I just recently started my journey setting up Plex with *Arr and have had a blast. I have the setup running on a raspberry Pi. Before I start buying a bunch of external hard drives, I went searching for some dedicated server hardware to comparison shop. Am I crazy to consider buying an old tower server for this, or will a raspberry Pi work just fine for this purpose? I don’t have that much experience but I do enjoy a good challenge.
A PI will not be powerful enough to run Plex. For one person with direct play maybe but I’d suggest a lenovo tiny or something like that. Old desktop would be fine too.
If you want to transcode 4k or have a lot of users, a desktop+video card is recommended
I think in your case it really comes down to transcoding the streams. If your player doesn’t support a video format, the Plex server will have to transcode it into a format that’s viewable. A pi might not be able to handle multiple transcodes at a time.
I personally use a Synology nas for my server and haven’t had any issues, but can be expensive.
Dell has refurbished Optiplex’s 50% off right now.
This one is $164.50 with the coupon code HOTDEAL3070
Or here are some other deals on 3070s.
There are even some 3050s for as low as $55 with the coupon code HOTDEAL3050
A Raspberry Pi will not be good enough for streaming and the wireless adapter on it is pretty terrible. I tried using a Raspberry Pi and it was literally unusable for me so I bought a cheap Optiplex. I’ve been using a 3060 and it’s been great so far.
Its literally all you need. They even recommend cheap pre built towers
As someone mentioned do you need to do something computational intensive like transcoding? Another question would be if electricity costs matter to you (would it run 24/7 for example?)
I currently don’t require much transcoding but I imagine I will as time goes on. I would rather not have to police the filetypes for downloads as heavily. That being said, It will be an always on server so power is a consideration. I haven’t thought about how expensive it would be to run a tower server vs raspberry Pi.
You could also ask over in !homelab@lemmy.ml . I mostly mention the power consumption, because of you an “old tower server” even if cheap might consume quite a bit and efficiency has improved by a lot. So even if the older hardware is cheaper you’d probably get that back from saving electricity over time.
I think it makes sense to think a bit about your needs and budget. Does noise matter? Another question would be how much storage you want and if you need redundancy. SSD prices have fallen quite a bit, so even 4tb SSDs aren’t that expensive anymore.
If you’d be fine with that, then there are quite a few cheap intel based (for quicksync) mini PCs for sale that could be an option.
If you’d want more storage and are looking at larger capacity HDDs, then you’d have to decide if you want to build yourself or buy a prebuild nas.
I’m sadly not quite up to date on what specific models are the best atm.
I’ve recently installed the whole arr suite as well, but my Plex media server runs off of my shield TV. i think the raspberry pi4 with 8gb ram is best suited for Plex media server. I have a little tower with 4 pis 3b, 1 is only for pihole, 2 is only for deluge, 3 is for the whole arr suite and 4 is for grafana dashboard and fan control (got a Python script that looks at the temperature of all 4 using node-exporter and picks the average for fan speed). So far it all works great. For storage, I have a NAS with 16tb in raid 1 so 8tb available. Make sure you set the quality setting right or it’ll automatically try to download 10gb files per movie or some silly high bit-rate file.
I hadn’t considered adding serial Pi’s. That is an interesting idea. I am not sure how I would go about doing that but Ill do some research. Any good resources you would recommend?
I am afraid there is no single space I found for the whole project as it just happened Organically based on what I wanted to achieve etc. get this, I first heard of sonarr in ‘17 but only going around installing it last month. I will admit, however, that I could not have completed my project without perplexity.ai simply because although I know my way around Python and Linux, I’m still a newbie. Mind you, It’s not perfect but getting the answers I needed was much easier. This is because unlike vanilla ChatGPT, before it replies, it does search the web and the produce a more or less accurate and up to date answer. Especially great for troubleshooting issues.
