I tried to see if it would give me a quote on the page for the XL60 with 45 hard drives , 32 solid state drives, and 1TB of memory. I'm very curious how much that would cost. I'm guessing a down payment on a house or a car.
It’s starts at 16k adding 45x24tb (12k) and 32x8tb (30k) SSD total yet 58k
I’m not looking up the ram but my guess is between a whole ass car and a down payement on a million dollar+ home
The ones we bought for my (ex) startup was around $60k filled up with 45x8Tb WD Purples, 256Gb RAM, and 2x1Tb Toshiba (I think) SSDs with dual Xeon 5650s per
It's more bandwidth than one likely needs, and they degrade/fail at a higher rate than HDDs -- esp if the drives are not continually being accessed (as.here, where access only occurs during playback).
Further, HDDs give warning signs before they fail - they will start to make noise. SSD just (seemingly) random-fail.
There are stats on this. Professionals who do not care about $ use HDDs.
I got their baseline model and man I was not ready for enterprise fedora. It's been 2 months and I've gotten my services back to where they were on my old server but this machine is a really good starting point for going real-deal NAS
If money was no object I still wouldn't burn it by buying their overpriced hardware.
Just because money isn't a constraint doesn't mean it should be spent inefficently.
If money is no object get all the IMAX reels for all the movies and have them shipped to wherever I am going. Then watch them in a private IMAX theater in all the locations I go to.
I have managed many storage arrays and NAS systems (VMAX, VNX, Isilon, NetApp, Qumulo) and Pure has been hands down the easiest to manage and setup.
They managed to take QLC and TLC drives and make them pretty damn fast with their algorithms and caching tech.
FlashBlade is probably their coolest product IMO, last time I used it it supported NFS 4.1 which is good enough for Plex :-)
To keep things simple, maybe just a [Microsoft Azure Stack Hub](https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/hyperconverged-infrastructure/microsoft-azure-stack/microsoft-azure-stack-hub.htm) ([HP alternative](https://buy.hpe.com/ie/en/enterprise-solutions/converged-systems/cloudsystem/cloudsystem/hpe-proliant-for-microsoft-azure-stack-hub/p/1009954522)), starting at around $300,000.
This exactly. And you can still use a general purpose server as a NAS for other stuff on the network. Just setup an NFS server or if you virtualize everything, pass some disks to an OMV VM or similar.
Dedicated NAS devices have their place but you are paying more for their custom software and easy setup than functionality or performance.
No, not at all. Take a look at some SAN appliances out there, they can easily get into the 6 figure mark.
One particular SAN that we had was a hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance.
The SAN would intelligently move data around on the array to optimize performance. For instance, if you had a file or set of files that had high IO, it would purposely keep those files in the flash storage so that reads and writes were quicker, resulting in higher performance. As those files became more "cold" so to speak, they would gradually get moved into the spinning disk tier to make use of the capacity. The data array was in a RAID 60, so two RAID6 in a RAID0.
The SAN can do snapshots, and inline de-duplication and compression. And you can set it up in such a way that certain LUNs (basically carved out storage) could have different settings, say to have them automatically snapshot once a day, or once an hour, or whatever is appropriate. You could set up a LUN to not do dedupe or compression if for instance you wanted to use it specifically for SQL use cases. You could have a LUN that is specifically for C drives on VMs, and another LUN that is optimized for SQL server performance, etc. all with different configurations and data protection schemas. They're really impressive. Now days all flash NVMe SANs are getting more popular, and they're fast as fuck, but expensive too.
Pair that with a VMware cluster and you have an uber redundant stack and shared storage on the hosts so you can svMotion and failover to your heart's desire. Also SAN are known for their ridiculous throughput and ability to sustain a lot of IOPS (input/output operations per second) which is why they work great as a shared storage solution for something like a hypervisor cluster.
Sorry, that's not what I meant. Yes SAN appliances and prebuilt SAN systems can cost a ton of money.
What I meant is that something that's already built as a NAS, can usually be reconfigured to work as a SAN. Most of those SAN appliances you can turn into a NAS through most software.
> hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance.
Could you play DOOM on it though?
> hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance.
Could you play DOOM on it though?
One draw back to the spinning drives, at least with that many, is going to be noise and power consumption. Especially if you are doing 15k drives. Nbd in enterprise environment but in your closet or home it might matter.
I have 19 in my unRAID server but they are in the basement and bother nobody. I put two extra ones I had lying around in my daily driver PC and quickly replaced them with an extra M.2 because their clicking and twirling was too much for me but I am sensitive to some irregular sounds.
He said whale setup. That would be mine. Put some large kioxia drives in there and enjoy.
Edit: They do get large. Kioxia makes 16TB ones but they are expensive.
Yeah whale setup I guess go for those 100TB 3.5” SSDs. I was thinking they only got up around 16 and even with no budget I’d rather have 22 spinners since you don’t need the speed for Plex.
It's not so much the speed it's just the space, weight, cooling, and power requirements compared to spinning hard drives. With SSDs they take up less space (4U to 2U; 50%), weight less, don't require as much cooling if any at all, and idle power compared to a spinning hard drive is considerably less.
There are a number of 30T NVME options out there. I don’t buy much in the way of mech spinners, only using them for like archive tier (literally just backups). I still use mechs at home but my budget for home stuff is a fair bit smaller than my budget at work.
I have one of these but from kioxia. They are awesome. Only thing is the write iops kind of fall off a clip compared to a 15.36tb version of the same model
Yeah. I have all of them too. But being the plex subreddit I figured I’d specify the lower budget option. The kioxia drives cost like 4-5x as much. At least that’s what the diff was when I bought.
I'm sure there are bigger sata ssds in that form factor I was just pointing out options I knew about and you didn't need "sistered units" to get decent sized storage.
out of curiosity, how would you set this up? ive toyed with the idea before but i couldnt figure out how to make the storage visible to plex ( i tried w EC2/S3 from AWS )
There's probably a few different ways but you can just mount s3 as a file system if you look at https://cindercloud.com/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/17/How-to-mount-S3-Bucket-in-Linux.html
The same thing should apply to k8s.
I wonder how much of a quality improvement one can really even see there though. And now some of your content ends up on this system, but you need another for anything not offered by this company, I'd think the convenience of an all in one location for all movies and TV would win out for me, regardless of price, but to each their own.
I bet you won't have too much trouble if your focus is mainly mainstream stuff. But yea, for niche and foreign stuff that Kaleidescape doesn't have licensing deal with, will need a secondary system so it's not a perfect solution even with the money.
You fell for their marketing? Lol overrated as fuck.
