QuickSync is super noticeably fugly to my eyes when doing manual transcoding and the size is huge. File size is less or not important if Plex streams are being hw transcoded using QS.
Now that I have my new Ryzen 7 system, I’m turning my old Haswell i7 box into a Plex server.
I’ve already got it set up so it has no monitor or keyboard, and I can remote desktop to administer it. Plex server is up and running. But I need a much, much, much larger hard drive. Currently using an old 1.5TB WD Green drive as a testbed.
What kind of drive do I need? NAS type, like WD Red? Will the disk be spinning 24/7? Or does it only spin-up when I’m streaming something, and will regular desktop-use drive suffice, like WD Blue? Or if lots of people are going to be streaming, high-performance drive, like WD Black?
And to use Intel Quick Sync to stream, do I need to download anything other than the Intel Graphics Driver, and enable the hardware accelerated option in Plex Server?
It will only spin up when videos are accessed so any drive will do.
Buy based on price, ideally shucking an external USB WD drive. Don’t buy seagate.
I’ve been happy with my Synology NAS systems (had a 4 bay and now an 8 bay). I recommend WD Red drives. They’ve worked great. I setup the Synology systems with 1 drive redundancy so if a drive fails I can swap one in.
Are Red drives better for NAS use? Probably, in theory. But the price disparity is faaaaaar too great to consider buying them.
WD Red 10TB: $285. Four of them = $1,140.
WD 10TB USB External: $160. Four are $640. $500 in your pocket.
Yeah I shuck the WD EasyStores.
Oh, I hadn’t heard about this. Massive power outage wiped out 6 exabytes of NAND at the joint Toshiba-Western Digital factory in Japan.
Prices aren’t going to dip for a whole. Sigh.
That affects SSDs, but I think the cost of spinning hard drives have also pretty much stabilized, at least with regards to cost/TB. It’s a racket!
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Depending on what content you have, you might be better off using the beefy CPU over the fairly obsolete Haswell QuickSync Video.
Haswell quicksync isn’t obsolete at all. It supports encoding h.264, which is what most clients actually want.
Very interesting! I learned something new today.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
So the encoder is (currently?) limited to H.264, and while Haswell doesn’t support hardware decoding from HEVC (on Plex at any rate), I’m sure the i7 can handle that in software with ease.
Yeah, if you have a ton of 4k HEVC content and plan to serve a lot of streams, you may want something better than a mobile i3. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.
You do not need a NAS drive… WD green is fine.
I know the guy who wrote the firmware, the only difference with raid drives was one bit to disable error-correction. They leave the error correction for the raid controller to handle.
FYI I got an email from Plex today that they are offering Plex Pass (basically their Premium service with a lifetime subscription) for $79. I’m tempted, even though I’m not currently using a media server at home. I want to go back to cutting the cord, but I’ve struggled to teach my wife how to use it.
Those emails are pretty rare; usually they were always $75. Anyway it’s a substantial discount so if you think you’ll want the advantages of Plex Pass I would snatch it up.
Main advantages are offline sync (copy shows to your tablet before a flight), the OTA DVR, and most importantly hardware transcoding.
Damnit, I need that email!!! I just turned my old i7 box into a Plex server, and I’m using my HDHomeRun cablecard tuner with it for live TV over Plex. You need a Plex subscription to use it, though. Lifetime for $79 would be very, very, very nice.
Yeah, I bit.
From the build thread and the Ryzen thread you all know I just got a new desktop 3600, so my old system is going to become my media server. I just have to figure out how to set it up (using HDMI I assume) to run to the TV, and then how to attach either the NVidia Shield or the old Roku to it. That should be fun, though.
Leave the Plex box in the corner of your computer room or somewhere else out of the way and use the Plex app on your Shield or Roku (or even native on your TV, if you have one) to stream content. No HDMI needed.
Yeah, it’s just a server. You don’t need to use it as a HTPC, although I suppose you could if you wanted to. You run the plex client on your Shield and Roku.
Doesn’t HTPC imply that the playback client (XBMC, what Plex forked off of) as well?This hasn’t been true for a long time.
@BennyProfane don’t forget to install Tautulli as well, formerly known as PlexPy. Has handy stats and stuff. I can’t find where it accounts for combined Plex library size but it seems to list items (shows, movies etc.) by library only. My scaled-back Plex library with redundancy is only 40TB nowadays, nearly half of what it was before but that was non-redundant.