NAS for Plex use... Again
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I run Plex in a container on my little box where I run my container stuff and k8s. And then I did have a big NFS share that it was reading from, but right now it's just on an external drive. I'm planning on getting a synology or something in the future.
The container structure is nice because I can just redeploy for the updates.
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@Grey I can believe that for sure.
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@NashBrydges I wish there was a more affordable colo closer to me. Maybe I need to revisit that.
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@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey I have 2 - R410s and 1 - R510 but they are getting a little dated and I'm wanting something newer and more efficient. They pump out a lot of heat too. Just can't decide on what I want to replace them with.
I jumped from a 2950 to the r710. Big jump. @xByteSean or one of his buddies helped me out.
I check there often. I caught a great deal on 2 R720xd machines with 8 - 4TB drives a few years ago for a project. Wish I would a bought a pair for myself. It was a steal.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey I have 2 - R410s and 1 - R510 but they are getting a little dated and I'm wanting something newer and more efficient. They pump out a lot of heat too. Just can't decide on what I want to replace them with.
I jumped from a 2950 to the r710. Big jump. @xByteSean or one of his buddies helped me out.
I check there often. I caught a great deal on 2 R720xd machines with 8 - 4TB drives a few years ago for a project. Wish I would a bought a pair for myself. It was a steal.
The pure noise pollution would be hell, I would expect - not to mention the power consumption.
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@Dashrender said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@Grey I have 2 - R410s and 1 - R510 but they are getting a little dated and I'm wanting something newer and more efficient. They pump out a lot of heat too. Just can't decide on what I want to replace them with.
I jumped from a 2950 to the r710. Big jump. @xByteSean or one of his buddies helped me out.
I check there often. I caught a great deal on 2 R720xd machines with 8 - 4TB drives a few years ago for a project. Wish I would a bought a pair for myself. It was a steal.
The pure noise pollution would be hell, I would expect - not to mention the power consumption.
Depends where you live. I had a dl380 and still have an r710 (it's off now) and it was like $15 a month to run both.
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I've almost always purchased HP servers with a few exceptions (customer wanted Dell) but on the refurbished market, Dell drives are a lot cheaper. Especially for drives over 2 TB.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
I've almost always purchased HP servers with a few exceptions (customer wanted Dell) but on the refurbished market, Dell drives are a lot cheaper. Especially for drives over 2 TB.
Oh I just buy whatever drives for home stuff. I don't care.
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@stacksofplates That is what I did the last time. Bought empty caddies and SATA drives.
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My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
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@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
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Plex needs lots of CPU power if your clients require transcoding. I have a 4 core E3 Xeon, 1231 I think, running Fedora on bare metal, but Plex and others run in docker containers. All my media is sitting in Google Drive, I have that mounted with https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive , some use rclone too. Google Drive for business cost me $12 a month and comes with unlimited storage, I think I'm pushing close to 100TB now. I've had way too many drive failures, I even had LSI SAS controller flipping on me, and after spending close to $1500 on storage alone, I said screw that. There's even Plexdrive docker image to keep your base system kosher, I think it comes with option of UnionFS and MergerFS, but that's more advanced topic.
See https://cloudbox.works/ for some ideas, I built my server in similar way. Cloudbox is a set of Ansible roles to setup completely automated media server. Mine is a bit different, I use Traefik as reverse proxy, with added OAuth2 authentication layer.
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@dafyre said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
I don't think UnionFS is actively developed anymore, MergerFS is better solution.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@dafyre said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@hobbit666 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
My god you lot have spent some ££££/$$$$ on your Home lab/Media Servers
I only have like 10 film and 4 television series on my Plex at the moment, and only 3tb storage lol.
I had an interesting storage setup at one time where my videos were cached locally to my Plex server, and they were aged out onto Cloud storage. So I could watch any movie I wanted whenever I wanted, but if my internet connection went down, I was limited to only what was cached on the Plex server.
I used UnionFS to do this... I may need to look at doing that again! lol.
I don't think UnionFS is actively developed anymore, MergerFS is better solution.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll check into it if I go that route again.
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@DustinB3403 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
I've always thought having a Plex server would be useful, but then though where would I get content?
Where are you guys getting your contebt to house on your systems?
Torrents, private trackers. Deezer for music. Some use usenet, but you need to pay for indexers and/or server access. At that point it's just better to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr to manage and automate all that. There are extra helper apps like Bazarr for subs, Oscarr as your dashboard, Jackett to index all your trackers, etc.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
I only mentioned paid streaming services as an alternative to usenet. If you have to pay to pirate media, you might just spend that money on legit services.
There's AppleTV and iOS app, WatchAid TV Show Planner, it tracks your TV shows and links directly to streaming services. Not perfect and not a complete solution as it doesn't support movies, but it's a start.
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@marcinozga said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
@DustinB3403 My wife ripped all the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It is pretty much her "project". I just maintain it. I believe we have about 460 movies or so. I ripped all my music to flac files and have it on there as well. Works great for my needs.
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal, so there doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to do it outside of non-DRM content.. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc are really not a replacement for Plex. I deleted my Plex server when we moved into the house and moved over to streaming services. It feels very limiting. I also hate having to search for content in multiple applications. If someone developed a website that shows you a single pane for all of your streaming services I bet a lot of people would use it.
I only mentioned paid streaming services as an alternative to usenet. If you have to pay to pirate media, you might just spend that money on legit services.
There's AppleTV and iOS app, WatchAid TV Show Planner, it tracks your TV shows and links directly to streaming services. Not perfect and not a complete solution as it doesn't support movies, but it's a start.
Yeah I just recently made the transition. Just letting people know my experience
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
Even if you buy the media the act of breaking the DRM is illegal,
Except when it isn't. There is a conflicting fair use law that says you always have the right to defeat DRM for fair use. It's actually, effectively, random.
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@brandon220 said in NAS for Plex use... Again:
I currently have 2 ReadyNas 2100 units with 5 TB. One is primary and the other is a backup copy. They are used strictly as storage for Plex. I am out of space and need more. I can upgrade the drives for more storage space but the NAS is not very fast, taking into consideration that it is an older unit.
My thoughts were to set up a new server with samba to serve Plex, and re-purpose the older NAS units as backup targets for the new "solution". Plex runs as a VM and there is not enough storage on the existing host. I need another solution.Would a new NAS be a better solution or a linux server with samba shares for movies and music? Is there a better solution?
With a NAS you get the OS they decided on and the hardware they picked.
With a server you can get whatever you want both software and hardware.A NAS is consumer components all the way through unless it's a high end unit with a high end price.
A server doesn't have to big or bulky or noisy or power hungry just because they commonly are. Plenty of other options around other than an old R710.
And there is also the possibility of assembling something yourself using server components or a mix of server and consumer components. For instance you might want to have remote management capability which you only have on servers but you don't need hot swap power supplies. Perhaps you want hot swap drive bays or you are fine mounting the drives internally. Perhaps you only need 2 or 4 drives for data but you want to have SSDs for running VMs. Or you need 24 drive bays but want it to be low power.
There is also the educational aspect of building and using a server versus a NAS which might matter. While a NAS is plug and play and often cheaper, your ROI might be higher using a server.