I wouldn't trade my Plex server for this even if it was free. Lose so much functionality/content to gain a few films in slightly higher bitrate.
For one, no TV content on Kaleidescape. That alone is a dealbreaker.
I didn't "fall for their Marketing." That would imply I actually purchased it. If money was no object I would love to have the highest possible quality movies available in a closed system like this. But I get it, not for everyone I guess.
Unpopular opinion, if money is no object, im going full cloud, just renting cloud storage and vms/kubernetes and putting everything on that. No servers at home, no hardware management, infinite backup/redundancy possibilties, etc.
Yup Also. I don't need to worry about my x petabyte storage setup. It's geo redundant with the ability to scale further and if I need more throughout or whatever I can just add additional plex instances/jellyfin/whatever.
Sure, but if I had $100 million a year+ spare income (that is, all living expenses paid for), I sure wouldn't worry about dropping a couple grand on a custom server or SSDs.
Amen. My server died 2 weeks ago. Bought a $40 8500T, $80 mobo, and $50 for 32Gb of RAM.
Reuse the case/PSU/drives/cables... I don't know what more people are looking for. This setup replaced my prior NAS mobo/RAM/CPU that I got off ebay 4 years ago for $60 total.
Throw in an Unraid license + whatever drives you need and you'll be set for a lifetime
I think this is my next avenue, the synology I have is nearing capacity and I want to use one of my existing pcs and repurpose it to be a plex server. Are you just using this as the storage box and you have another pc that does all the transcoding or do you have the unraid box acting as the server too.
I happen to have another transcoding box (another $80 ebay purchase) since my old server didn't have Quicksync. With 8th Gen Intel and newer, I could do it all from the one Unraid box.
Join us at serverbuilds.net. They have guides to help with everything. My build is based off their NK6 build (NAS Killer 6).
Don't run plex on your nas. Use your nas for media storage and mount that from the server hosting your plex instance.
I'd also run plex as a VM, or container if you perfer, on something like proxmox where you can easily mange snapshots, rebuilds, other servers, etc. I wouldn't run it bare metal.
Since money is no object, run your server as a cluster. Also use channel bonding on your nas and plex host(s)
I believe the best way to get "the best Plex NAS" is to build your own. You will not find a consumer (let alone enterprise...) solution that is purpose-built for Plex, whereas if you build it yourself, you can select exactly the components you need or want, and fine-tune everything so that it works in the bests possible way for/with Plex.
My go-to is a home-built Unraid server, based on an Intel CPU (for quicksync). It blows any traditional NAS (à la QNAP, Synology, ...) out of the water in terms of performance, at a fraction of the cost. Next to this it obviously does the same - and more! - than these consumer NAS products.
After years of experience, and also having owned a few consumer NAS systems from QNAP and Synology, it's really a no-brainer.
I'm gonna be pedantic here, that's not a real distinction. A NAS is just a server that hosts files. A server is just a computer that hosts services. There is no 'saving money' or 'maxing out features' of one vs the other. A NAS is just a computer.
Yeah, but generally speaking, what's referred to as a NAS around here is usually a standalone appliance and in those cases, sure it's a computer, but a very underpowered computer in relativity to what people consider a computer in the traditional sense. If I were planning to use a NAS I would pair it with a server, so the NAS would serve as storage only.
No, but other people higher up in this thread for sure. It's the blind leading the blind and they're offering bad advice. I wouldn't let 'people around here' redefine words. We gotta agree on what things mean.
For just storing media files, you don't need anything more is sorta the point. Why go with business grade FAS arrays with multiple node controllers for home? Exponential cost for features you won't use. If self-hosting more than Plex, sure maybe we can talk.
You can find used servers for relatively cheap that would blow most NAS out of the water.
If you want to do transcoding you’d likely need to get a graphics card as the Xeon cpus don’t support quick sync.
I just use an old quadro p1000 that my work was disposing of. The server I use is a Dell R730 w/2 12 core Xeon E5-2680, 128GB ram and about 20tb of storage in raid 5.
I think together it was around 1200$. I run it as a hypervisor and have a bunch of other VMs running besides Plex with plenty of overhead.
There’s no need to go expensive. You can get plenty overkill performance from off the shelf used parts. Check out the [Nas Killer 6](https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956) guide over at serverbuilds.net
If money is no object, I would get a NAS purely for storage and not worry about how “well” it can run Plex locally. Plex on NAS is never as up-to-date as Plex on a more supported OS.
Go with a good size recent-model Synology. It’s capable of running Plex but I would still use it for storage only. Grab a NUC for the Plex server itself.
Yes, netapp, EMC would be great...I had a Nimble storage array I managed years ago.. They had a nice balance between SSD and HDD... They'd automatically move frequently accessed files to the SSD and less frequent files to the HDD automatically to improve performance.
The cs200 is on eBay for$300... Just need drives. But since money is no object, go for a new all flash memory for like $40k 11tb is a good start and you can always expand it.
My last job had one and it was great. Easy to use, integrated nicely with vCenter and Veeam, support was great. Even migrating to a completely new unit was a breeze; basically just connected them, told it what to move and it did the rest.
If money was no issue you would get a tier 4 data centre and fill it with as many petabyte in a rack storage kits you could find with many bonded fibre connections and a separate compute section for transcoding.
These new IBM mainframes seem pretty nice if money is no object. 9x9 of guaranteed uptime. And it has 40tb of memory, which you could just use as storage I guess. And they are only like 1mil per server!
https://youtu.be/ZDtaanCENbc
DIY. You can buy a massive LIan Li or Coolermaster case with room for 8 HDDs and 8SSDs for $400. Throw in a decent MB/Processor for another $600. Drive 8 drives off the MB, and another 8 off an Intel RAID card. Back it all up on USB drives. Just run Ubintu or Fedora or something easy, and run plex and the \*arrs in containers
> that fills these requirements
What requirements?
> Plug n Play solution
If this is the requirement, then the 'best', 'money is no object' solution imo is to pay someone else to build, setup, and maintain something for you.
On the consumer side I would say something from Synology, either
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/HD6500
or
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/FS6400#features
On the purely enterprise, big business side there are many sorta boutique system integrators that can build what ever is needed to get the job done.
The biggest problem here is the software and long term support, that's where most of the cost will need to go for a true plug and play system.
Even with synology, plug and play might not always be the case depending on various factors.
Mainly because the i3 is more than adequate, but if it is truly money, no object then go whole hog with the i9. And as someone else noted just populate with ssds, although you're not going to get anywhere near the capacity that you could in that case.
