Need advice on Massive New Plex server

[modder man]

I guess I stated that wrong, but the way I always understood it with striping calculations, the larger the raid in storage size the harder it is on the controller for calculations and keeping up with performance.

As spartacus mentioned a Z2 is far from a traditional raid. You will not see performance greatly degrade as the array fills up. For reference this benchmark is run from a 12x8TB Z2 array

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

I guess I stated that wrong, but the way I always understood it with striping calculations, the larger the raid in storage size the harder it is on the controller for calculations and keeping up with performance.

OK then, so actual volume size as opposed to volume current free space. Still, that has no effect on the actual block of data for which the parity calculations are being done.

The only way I can envision volume size affecting the speed of parity calculations is as a function of the number of disks making up the array. e.g., maybe an 8-disk RAID5 is a hair slower than a 4-disk one due to the need to split data and calculate parity across that many more drives. Though I'd be surprised if it's anything you'd truly be able to see or would matter.

 

[epimetheus]

I just built this:

Anniversary LGA2011 build

I've been thoroughly impressed with the performance for the cost (12C/24T for under $500, including rackmount case). I've got dual E5-2620 V1's and 64Gb RAM in it right now. I'm running Unraid with Plex, MakeMKV, and Handbrake dockers. I'm working on migrating my Blue Iris over to Windows VM and HS3 over to a Ubuntu VM on it as well. Looking for high end E5 V2 deals on ebay for possible upgrade.

 

[khorton]

Hello forum members!

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So far my new proposed build in progress...
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CPU: Intel Xeon lower power 10, 12 or 14 core (Low power or just rake that electric bill high?) Kabylake or newer?

I'd recommend against the low power versions of the CPU. The low power versions of a given CPU use the same amount of power as the regular version at idle, which is where the Plex server will be most of the time. The low power version limits the power (and performance) only when the system is under load, i.e. the exact time you want more power, to transcode multiple streams.

The low power versions of the CPUs are really only useful if your system has a major cooling issue, and you need to limit the maximum amount of heat that can be generated when the system is under heavy load.

 

[gigatexal]

I would give serious consideration to configuring your spinner drives in an NSA (non-striped array) with something like SnapRAID, FlexRAID, UnRAID, Drivepool, etc. It's a much more efficient way to store media for a home media streaming server.

Blasphemy! RaidZ2 all the things. Jokes. Yeah it’s just movies. Surely you have a backup or the originals.

 

[Night Shade]

The issue of not having redundancy is the rebuild of the material on to the server. Say a two hour movie takes 1 hour to rip and put into the desired format/quality. That is typical with an octocore CPU like an fx8350 and that requires the use of lets say around 250 watts (probably on the low side for an 8350) for one hour to run the system at max. Slower systems may actually use more power and newer systems may use a little less but it's not a bad estimate. Each movie will then cost around 3 cents per rip. Not a ton in electricity for one but lets figure a 4TB collection with an average file size around 2 to 5 GB depending on the movie. So lets call that 2200 movies. That is 2200 hours straight through to rebuild, or about 66 dollars in electricity not to mention that it will take nearly a year (275 days total) of swapping discs every hour doing eight per day. Faster system a little less and a slower system a lot more time between swaps. And we all know that time is money so how much is that 2200 hours worth to you. Sure you don't have to be sitting there the whole entire time but lets say you have to futz with each disk for 10 minutes. That is still quite a few hours of just swapping discs and you need to be nearby for the rest of the time to be ready for the next one.

By the time you have a backup to hold all the files you may as well buy the drives and throw them into a pool and have storage for more than the media. The drive cost is nearly the same for the redundancy and the electricity cost is similar over a year of ripping movies and you can now run Syncthing to backup pictures on your phones directly to the server and let Plex or whatever media center you chose display them as well. Backups for the most important stuff is still recommended but the risk of loss due to a drive failure is quite small.

Take it from someone who suffered a single drive loss in a system with only 1.5TB of movies (512 movies or or about 64 days of swapping discs) written, it SUCKS to rebuild. Adding one here and there is no big deal but doing them all is a pain and I have no intention of doing that over again.

 

[NashBrydges]

For what it's worth, here is my setup.

Storage:

• Movies are stored on a Dell R510 stuffed full of 6TB drives in a RAID6 config (I don't want to re-rip 2000 movies so need some protection)
• The R510 is setup as a NAS server with a single VM as file server. It's assigned 4 vCPUs and 8GB memory to the VM
• Backup is done via Veeam to another R510

Plex Server:

• Installed on a Ubuntu 18.04 VM running on a Dell R720XD (E5-2650 x 2 + 256GB DDR3 RAM) stuffed full of SSDs
• The Plex VM is assigned 8vCPUs + 16GB memory
• I've network connected the Plex VM to the file server so all files are streaming from a network attached drive on Ubuntu
• There are NO video cards installed on the server. Transcoding happens on the CPU.

Performance:

• I can easily stream up to 3 x 4k streams or 5 full 1080P streams simultaneously and never experience a hiccup.
• I have family members who connect remotely via various devices (Rokus mostly) and can all enjoy easy streaming even with all of the concurrent streams happening in my house.

I have to be honest, your suggested build sounds like it's WAY overkill. If money's no object, more power to you, but I don't think you need that much horsepower to do what you're looking to do, unless you happen to be on the fringes of performance needs.

 

[Ixian]

I have to be honest, your suggested build sounds like it's WAY overkill. If money's no object, more power to you, but I don't think you need that much horsepower to do what you're looking to do, unless you happen to be on the fringes of performance needs.

I agree. I used Plex for years but have gone over to Emby (for these purposes they are more or less identical, and I share with several friends/family members) - IMHO:

Look for a Xeon-D SOC board, like the 1541, which is fairly popular still and can be found combined with MATX boards with lots of storage options (such as the ASRock Rack D1541D4U-2T8R - lot of Datto system pulls that used that one pop up on Ebay and here).

It can handle multiple streams and then some and not consume a ton of power/turn your room in to a space heater while it is at it.

Forget trancoding 4k. As someone else has already pointed out, almost all the 4k media you might want to stream is also going to be HDR, and there's no tone mapping, meaning transcoded streams will look like crap in addition to taxing the hell out of your CPU. You want clients that can direct play 4k (plenty can, including Shields, newer Roku Ultras, ATV 4k, and so on). As far as sharing them over your WAN, pretty much forget about it unless you've got serious outbound bandwidth and no data caps. Not saying it can't be done, just that it probably isn't worth it. All my 4k stuff is in a separate library that doesn't get shared.

I use Unraid for my media server and moved my FreeNAS to backup duty a few months ago however I'm seriously considering going back. Not a huge fan of Unraid. Maybe I'm just used to FreeNAS but I find myself screwing around with Unraid a lot more and have had some stability issues with recent (non-beta) releases. FreeNAS definitely has a learning curve and requires more upfront planning for storage but mine has been going almost 5 years now and I could count the major problems I have had with it on one hand, and those were due more to me not understanding something than anything else. Performance-wise it's better than Unraid, particularly the sequential disk reads media streaming needs, which isn't surprising with a striped file system (I use ZRaid2 with 8 10TB WD Reds).

Whatever road you take though, don't think you need to brute-force it with CPU.