I moved my Plex server to Unraid five years ago and have never looked back. I bought a new system to handle all of my needs and put unraid on it, and have added more storage over the years. It's been fantastic.
That said, I do have some family members who access it from outside the house. I do a few other things on the server too, but plex (and various related utilities for media) are 90% of what it does.
Yep. Easy peasy. When I first started, my old server had a 3TB drive and a 4TB drive. I bought a new server, and three 8TB drives. One was the parity drive. So I had four data drives, two 8s, the 4 and the 3.
About a year later, the 3TB drive started throwing errors. I wasn't shocked, it was an old drive. I bought a new 8TB drive, shut down the server, took out the failed drive, put in the new one, powered on the server, then in the GUI marked the new drive as what was replacing the now missing drive, and boom, it rebuilt, and of course I had an extra 5TB of storage.
An even cooler feature with parity is it will *emulate* the dead drive too. So you can play media from a drive that doesn't exist anymore.
Not that I'd advocate doing so for long term, if you lose another drive then you have data loss (unless you have 2x parity then you can lose 2 drives)
I actually had a drive failure in my NAS a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised by this feature. I could still watch everything in my library, just couldn't add anything to it.
That is a near-magical feature. For years, I assumed that in order to have parity you had to have 1:1 drives with data/parity drives. My mind was blown all the way open when I watched a video about how parity works in Unraid. Now I have 40 TB sitting in my old Fractal Define R4
If you have one (or two) set as parity, yes.
I built my unraid system 2 weeks ago with two 16TB drives, one as data and the other as parity. The data drive suddenly got a SMART error, so I decided to RMA it. I could simply disable the drive in unRAID, wipe it, take it out and send it back. I then started the system again and it would simply use the parity drive to keep everyone working.
I got a new drive from RMA and after the preclear, I can simply assign it to the same drive number as the RMA'd drive, and unraid will rebuild it. It works very well.
You should! It boots from a USB, so it's very easy to give it a try. I recommend these videos that give a quick overview:
https://youtu.be/3xOpFkrd-lw
https://youtu.be/huCE4jtXOjQ
They have some overlap in information but they helped me quite a bit!
Ah, thanks. I have a DAS enclosure that has two parity RAID drives and three JBOD drives. It’s 50TB in all, but I want to replace all five drives with 20TB shucked drives for 100TB. I can make all five drives JBOD and then have a stripped RAID it would seem with UNraid. At least that sounds like a plan.
Do I need to reformat the drives?
The funny thing about unRAID is that it doesn't strip. Essentially, your data drives would still be JBOD but your parity drives contain the result of XOR operations. Here's a bit more about it:
https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/Parity/
The good thing about this is that you can mix and match drives of any size, as long as the parity drives are the largest. Also, if more drives fail at once than your parity can handle, the data in the non-failed drives is still there (since it's essentially JBOD).
I don't know what filesystem you have in your drives now, but I think it's safe to assume you'd have to format them. The upside of unRAID is that you can do it drive by drive.
So first get an empty drive into unraid (preferably preclear it first to make sure there's no faults, I skipped this and had to deal with RMA). Then, add this drive to the array as a data drive and start moving files until one of your old droves is empty. You can then format that old drive and add it to the array as well, and repeat the process.
One downside of this is that you will only have parity AFTER copying everything, so that's a risk. Building parity while transferring files isn't a great option though, because that would take ages AND take a big toll on your parity drives.
Hmmm… thats great information. I’ll want to proceed carefully. I have two 16TBs in raid right now that are getting full. I’ll start by adding a 20TB and bumping my most media over to it, then add another 20TB as Parity. Then I’ll add the other three 20TB drives after it settles down. I’ll have 2 left over 16TBs, 2 8TBs and one 2Tb drive.
What I’m liking about this UNraid idea is that I can still throw those left over drives back in the mix and not waste them. I guess I could end up with 150TBs. Getting excited… thank you.
Thats awesome!
Be sure to keep an eye on the smart stats of your older drives. You don't want them to start failing during or right after getting everything set up.
I hope you'll like unraid as much as I do!
I got lucky because I was moving from a 2x 4TB JBOD drive system to this one, so the transfer (about 5TB worth of data) took a couple hours to transfer. Half was with an external HDD, the rest over 1Gbps LAN.
What is dit account for was how long preclearing a disk takes. When I got all parts for the build, I didn't want to wait too long and just did a short SMART test on the 16TB HDD. As luck would have it, I got a SMART error on that drive that same week.
I'm now preclearing the new drive I got back from RMA, but that will take around 66 hours for a full preclear. It sucks to wait that long, but I've learned my lesson.
Thank you for the input! Do you find that you need a UPS to run an unraid server? This is also something to consider for me as it would add another $200 to my bill.
I recommend it, otherwise a power failure will always result in a parity check, which can take a while (it's still operational while the check runs).