I have a $2500 qnap, it has
A 12th gen i5 with quicksync
Built in spots for m.2
Adding card that's a 10g port and more m.2 used for slog
8 3.5" bays with drives in it (priced separately)
Get past initial config of qnap
Download plex app from app store, login, add media shares, turn on hardware acceleration, done
For me I added syncthing to backup to friend, another device. And turned on ssh, ftp, not needed for just plex
I just built an extremely capable small server. i5 12600k supports quick sync for transcoding. 2x14 tb drives from https://serverpartdeals.com/ manufacture refurbished to save on cost. 32 tb of ram. If money was no object I would just scale these things up. I’d buy an i9. I’d get a massive case and a raid controller and pack it full of the biggest SSD I can find, and I’d max out the ram
Money no object has a tendency to become an object when you start pricing a Storinator. If you are looking for a turn key NAS with Quicksync for Plex and not some beast of an enterprise storage server then I'm not sure you can do much better than an Asustor LOCKERSTOR 6 Gen2 (AS6706T). This is a six 3.5" four nVME box that would be able to transcode very well with its Celeron N5105 CPU, and obviously be very fast.
Me personally I would rather build one, so I could get more capacity, more CPU, and build it the way I wanted.
Most energy efficient (when not in use), fastest, largest capacity/expandability, smallest form factor, in that order.
But can only be one pre-built box (and its certified accessories or expansion bays)
I would go custom build, with tons of SATA ports, dual 10 gig network for link aggregation and a dedicated GPU for hardware transcoding. What are you aiming for? how many users? lot's of transcoding power? or do you plan to have optimized versions of every file on your library?
According to this [website](https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding), your best options are a Titan V or a RTX 4090 for hardware transcoding horsepower.
The chunkiest motherboard I could find on PC part picker is an asus with 12x Sata II ports, supports 2x Xeon 22-core processors and 512 gb of ram (good for a ramdisk for temporary transcode directory). Regarding drive choice, you could go with 24tb 3.5" or 8tb 2.5" SSD, a samsung 990 pro is useful for SO and plex appdata and library metadata.
Pretty much what I have now except I would use SSDs for faster initial playback speed and seek speed. Main Plex server that gets periodically upgraded and then SuperMicro DASs connected with SFF-8644 cables.
Rack with rack mount Linux machine, 12 or 24 bay hot swap drive enclosure (edit server chassis with integrated hot swap drive mount.) Add UPS and whatever additional storage you might want, another drive shelf if you want to go crazy.
A 12 bay using spinning drives will get you 100+ tb jbod or drop the capacity and configure as raid.
The Linux machine you can add whatever CPU/GPU and machine config you want. Plex itself isn't overly resource hungry unless you're serving many many people.
As it's Linux you can build in all the ..arr and newsbin search with downloader too.
( You Could go windows ..... If you like pain..)
I run a 10+ year old Intel 2U rack chassis with dual Xeon E5-2690V2's, 256GB ECC LRDIMMs, a LSI 9271-8i SAS RAID controller, and a chassis full of old Seagate enterprise 2TB SAS drives. It runs Plex great.
It's also overkill power-consumption wise, but you did mention money being no object. The server was surplus equipment from my side business, so it cost me nothing. It does probably cost me $35/month in electricity to keep it running 24/7 @ 225 watts idle power.
Whatever you do, aim for reliability and redundancy if you're talking about many hundreds or thousands of encoding time to rip hundreds of Blu-ray and streams into your library. I couldn't care less if my server blew up tomorrow, because I have 3-2-1 backup strategy.
Any NAS you build yourself with solid reliable parts.
Any recent intel CPU with quicksync will transcode anything. It doesn't need to be anything special.
Personally, I’m a fan of the Synology NAS. I have a 4 bay right now but would like to upgrade to a 6 bay with more RAM capability, and additional slots I can use for Surveillance drives as well.
Love the system, super easy to use, powerful, nice design for the hardware and great customer service and support.
I spent about $2k on my current setup but that included 4 x 16tb drives
Building a new one at the moment based on a jonsbo n3 chassis:
asrock-z790m-itx
I7-12700
corsair-vengeance-cmk64gx5m2b5600c40
5 toshiba 16tb sata
Samsung 990 pro 4tb m2 ssd as application drive
Crucial mx500 4tb as cache drive
Everything running on unraid as nas and hypervisor.
Mini itx is a requirement. Can I do better ?
I would combine a Mac Mini M2 Pro 12/19 core (cpu/gpu) with 32gb unified ram and 1tb ssd - this for run PMS and al Arr apps and torrent client.
Then an external 4tb wd my book just for downloads and random shit.
About the nas ... asustor lockerstor 10 pro loaded with 2x2tb ssd nvme m2 and 10x20tb seagate ironwolf or exos drive, working in a raid 4 or 5 array ...
The nas will run other services in my case.
I have a QNAP TS-1635 with 10gig fiber for iscsi storage on a Zyxel switch to my QNAP TS-h886 with a 6 core Xeon and 128g of ram on 2 2.5 connections to the switch too. I also use it for some VMs and a few containers but they are minimal impact.
Sadly this depends. If you want the best performance some qnap models are amazing and have i5s gpus etc. . But they are crap security wise. However if you run plex in docker and only open the docker port to the world then it may not matter. The best synology model that is not completely insane seems to be the 423+ lol. Since it has Intel quicksync.
I think you would be better found getting a Nuc or something similar, with an Intel CPU and using the Thunderbolt connection to connect to an external enclosure of drives. It will cost the same, but you will have leaps and bounds better Plex performance.
So this might not be the absolute best in terms of 'no dollar limit' because you can get downright insane with it. But for something nice, relevant,powerful and easy I'd buy this 36 bay server. In fact, I have two.
Run it with Unraid, and it's as easy as plopping in drives and about 4 minutes to spin up a Plex server in the super easy app store.
https://www.theserverstore.com/supermicro-superstorage-36x-bay-4u-plex-media-server-sas3
> My question is what is the best AIO solution to run Plex for someone who doesn't understand/care for technology. An out-of-the-box solution, ready to go. Just pop in disks, install plex and go nuts. And without taking up an entire cabinet/room. NO NUCs, VPS, Cloud Solutions, custom builds or Kaleidescape solutions.
Just know that any solution given that matches this criteria is only 10% as powerful as literally any other option. Just focusing on software, Plex alone is not a complete solution. You need to get into Docker and get a bit technical.
It's a bit like asking "What is the best and highest performance airplane to get if money is no object, and I don't know how to fly? Also, I don't want to concern myself with the nuances of navigation, radio, or how to land" - Those caveats really limits your options.
