The Operating Systemįor storage servers, there’s a plethora of options to choose from. You can watch us build the system in our video, starting at the 5:14 mark. It would be worth considering using a raidz3 instead of our intended raidz2, just to give you an extra bit of security when you’re faced with swapping out a failed drive. If you plan on shucking external USB drives though, keep in mind they’re not designed to run 24/7 under a workload, and you may notice more failures over time. ZFS is a little more forgiving than a traditional hardware RAID however, so if you’re looking to skimp on the storage, lower-end models would work, but the extra cash for the longer warranty and for the piece of mind, it is strongly recommended you flex up just a bit. Our choice of Western Digital Ultrastar drives gives us Enterprise-class warranty and performance, designed to be ran 24/7 in a RAID. An LSI 9211-8i compliments our SATA connectivity, giving us eight additional SATA connections with the two Mini SAS to SATA breakout cables. It’s a steal of a deal and can host the same components that we’d cram into a standard ATX case. We picked a Rosewill 4U server chassis due to being the least expensive 12+ 3.5″ hot swap bay chassis we could find. With the current component glut, PSUs are still fairly high-priced, so the $111 was fairly affordable compared to some of our other options. We did have to spring for a 3-pack of SATA to Molex adapters to finish powering our backplane and chassis fans though. The Gold rating ensures we’ll have a certain level of efficiency as well. We picked the EVGA Super Nova 650 G5 due to the chain of four Molex connectors and it’s outstanding 10 year warranty. The 500GB of NVMe might prove too small for all of Plex’s features to be enabled for a large library, so one might consider more space if you intend on using preview thumbnails. The G.Skill Ripjaws V RAM was a cheap option for 16GB, which gives us enough headroom for a VM or two, on top of the Plex and filesystem requirements. We select the ASRock B550 Pro4 for its price, NVMe M.2 socket, and 6 SATA ports.
AMD’s 65W TDP APU idles at very lower power and under light load, runs more efficient than something like the i5 9600K. While we’re not looking to host more than just a small household of users, the system is intended to be utilized for Virtual Machines and other uses as well in the future, so we need something bit a bit more power, but without bumping up out of our desired power range like a 95W CPU+dGPU would do. This requirement would certainly shrink our potential used OEM systems, but for smaller deployments, may fit just fine. Since we’re using twelve hard drives, we need at least 4 SATA from the motherboard and another 8 from a PCIe RAID/JBOD card, and then one additional port for the OS. However a used computer with vendor-specific components does raise questions on longevity and build flexibility. With Plex recently supporting QuickSync for on-the-fly transcoding, it becomes almost a de facto option, as it can handle plenty of simultaneous transcodes at very low power usage.
If you’re wanting cheap, used Dell Optiplex systems with low-power Intel CPUs sporting QuickSync are a great option. There’s a lot of debate on what a good set of Plex server components would be.
Rosewill 4U Server Chassis w/ 12 Hot Swap Bays Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC320 8TB SATA HDD System Build List Pre-build Parts Partģ-Pk SATA Male to Molex LP4 Female Power Adapter The system, as built, will deliver roughly 64TB of usable storage capacity. It needed to have a lot of space, be resilient, relatively power efficient, and fairly easy to maintain without cracking open the case. We were recently asked for assistance to build a home media storage server to store family photos, video, DVD backup archive, and other media items and to use Plex to organize it. We field many inquiries for custom builds to serve particular needs.
#Plex media server for western digital full
Please watch the video if you want the full setup walkthrough.) ( Note: this article is written as a companion article to our YouTube video on this topic.