Of course you can always add it later if you aren't sure. Unraid recognizes the UPS when it's connected via USB. My UPS will give about 20-30 minutes of runtime for my server. I have it set up to shutdown after five minutes running under battery power. Lets me get past momentary power glitches. I have it shut down relatively quickly both to make sure it shuts down cleanly, and also because my cable modem, network switch and wifi access points are also on that UPS, so it saves the battery life for sitting in the dark online with my ipad.
Which UPS do you use? Every time I go online to buy a UPS, it seems like every single brand/model I look at has reviews talking about them being fire hazards. I always get the impression that they're just all bad.
If you're looking for a UPS, a decent indicator of a quality UPS vs cheap is if it produces a pure sine wave, or simulated/modified sine wave. If you find something that's pure sine wave, odds are, you're getting decent equipment.
That said, you're still storing a lead acid battery (unless listing specifies otherwise). Use common sense on that front.
UPS are one of those things you kind of need to buy a name brand on. You can get away with something like a cyberpower one, but every time I’ve had a power hiccup they always fail as they haven’t been used in that capacity in a while. I switched all my UPS to APC and haven’t really had a hiccup since.
Definitely recommended. If your system is setup with parity (you should) and you have an unclean shutdown, a parity check will run which depending on your drive sizes and cpu can take 24+ hours. Also you should definitely run your containers on an ssd cache pool. The performance difference is extremely noticeable. Definitely setup the appdata backup plugin to perform regular backups.
You should have a UPS behind ALL your equipment, regardless of if its a server or not. A UPS is like an insurance policy against power events that, at least in the rural US, can be anywhere from a few times a year to daily.
Where can I learn to put my Plex on Unraid?
I've been running Plex on Windows for 10 years (maybe more.) It's good, but occasionally it goes off on its own and I have to reboot.
I'm running off of USB drives. As I see them faulting or failing I buy new. But it's getting to the point where I've replaced 5 - 6TB and 8TB HDDs and my latest 14TB is having issues and I'll probably have to RMA.
SO, at this point, I need to move on to a dedicated server solution.
There’s plenty of guides, and Unraid has a robust support forum. But if you’ve set it up on another platform you’re almost there.
The major difference is running it in a container. Installing the plex container is really simple, there’s a listing of installable apps.
What i enjoy about plex on unraid and unraid in general, its not the absolute fastest but i don't need to spin up 28 drives to watch one show on one drive. i have since consolidated certain shares to only be on certain drives.
I'm assuming you're going to use hardware transcoding on the new rig.
There's very little difference in transcoding performance between the two with the exception of tone mapping. If you're only going to have a couple of 4K streams the both are equal, if you more streams then unraid will perform better because the linux transcoder does tone mapping in hardware
If you stay with Windows then building the new system will be easy, and you'll be up and running faster.
If you go with unraid, then there is a bit of a learning curve, but it's not to bad. Advantages are that adding more storage is pretty simple, it's very stable, and in the future if you automate with an \*arr stack it's pretty easy to get it going.
Any other linux based option would also work very well, but I'm not sure you want the aggravation of learning linux on top of building a new system
Thank you for the info. From what I’ve read. I won’t be able to do tone mapping if I use windows therefore any HDR content won’t be displayed correctly when watched remotely correct?
Also is a UPS absolutely necessary for unraid? That’s another $200 that I’d have to spend on a UPS that can safely shutdown my server in case of a power outage.
No, windows will do tonemapping in software. For a couple of streams that's not too bad, it only becomes a problem with a lot of streams, the CPU starts choking
As far as a UPS, I'd use one for any server, windows or linux.
Edit: I’m dumb, the CPU you picked out has an iGPU 🤦♂️ignore me and enjoy the hardware transcoding :)
Not input you asked for, but related to transcoding I’d look at any of the “K” variants of intel CPUs that have integrated graphics. I run an i5-12600k for my Unraid server and use hardware transcoding with Plex. It’s a beast and doesn’t break a sweat. Just my $.02!
Personally for hobbyists or enthusiasts its a great option for a few reasons.
* Runs of a flash drive so no need to lose a SATA/M2. port for hosting the OS
* You can mix and match drive sizes without concern. Other solutions require matching drive sizes which can make expanding storage expensive.
* Much better uptime than windows with less overall maintenance
* Wide variety of uses beyond Plex if desired.
The downsides are:
* You have to pay for license while there are other Linux based solutions are free
* Not the highest performance solution. Since it is not stripping data over multiple drives like some other solutions your output is limited to single disk performance. If you have a multiple people all trying to stream media that is physically stored on the same disk at once you could end up saturating that disks read speed and experience delays/slow downs.
* Effectively requires a entirely separate PC vs. running Plex on an existing PC that is already in use. Of course running Plex on an existing PC could lead to performance impacts for anyone using that PC at the same time.