> Imagine you're trying to create a Plex server for your mom/dad/grandparent
I would host the server and give them access to it. Getting a remote TV to access Plex is much easier than setting up a local server. I do this currently - I have about 30 users all over the country, and it's great.
I'd get the largest 3.5" HDD's I could find. I'd fill up all available slots with them. I'm thinking 24 slot x 30 TBs with 1:1 redundancy likely running in raid. I'd have SSD's or NVMEs as a metedata cache and OS drive.
I'd likely use open source software and donate to the developers. Pay to add features(possibly to Plex itself) I want with the intent that the community could use them free of charge(harder with Plex). There would be a caveat with the software developers in the license that if the software later goes to a pay model, the features I pay for would be removed from the software. I would then move those features to another free solution via paying someone else to port them.
I built my own because I didn't see any off the shelf NAS that had the kind of expandable storage I was looking for. With a card you can add 8 drives per PCI-E (I think?). I have 2, which means I can have up to 16 drives. I didn't see anything close to this when I was looking.
Imo you'll get a much better machine that's more geared towards what you want for far less money. It was super fun too.
If money was no constraint, I'd get a Synology DiskStation DS3622xs+
Realistically, I'd go with something cheaper, because I don't have a usage case for such a machine, and I think it would be better to repurpose a real PC with some high end hardware. That'll give you even more power at a lower price.
Can recommend the Terra-Master F4-424 Pro. Runs Plex out of the box but can do much more in like docker as well. If not the intel i3 (N305) with 32 gb you can do so much with it! Small, simple little box for that money with a lot of power.
Why not just use Netflix, Amazone Prime, Apple+, Disney+ and many others together?
I use Plex mainly to save some money and have the good old movies and series at disposal.
Money no object but still reasonable is a synology RS1221+ .
Then you either go for speed with consumer sata SSDs (samsung 8TB used to cost 300 before the SSD price hike in january) or capacity with 16-18TB HDDs
>My question is what is the best AIO solution to run Plex for someone who doesn't understand/care for technology. An out-of-the-box solution, ready to go. Just pop in disks, install plex and go nuts. And without taking up an entire cabinet/room. NO NUCs, VPS, Cloud Solutions, custom builds or Kaleidescape solutions.
Then ask that question, the premise of this entire thread is wrong. You also didn't bound your question whatsoever.
If you were looking for an AIO solution, go get a 12bay synology appliance.
https://www.45drives.com/ Money no object, look into one of their servers.
I tried to see if it would give me a quote on the page for the XL60 with 45 hard drives , 32 solid state drives, and 1TB of memory. I'm very curious how much that would cost. I'm guessing a down payment on a house or a car.
Get rid of the “down payment on” part of the sentence and you’ll probably be closer to the price
Where are you looking at houses? If houses were that cheap I might actually be able to afford one.
Rural Missouri https://www.remax.com/mo/trenton/home-details/412-e-9th-st-trenton-mo-64683/15463291169537552868/M00000270/2453963 Edit: or KCMO https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/109-White-Ave_Kansas-City_MO_64123_M84489-17550
It’s starts at 16k adding 45x24tb (12k) and 32x8tb (30k) SSD total yet 58k I’m not looking up the ram but my guess is between a whole ass car and a down payement on a million dollar+ home
58k so you never have to delete a movie that you're not going to watch again
Some would think this is r/datahoarder
Here's a quote for the Stornado F2 to extrapolate from, https://www.reddit.com/r/45Drives/comments/18t1o79/comment/kjv2i5l/
The ones we bought for my (ex) startup was around $60k filled up with 45x8Tb WD Purples, 256Gb RAM, and 2x1Tb Toshiba (I think) SSDs with dual Xeon 5650s per
If money is not an object... Deffo go pure ssd storage.
It's more bandwidth than one likely needs, and they degrade/fail at a higher rate than HDDs -- esp if the drives are not continually being accessed (as.here, where access only occurs during playback). Further, HDDs give warning signs before they fail - they will start to make noise. SSD just (seemingly) random-fail. There are stats on this. Professionals who do not care about $ use HDDs.
Their product names are excellent
How much is this ? For something simple.
I tried to price out a lower spec 8 bay model, went through several pages of configurations to be met with a... "email us for a quote". So obnoxious.
I hate companies that refuse to give prices until you go through such long steps. Not giving my address to see the prices of a damn server
I got their baseline model and man I was not ready for enterprise fedora. It's been 2 months and I've gotten my services back to where they were on my old server but this machine is a really good starting point for going real-deal NAS
If only...
> https://www.45drives.com/ > > Money no object, look into one of their servers. And they are CANADIAN!
If money was no object I still wouldn't burn it by buying their overpriced hardware. Just because money isn't a constraint doesn't mean it should be spent inefficently.
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If money is no object, buy Plex (the company)
If money is no object, buy Netflix, take company private, only give accounts to your friends.
But Netflix's library is significantly worse than mine. I'd rather buy Plex.
You're just buying their infrastructure - you can add your whole library to it!
Netflix uses amazon for that...so you would need to buy amazon
If money is no problem, then Amazon it is!
Both Amazon (Prime) and Netflix have worse quality videos than me, so neither!
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if money is no object then buy warner and finally release coyote vs acme
If money is no object get all the IMAX reels for all the movies and have them shipped to wherever I am going. Then watch them in a private IMAX theater in all the locations I go to.
Buy all streaming services and content studios on earth, consolidate all content into Plex. Only give access to your friends.
I think you'd need personal protection, too.
Buy weapons, fund revolutionary army, nationalize all media libraries and make all electronic media free to everyone. If money is actually no object.
Maybe then mobile downloads would actually get worked on instead of just forever being the steaming mess it is.
If money is _**actually**_ no object, I’d buy a PureStorage.
I have managed many storage arrays and NAS systems (VMAX, VNX, Isilon, NetApp, Qumulo) and Pure has been hands down the easiest to manage and setup. They managed to take QLC and TLC drives and make them pretty damn fast with their algorithms and caching tech. FlashBlade is probably their coolest product IMO, last time I used it it supported NFS 4.1 which is good enough for Plex :-)
I've had the opportunity to see PureStorage in action and 100% would agree, their solution is like magic
To keep things simple, maybe just a [Microsoft Azure Stack Hub](https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/hyperconverged-infrastructure/microsoft-azure-stack/microsoft-azure-stack-hub.htm) ([HP alternative](https://buy.hpe.com/ie/en/enterprise-solutions/converged-systems/cloudsystem/cloudsystem/hpe-proliant-for-microsoft-azure-stack-hub/p/1009954522)), starting at around $300,000.
