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.
I run mine from an old intel NUC that i got for cheap, its significantly more powerful than a raspi for very little extra power. Mine draws less than 8W running 4 VMs (pi-hole, VPN, my home assistant, and one I’m soon setting up as mediaserver).
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.
I was using raspberry pi4 4gb with full arr stack + many more services in docker containers. Its not snappy, but it works fine. Transcoding is imposible, but with *arr stack its easy to chose quality and dodge transcoding and that was enough for me. Super low power consuption and 0 noise is amazing. But there is another problem, rpi doesnt have a sata port. I was using usb to sata adapter at first, it was perfect untill i upgraded SSD which needed more juice. That forced me to get sata dock with external power supply. Everything became bulky and not cheap at anymore. After that I got used PC with no GPU. Intel g3930 and 8 gb ddr4 is draining 25W on idle and its rock solid. It can transcode multiple 1080p at once. I still use rpi as a backup pihole and few more services.
I highly recommend getting something with sata or m2 ports, probably any intel gen 7 or newer with quicksync. DIY or SFF PC, new or used, doesnt matter.
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 [email protected] . 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.
You could always setup a Tdarr instance on another, powerful server (that you don’t have on all the time) that can crunch through everything to make sure it’s the right file type.
Its literally all you need. They even recommend cheap pre built towers
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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.
Keep in mind SD cards are not generally as durable as SSDs or HDDs, so rpi servers are doable but you should make sure to back it up. Some folks connect SSDs and make the sd card read-only for booting. I haven’t done this myself as I prefer towers.
Also be sure to not let your pi lose power, this can corrupt the sd card.
I have a ThinkCentre m90q with an i3. It’s a few years old. It’s a lot more powerful than a Pi. A Pi will not cut it.
You will preferably need something with modern hardware encoding. Support for h265 and AV1 is a requirement nowadays to play high quality sources and find anything for newer stuff. Moreso if you want to watch 4k content.
