however they've recently made an update that I find totally unacceptable. More can be found in the forums here, but basically they are using our publicly-addressable IP to advertise their free streaming service, effectively associating my IP against their content. As a result I've been investigating other options.
   
   Emby was my first instinct, but it had been a while since I looked at them and they appear to have followed a similar route to Plex with regard to commercialisation - which I'm not opposed to, but I just know how this journey seems to end. Especially when they are doing 'Lifetime passes' as a method of raising large initial capital at the expense of longer-term sustainable income, leading to attempts at making money elsewhere. 
   
   A friend of mine has just told be about Jellyfin, which seems promising. Anyone used it care to share experiences? What are the main negatives compared to Plex and Emby? How compatible is it with UnRAID?
    
2. I've investigated how to install Plex on UnRAID and there appears to be two main methods; through Docker and as an App. Are there any advantages/disadvantages to these? 
        
3. I've been reading about the Cache drive and I can't make my mind up if I should use one. At the moment, I've got 2 x 500GB Samsung 960 EVO SSDs and 4 x 10TB WD Red (Shucked) HDDs. My server used to be built on RAID 0 for the two SSDs which had my OS and Plex installed on it and the 4 x WD Reds in RAID 10. Major reason to change to UnRaid was the increase in space availability. Performance for my usecase was absolutely fine with the aforementioned configuration - probably overkill, but I got fed up wasting so much HDD space and decided to take the hit on the potential performance reduction to give more space.
   
   I'm sure having the SSDs as a Cache Drive will increase performance fairly substantially, but I'm not entirely sure how or if it will be worthwhile. Most of the time my media just sits there, so read speeds are a lot more important that write speeds and I can't see how the SSDs as a Cache will effect that (but perhaps that's my ignorance). The benefits of not using them is that I can remove the SSDs and put them into other devices, plus I have an extra 2 x WD Red 10TB ready to be shucked and entered - increasing my overall capacity (and I'll probably place one of them as a second parity). I can add the new drives anyway, but I'll need to get a SATA expansion card (Mobo is at max capacity) which I don't really have the money for right now.
   
   Would the positives of using a cache drive outweigh these 'negatives'? Should I enable them for the initial transfer of files as I've got about 20TB of films and TV series to move? Can I disable/remove them after this? I've thought about installing the SSDs for Plex to use, but I've also got 32GB of RAM which I'm looking to upgrade to 64GB. Wouldn't it just be better to put the Plex Transcode directory etc. onto a RAM disk?
    
4. Finally, and thank you for reading this far, are there any features I should explore using that I'm not? I've configured my drives to be encrypted from the start (thanks to a video by Byte my Bits for that recommendation). Any best-practice configurations to improve the speed of the system?

 

Thanks again, and I hope you are all safe and well during this terrible period of time.

Edited November 16, 2020 by Skatman

[trurl]

4 hours ago, Skatman said:

Plex on UnRAID and there appears to be two main methods; through Docker and as an App

A Docker container is small virtual machine dedicated to specific App. Not sure where you got the idea there was a Plex App that wasn't a docker. Years ago before dockers on Unraid there was a plugin for plex but apps are not done that way anymore. There are literally hundreds of Docker apps available.

 

4 hours ago, Skatman said:

about the Cache

Even if you don't care about caching User Share writes, cache is the usual place for Docker / VMs to be setup. This allows better performance for these and also allows array disks to spin down since these will always have open files.

 

 

[Skatman]

Hey,

Thanks for responding. Nice to meet you.

1 hour ago, trurl said:

A Docker container is small virtual machine dedicated to specific App. Not sure where you got the idea there was a Plex App that wasn't a docker. Years ago before dockers on Unraid there was a plugin for plex but apps are not done that way anymore. There are literally hundreds of Docker apps available.

 

I'm actually talking about the Plugin. I got the information from this video which had a fairly recent date on it. He said it was the "default" way of doing it. https://youtu.be/denVoBHwXMY?t=291 

 

Assume the Docker way is the best way then?

 

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Even if you don't care about caching User Share writes, cache is the usual place for Docker / VMs to be setup. This allows better performance for these and also allows array disks to spin down since these will always have open files.

OK, so it's definitely worthwhile doing the Cache then! I'll get that installed and just have to get a SATA expansion card. 

Best,

[trurl]

32 minutes ago, Skatman said:

I'm actually talking about the Plugin. I got the information from this video

That video is installing the "official" plexinc Docker. It is not a plugin.