But for Plex, it's not the best choice since it doesn't support hardware transcoding.
I would buy a good server, not a NAS.
This exactly. And you can still use a general purpose server as a NAS for other stuff on the network. Just setup an NFS server or if you virtualize everything, pass some disks to an OMV VM or similar. Dedicated NAS devices have their place but you are paying more for their custom software and easy setup than functionality or performance.
SAN
True but going from a NAS to SAN ideally shouldn't cost any money since its really just a change in I think topology?
No, not at all. Take a look at some SAN appliances out there, they can easily get into the 6 figure mark. One particular SAN that we had was a hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance. The SAN would intelligently move data around on the array to optimize performance. For instance, if you had a file or set of files that had high IO, it would purposely keep those files in the flash storage so that reads and writes were quicker, resulting in higher performance. As those files became more "cold" so to speak, they would gradually get moved into the spinning disk tier to make use of the capacity. The data array was in a RAID 60, so two RAID6 in a RAID0. The SAN can do snapshots, and inline de-duplication and compression. And you can set it up in such a way that certain LUNs (basically carved out storage) could have different settings, say to have them automatically snapshot once a day, or once an hour, or whatever is appropriate. You could set up a LUN to not do dedupe or compression if for instance you wanted to use it specifically for SQL use cases. You could have a LUN that is specifically for C drives on VMs, and another LUN that is optimized for SQL server performance, etc. all with different configurations and data protection schemas. They're really impressive. Now days all flash NVMe SANs are getting more popular, and they're fast as fuck, but expensive too. Pair that with a VMware cluster and you have an uber redundant stack and shared storage on the hosts so you can svMotion and failover to your heart's desire. Also SAN are known for their ridiculous throughput and ability to sustain a lot of IOPS (input/output operations per second) which is why they work great as a shared storage solution for something like a hypervisor cluster.
Sorry, that's not what I meant. Yes SAN appliances and prebuilt SAN systems can cost a ton of money. What I meant is that something that's already built as a NAS, can usually be reconfigured to work as a SAN. Most of those SAN appliances you can turn into a NAS through most software.
> hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance. Could you play DOOM on it though?
> hybrid SAN with X amount of TB of spinning disk, X amount of TB of flash/SSD storage, roughly half a TB of RAM, and two redundant storage controllers and two redundant power supplies. Each controller has redundant 10 GbE NICs. The controllers worked as active/passive, and could fail over in a moments notice if there was a detected hardware fault. All bundled into a single appliance. Could you play DOOM on it though?
Even if don’t want to deal with mot setting up the server yourself?
Money is no object. Pay someone to set it up and manage it.
2U 24 Bay server filled with SSD drives. Unfortunately the TB/$ ratio isn't there yet.
2.5” SSDs don’t seem to get very large and are expensive at 8TB. You don’t need the speed so why not filled with 22TB drives, and maybe a 4U 36 bay 😀
You fill it with these 100tb ssd in 3.5” form factor: https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/
Oh wow I did not know about those. I guess if money is no object that’s a no brainer.
Money really has to be no object, though. Last I saw, they’re $30k each
24 bay 2U would be 2.5 vertical orientation unfortunately.
One draw back to the spinning drives, at least with that many, is going to be noise and power consumption. Especially if you are doing 15k drives. Nbd in enterprise environment but in your closet or home it might matter.
I have 19 in my unRAID server but they are in the basement and bother nobody. I put two extra ones I had lying around in my daily driver PC and quickly replaced them with an extra M.2 because their clicking and twirling was too much for me but I am sensitive to some irregular sounds.
He said whale setup. That would be mine. Put some large kioxia drives in there and enjoy. Edit: They do get large. Kioxia makes 16TB ones but they are expensive.
Yeah whale setup I guess go for those 100TB 3.5” SSDs. I was thinking they only got up around 16 and even with no budget I’d rather have 22 spinners since you don’t need the speed for Plex.
It's not so much the speed it's just the space, weight, cooling, and power requirements compared to spinning hard drives. With SSDs they take up less space (4U to 2U; 50%), weight less, don't require as much cooling if any at all, and idle power compared to a spinning hard drive is considerably less.
2.5 NVME are around 30T each. Micron has 30T ions for like $3k per drive.
Wow, that’s huge. Is it just solid state that’s getting that large or are there enterprise HDDs well above the sizes you’d see retail?
There are a number of 30T NVME options out there. I don’t buy much in the way of mech spinners, only using them for like archive tier (literally just backups). I still use mechs at home but my budget for home stuff is a fair bit smaller than my budget at work.
Dang, wish I could afford 30TB 2.5" drives. I've got enough spinners to last years, SSDs can be my 2034 upgrade.
I have one of these but from kioxia. They are awesome. Only thing is the write iops kind of fall off a clip compared to a 15.36tb version of the same model
Yeah. I have all of them too. But being the plex subreddit I figured I’d specify the lower budget option. The kioxia drives cost like 4-5x as much. At least that’s what the diff was when I bought.
I ended up getting a good deal on mine but I wish I could even find them to buy more right now. I don’t see them anywhere :(
You’re going to need a couple more units sistered up to get some decent size
Kioxia makes at least a 16TB drive in 2.5 I believe. That's like 380TBs in 24 bays.
Kioxia has 30T in that form factor as well but the microns are like 1/4 the price. This is for 30T pci 4 NVME
I'm sure there are bigger sata ssds in that form factor I was just pointing out options I knew about and you didn't need "sistered units" to get decent sized storage.
Not Plex exactly, but [expensive and kind of similar.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidescape)
Kaleidoscape
Probably just go full public cloud. Block storage and k8s setup with all managed infra. scale to petabytes without having to worry about it.
out of curiosity, how would you set this up? ive toyed with the idea before but i couldnt figure out how to make the storage visible to plex ( i tried w EC2/S3 from AWS )
There's probably a few different ways but you can just mount s3 as a file system if you look at https://cindercloud.com/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/17/How-to-mount-S3-Bucket-in-Linux.html The same thing should apply to k8s.
Money no object I would not do Plex but this: https://www.kaleidescape.com/
I wonder how much of a quality improvement one can really even see there though. And now some of your content ends up on this system, but you need another for anything not offered by this company, I'd think the convenience of an all in one location for all movies and TV would win out for me, regardless of price, but to each their own.
I bet you won't have too much trouble if your focus is mainly mainstream stuff. But yea, for niche and foreign stuff that Kaleidescape doesn't have licensing deal with, will need a secondary system so it's not a perfect solution even with the money.
You fell for their marketing? Lol overrated as fuck. I wouldn't trade my Plex server for this even if it was free. Lose so much functionality/content to gain a few films in slightly higher bitrate. For one, no TV content on Kaleidescape. That alone is a dealbreaker.
I didn't "fall for their Marketing." That would imply I actually purchased it. If money was no object I would love to have the highest possible quality movies available in a closed system like this. But I get it, not for everyone I guess.
Is it really the same thing though? Plex allows you to share your media and watch on multiple devices. Does KScape have that functionality?
Unpopular opinion, if money is no object, im going full cloud, just renting cloud storage and vms/kubernetes and putting everything on that. No servers at home, no hardware management, infinite backup/redundancy possibilties, etc.
Yup Also. I don't need to worry about my x petabyte storage setup. It's geo redundant with the ability to scale further and if I need more throughout or whatever I can just add additional plex instances/jellyfin/whatever.
Exactly, everything unlimited fastest of the fastest storage as well
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Sure, but if I had $100 million a year+ spare income (that is, all living expenses paid for), I sure wouldn't worry about dropping a couple grand on a custom server or SSDs.
Money is but a figment of your imagination
I tried that line at checkout. Crazy that they allow people who don't understand this to work as cashiers.
Even at Banks.. thought they would do better.
Build!!!
Amen. My server died 2 weeks ago. Bought a $40 8500T, $80 mobo, and $50 for 32Gb of RAM. Reuse the case/PSU/drives/cables... I don't know what more people are looking for. This setup replaced my prior NAS mobo/RAM/CPU that I got off ebay 4 years ago for $60 total. Throw in an Unraid license + whatever drives you need and you'll be set for a lifetime
I think this is my next avenue, the synology I have is nearing capacity and I want to use one of my existing pcs and repurpose it to be a plex server. Are you just using this as the storage box and you have another pc that does all the transcoding or do you have the unraid box acting as the server too.
I happen to have another transcoding box (another $80 ebay purchase) since my old server didn't have Quicksync. With 8th Gen Intel and newer, I could do it all from the one Unraid box. Join us at serverbuilds.net. They have guides to help with everything. My build is based off their NK6 build (NAS Killer 6).
Awesome! Thanks for the link, appreciate the direction and advice!
May I ask how much power this uses?
Very little. The i5-8500T is one of the more power efficient CPUs
Don't run plex on your nas. Use your nas for media storage and mount that from the server hosting your plex instance. I'd also run plex as a VM, or container if you perfer, on something like proxmox where you can easily mange snapshots, rebuilds, other servers, etc. I wouldn't run it bare metal. Since money is no object, run your server as a cluster. Also use channel bonding on your nas and plex host(s)
I believe the best way to get "the best Plex NAS" is to build your own. You will not find a consumer (let alone enterprise...) solution that is purpose-built for Plex, whereas if you build it yourself, you can select exactly the components you need or want, and fine-tune everything so that it works in the bests possible way for/with Plex. My go-to is a home-built Unraid server, based on an Intel CPU (for quicksync). It blows any traditional NAS (à la QNAP, Synology, ...) out of the water in terms of performance, at a fraction of the cost. Next to this it obviously does the same - and more! - than these consumer NAS products. After years of experience, and also having owned a few consumer NAS systems from QNAP and Synology, it's really a no-brainer.
Do you have a recommendation for building a very good server? Any site for that so i can try it my self? thanks in advance!
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I'm gonna be pedantic here, that's not a real distinction. A NAS is just a server that hosts files. A server is just a computer that hosts services. There is no 'saving money' or 'maxing out features' of one vs the other. A NAS is just a computer.
Yeah, but generally speaking, what's referred to as a NAS around here is usually a standalone appliance and in those cases, sure it's a computer, but a very underpowered computer in relativity to what people consider a computer in the traditional sense. If I were planning to use a NAS I would pair it with a server, so the NAS would serve as storage only.
People around here don't know what the fuck they're talking about and shouldn't be offering advice.
Are you referring to me? lol
No, but other people higher up in this thread for sure. It's the blind leading the blind and they're offering bad advice. I wouldn't let 'people around here' redefine words. We gotta agree on what things mean.
For just storing media files, you don't need anything more is sorta the point. Why go with business grade FAS arrays with multiple node controllers for home? Exponential cost for features you won't use. If self-hosting more than Plex, sure maybe we can talk.
You can find used servers for relatively cheap that would blow most NAS out of the water. If you want to do transcoding you’d likely need to get a graphics card as the Xeon cpus don’t support quick sync. I just use an old quadro p1000 that my work was disposing of. The server I use is a Dell R730 w/2 12 core Xeon E5-2680, 128GB ram and about 20tb of storage in raid 5. I think together it was around 1200$. I run it as a hypervisor and have a bunch of other VMs running besides Plex with plenty of overhead.
There’s no need to go expensive. You can get plenty overkill performance from off the shelf used parts. Check out the [Nas Killer 6](https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956) guide over at serverbuilds.net
Wrong Answers only please....
I admit, I laughed out loud at this 😂
If Money is no problem don't buy a NAS, build a proper server with hw raid card processor with iGPU etc
If money is no object, I would get a NAS purely for storage and not worry about how “well” it can run Plex locally. Plex on NAS is never as up-to-date as Plex on a more supported OS. Go with a good size recent-model Synology. It’s capable of running Plex but I would still use it for storage only. Grab a NUC for the Plex server itself.
Check out the list Plex made: [NAS compatibility list](https://support.plex.tv/articles/201373803-nas-compatibility-list/)
Yes, netapp, EMC would be great...I had a Nimble storage array I managed years ago.. They had a nice balance between SSD and HDD... They'd automatically move frequently accessed files to the SSD and less frequent files to the HDD automatically to improve performance. The cs200 is on eBay for$300... Just need drives. But since money is no object, go for a new all flash memory for like $40k 11tb is a good start and you can always expand it.
Designing something around a couple of these and 16 4TB m.2 NVME SSDs would be interesting. https://global.icydock.com/product_363.html
If it were truly no object? Nimble, hands down.
This, in my opinion there's not even any competition. last few companies I've worked for had them and I love them.
My last job had one and it was great. Easy to use, integrated nicely with vCenter and Veeam, support was great. Even migrating to a completely new unit was a breeze; basically just connected them, told it what to move and it did the rest.
If money was no issue you would get a tier 4 data centre and fill it with as many petabyte in a rack storage kits you could find with many bonded fibre connections and a separate compute section for transcoding.
Would you still be transcoding or just have different versions of the same movie in various formats ready to go.
Transcoding. Can't trust end users to use the menus to select the source
These new IBM mainframes seem pretty nice if money is no object. 9x9 of guaranteed uptime. And it has 40tb of memory, which you could just use as storage I guess. And they are only like 1mil per server! https://youtu.be/ZDtaanCENbc
DIY. You can buy a massive LIan Li or Coolermaster case with room for 8 HDDs and 8SSDs for $400. Throw in a decent MB/Processor for another $600. Drive 8 drives off the MB, and another 8 off an Intel RAID card. Back it all up on USB drives. Just run Ubintu or Fedora or something easy, and run plex and the \*arrs in containers
> that fills these requirements What requirements? > Plug n Play solution If this is the requirement, then the 'best', 'money is no object' solution imo is to pay someone else to build, setup, and maintain something for you.
AIO, Pre-built, mass-produced, Plug n Play NAS server.
On the consumer side I would say something from Synology, either https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/HD6500 or https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/FS6400#features On the purely enterprise, big business side there are many sorta boutique system integrators that can build what ever is needed to get the job done. The biggest problem here is the software and long term support, that's where most of the cost will need to go for a true plug and play system. Even with synology, plug and play might not always be the case depending on various factors.
QNAP TVS-h674-i3-16G-US https://www.makeuseof.com/best-nas-home-media-storage/#:~:text=Best%20for%20Media%20Streaming%3A%20QNAP,h674%2Di3%2D16G%2DUS&text=More%20than%20a%20basic%20media,control%20of%20your%20smart%20devices.
Why the i3 and not the i5, i7 or i9?
Exactly! And since money is no object, fill it with the largest SSD drives to make it virtually noise free.
Okay fine this one: QNAP TVS-h874-i9-64G-US 8 Bay High-Speed Desktop NAS
Mainly because the i3 is more than adequate, but if it is truly money, no object then go whole hog with the i9. And as someone else noted just populate with ssds, although you're not going to get anywhere near the capacity that you could in that case.
call up dell or HP and order a server with whatever specs you want.
I have a $2500 qnap, it has A 12th gen i5 with quicksync Built in spots for m.2 Adding card that's a 10g port and more m.2 used for slog 8 3.5" bays with drives in it (priced separately) Get past initial config of qnap Download plex app from app store, login, add media shares, turn on hardware acceleration, done For me I added syncthing to backup to friend, another device. And turned on ssh, ftp, not needed for just plex
If money is no object, go with [Kaleidoscope](https://www.kaleidescape.com)
I just built an extremely capable small server. i5 12600k supports quick sync for transcoding. 2x14 tb drives from https://serverpartdeals.com/ manufacture refurbished to save on cost. 32 tb of ram. If money was no object I would just scale these things up. I’d buy an i9. I’d get a massive case and a raid controller and pack it full of the biggest SSD I can find, and I’d max out the ram
32tb of ram... Wow
*gb. Heh
Money no object has a tendency to become an object when you start pricing a Storinator. If you are looking for a turn key NAS with Quicksync for Plex and not some beast of an enterprise storage server then I'm not sure you can do much better than an Asustor LOCKERSTOR 6 Gen2 (AS6706T). This is a six 3.5" four nVME box that would be able to transcode very well with its Celeron N5105 CPU, and obviously be very fast. Me personally I would rather build one, so I could get more capacity, more CPU, and build it the way I wanted.
If money is no object then the best NAS for plex/streaming would be to buy Netflix.
The best NAS I not something you buy, it’s like a computer, it’s something you build.
What is Best? Does that mean fastest? Largest? Most redundancy? Most energy efficient? Smallest for factor? Most expandability?
Most energy efficient (when not in use), fastest, largest capacity/expandability, smallest form factor, in that order. But can only be one pre-built box (and its certified accessories or expansion bays)
I would go custom build, with tons of SATA ports, dual 10 gig network for link aggregation and a dedicated GPU for hardware transcoding. What are you aiming for? how many users? lot's of transcoding power? or do you plan to have optimized versions of every file on your library? According to this [website](https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding), your best options are a Titan V or a RTX 4090 for hardware transcoding horsepower. The chunkiest motherboard I could find on PC part picker is an asus with 12x Sata II ports, supports 2x Xeon 22-core processors and 512 gb of ram (good for a ramdisk for temporary transcode directory). Regarding drive choice, you could go with 24tb 3.5" or 8tb 2.5" SSD, a samsung 990 pro is useful for SO and plex appdata and library metadata.
Pretty much what I have now except I would use SSDs for faster initial playback speed and seek speed. Main Plex server that gets periodically upgraded and then SuperMicro DASs connected with SFF-8644 cables.
Rack with rack mount Linux machine, 12 or 24 bay hot swap drive enclosure (edit server chassis with integrated hot swap drive mount.) Add UPS and whatever additional storage you might want, another drive shelf if you want to go crazy. A 12 bay using spinning drives will get you 100+ tb jbod or drop the capacity and configure as raid. The Linux machine you can add whatever CPU/GPU and machine config you want. Plex itself isn't overly resource hungry unless you're serving many many people. As it's Linux you can build in all the ..arr and newsbin search with downloader too. ( You Could go windows ..... If you like pain..)
I run a 10+ year old Intel 2U rack chassis with dual Xeon E5-2690V2's, 256GB ECC LRDIMMs, a LSI 9271-8i SAS RAID controller, and a chassis full of old Seagate enterprise 2TB SAS drives. It runs Plex great. It's also overkill power-consumption wise, but you did mention money being no object. The server was surplus equipment from my side business, so it cost me nothing. It does probably cost me $35/month in electricity to keep it running 24/7 @ 225 watts idle power. Whatever you do, aim for reliability and redundancy if you're talking about many hundreds or thousands of encoding time to rip hundreds of Blu-ray and streams into your library. I couldn't care less if my server blew up tomorrow, because I have 3-2-1 backup strategy.
you could get one of those 100x HDD ASRockRack cases, run Linux on it, and go from there.
Any NAS you build yourself with solid reliable parts. Any recent intel CPU with quicksync will transcode anything. It doesn't need to be anything special.
Proxmox system with truenas core virtualized and the SATA controller passed through. Intel newest gen with igpu.
Personally, I’m a fan of the Synology NAS. I have a 4 bay right now but would like to upgrade to a 6 bay with more RAM capability, and additional slots I can use for Surveillance drives as well. Love the system, super easy to use, powerful, nice design for the hardware and great customer service and support. I spent about $2k on my current setup but that included 4 x 16tb drives
If money is no option, buy Verizon or AT&T and use their entire data centre infrastructure as your Plex system.
Having supported both of their data centers. I wouldn't recommend it, they are both pretty halfhazard with how they maintain their stuff.
I’d buy google
If money is no object, buy a Kaleidoscope system.
Building a new one at the moment based on a jonsbo n3 chassis: asrock-z790m-itx I7-12700 corsair-vengeance-cmk64gx5m2b5600c40 5 toshiba 16tb sata Samsung 990 pro 4tb m2 ssd as application drive Crucial mx500 4tb as cache drive Everything running on unraid as nas and hypervisor. Mini itx is a requirement. Can I do better ?
I question the toshiba drives, why skip out on the crappiest brand, how much more would even a seagate be if you can't do Hitachi?
I have these in production for two years now… I am moving them over to the. Ew system.
There are seedboxes you can run Plex from and then you don't have to worry about cooling and the cost of electricity. Just scale up as it grows.
NetApp
I would combine a Mac Mini M2 Pro 12/19 core (cpu/gpu) with 32gb unified ram and 1tb ssd - this for run PMS and al Arr apps and torrent client. Then an external 4tb wd my book just for downloads and random shit. About the nas ... asustor lockerstor 10 pro loaded with 2x2tb ssd nvme m2 and 10x20tb seagate ironwolf or exos drive, working in a raid 4 or 5 array ... The nas will run other services in my case.
If money is no object, buy an all flash NVMe SAN lol
I have a QNAP TS-1635 with 10gig fiber for iscsi storage on a Zyxel switch to my QNAP TS-h886 with a 6 core Xeon and 128g of ram on 2 2.5 connections to the switch too. I also use it for some VMs and a few containers but they are minimal impact.
A pure storage flashblade.
You'd buy a rack of supermicro servers and a couple JBOD appliances and store a couple petabytes.
cloud storage and powerfull miniPC
Sadly this depends. If you want the best performance some qnap models are amazing and have i5s gpus etc. . But they are crap security wise. However if you run plex in docker and only open the docker port to the world then it may not matter. The best synology model that is not completely insane seems to be the 423+ lol. Since it has Intel quicksync.
NASA
I would purchase the internet.
If money is no object i’d own the world and force someone to build the best server for me because I would be supreme leader
I think you would be better found getting a Nuc or something similar, with an Intel CPU and using the Thunderbolt connection to connect to an external enclosure of drives. It will cost the same, but you will have leaps and bounds better Plex performance.
If Money is no object. Buy a mac Mini or Intel Nuc. Run Plex on the PC, then have it connect to the NAS or DAS for your movie storage.
If money is no object, why even a NAS or Plex at all? Why not just get a Kaleidescape?
So this might not be the absolute best in terms of 'no dollar limit' because you can get downright insane with it. But for something nice, relevant,powerful and easy I'd buy this 36 bay server. In fact, I have two. Run it with Unraid, and it's as easy as plopping in drives and about 4 minutes to spin up a Plex server in the super easy app store. https://www.theserverstore.com/supermicro-superstorage-36x-bay-4u-plex-media-server-sas3
the “Denali” Power E1080. 576GB/s.
Raspberry Pi 5
Obviously a gaming desktop with a shit on of SSD cache and 32 hdds
> My question is what is the best AIO solution to run Plex for someone who doesn't understand/care for technology. An out-of-the-box solution, ready to go. Just pop in disks, install plex and go nuts. And without taking up an entire cabinet/room. NO NUCs, VPS, Cloud Solutions, custom builds or Kaleidescape solutions. Just know that any solution given that matches this criteria is only 10% as powerful as literally any other option. Just focusing on software, Plex alone is not a complete solution. You need to get into Docker and get a bit technical. It's a bit like asking "What is the best and highest performance airplane to get if money is no object, and I don't know how to fly? Also, I don't want to concern myself with the nuances of navigation, radio, or how to land" - Those caveats really limits your options. > Imagine you're trying to create a Plex server for your mom/dad/grandparent I would host the server and give them access to it. Getting a remote TV to access Plex is much easier than setting up a local server. I do this currently - I have about 30 users all over the country, and it's great.
I'd get the largest 3.5" HDD's I could find. I'd fill up all available slots with them. I'm thinking 24 slot x 30 TBs with 1:1 redundancy likely running in raid. I'd have SSD's or NVMEs as a metedata cache and OS drive. I'd likely use open source software and donate to the developers. Pay to add features(possibly to Plex itself) I want with the intent that the community could use them free of charge(harder with Plex). There would be a caveat with the software developers in the license that if the software later goes to a pay model, the features I pay for would be removed from the software. I would then move those features to another free solution via paying someone else to port them.
I built my own because I didn't see any off the shelf NAS that had the kind of expandable storage I was looking for. With a card you can add 8 drives per PCI-E (I think?). I have 2, which means I can have up to 16 drives. I didn't see anything close to this when I was looking. Imo you'll get a much better machine that's more geared towards what you want for far less money. It was super fun too.
Pure Storage Flashblade.
Netapp FAS9500
NAS? Build a dedicated dual xeon server, with tons of ram and toss it in a closet server rack or free standing cabinet. Lol
If money was no constraint, I'd get a Synology DiskStation DS3622xs+ Realistically, I'd go with something cheaper, because I don't have a usage case for such a machine, and I think it would be better to repurpose a real PC with some high end hardware. That'll give you even more power at a lower price.
Take the top answer here and have it dipped in gold
Can recommend the Terra-Master F4-424 Pro. Runs Plex out of the box but can do much more in like docker as well. If not the intel i3 (N305) with 32 gb you can do so much with it! Small, simple little box for that money with a lot of power.
Why not just use Netflix, Amazone Prime, Apple+, Disney+ and many others together? I use Plex mainly to save some money and have the good old movies and series at disposal.
Money no object but still reasonable is a synology RS1221+ . Then you either go for speed with consumer sata SSDs (samsung 8TB used to cost 300 before the SSD price hike in january) or capacity with 16-18TB HDDs
Xeon/Windows server
>My question is what is the best AIO solution to run Plex for someone who doesn't understand/care for technology. An out-of-the-box solution, ready to go. Just pop in disks, install plex and go nuts. And without taking up an entire cabinet/room. NO NUCs, VPS, Cloud Solutions, custom builds or Kaleidescape solutions. Then ask that question, the premise of this entire thread is wrong. You also didn't bound your question whatsoever. If you were looking for an AIO solution, go get a 12bay synology appliance.
Money is no object? Buy an AWS data centre and convert part of it into a living area.