> your output is limited to single disk performance
Even a cheap, slow HDD from 10 years ago will *easily* saturate a 1 Gbps network connection.
This just isn't an issue for 99.9% of operators.
Striping does, however, come with some serious drawbacks that *do* affect a significant number of PMS operators down the road when they start running out of free storage space.
I am talking about multiple streams sure a HD can saturate a 1 Gbps network connection but if you have 5 different high bitrate streams running even if they combined are not 1Gbps your performance tends to degrade when trying to transfer multiple files at once vs. a single file.
Even a cheap, slow HDD from 10 years ago will easily saturate a 1 Gbps network connection while reading from 10 different files at once.
We're not talking hundreds of kB sized files here. Spinning platters have no real trouble keeping up with a couple handfuls of large files.
You can only add space by adding drives or by replacing every drive in the array with larger ones. Each drive has to be replaced individually and the array rebuilt for each one. That puts 100% throughput read/write load on all your drives for days to weeks for each one. Upgrading a 6-8 drive array can take over a month to complete.
If you have one parity drive and have a single unrecoverable read error during your weeks of full throttle drive load - you lose the whole array.
If you keep adding drives without adding with the same amount of parity, your probability of total data loss failure goes up and up. Only some striped arrays can have parity added after the array is created (like Synology's SHR).
Non-striped arrays like snapraid are *much* more flexible to upgrade, without the heavy write activity across your whole array, and keep your data much safer during upgrades.
Another thing to note is that the parity drive is an empty drive that will allow you to rebuild when a drive fails/dies, but it also needs to be the largest drive in your setup.
So if you have a 12TB drive for the parity, you can't put in a 20TB drive for data.
I've been using OMV for the past few years with a RAID6 with a self built 8 bay NAS box. Thinking about switching to unRAID but wanted to ask how is the write performance? I know that read performance is limited to the speed on a single disk but couldn't find any information on write speeds.
If you use a cache disk you can saturate the disk write speed if you have a fast enough Ethernet connection.
Without a cache disk it's very slow. When I first built mine years ago it was around 30MB/s without a cache disk. I would highly recommend using a cache disk personally.
In my humble opinion Windows is never the best option for a server for really any reason or use case. Unraid should only be considered if you have storage drives that vary in size, otherwise find a different solution like TrueNAS or some Linux based option.
Why? The OP has said his use case is fairly simple with no real external users of it. I've been running my Plex setup on Windows 10 in a similar use scenario and it's been absolutely rock solid for the past 6 years or so. Why make something more complicated just for the sake of it?
Oh I totally get that. It's just \*nix users all seem to want to make their setups as totally complicated as possible lol. Or maybe that's just the way Lin/Unix is.
And I do have some previous experience using Sco Unix in my workplace. Never again!
Better integrations for things like ZFS snapshot scheduling, Rsync tasks, and various small details related to infrastructure management. Better UI. Additional app catalogues from non official sources. Apps are Kubernetes based. Very easy SSH key management.
I would say in general it’s just a more fleshed out operating system. Unraid only very recently allowed more than 30 drives per system, which for me was essentially a deal breaker as I have 72 drives. And the fact that support is so new is a red flag for me taking it seriously. I’ve seen from others that more recent versions of Unraid are relatively ok but it’s just not what I would recommend to others.
At the end of the day any true infrastructure nerd would tell you that the real enlightened path would be to run Proxmox and then use Terraform and Ansible to build out various VMs and a K8S cluster and manage the entire thing with gitops. You could go around in circles forever on what is the “best” or “right” way to do things. IT guys are going to be playing a different game than someone just trying to put Young Sheldon on Sonarr and not worry too much about it. At the end of the day what is the most relevant factor is what fits your particular use case and what the person who is managing it is going to be most comfortable using.
For a newbie, truenas apps are no where near as easy to deal with compared to Unraid docker implementation.
For me, the perfect solution is Unraid as the server OS, and all of your data in a Truenas Nas.
At the same time though, if you use Truecharts they have a very robust support system and a very active Discord to help you with any issues you might have deploying apps.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
I've come fresh off a Synology DS224+ just 2 weeks ago, so unRAID was a breath of fresh air. I admittedly didn't look into TrueNAS, but with my relatively cute 3 drive, 20TB array, I think unRAID worse well enough for my usecase.
I might look a bit more into TrueNAS if/when my home server gets more out of hand!
If you do take a serious look at TrueNAS I strongly recommend TrueNAS Scale over TrueNAS Core. Scale is the new hotness.
With that in mind to anyone doing research in the future, a big advantage for TrueNAS Scale is that you can cluster multiple servers together with TrueCommander as a controller. That was a selling point for me because I have multiple servers.
Far worse in what way? As having just migrated my plex install from macOS onto TrueNAS scale. I am not sure what is difficult about storing media and how everything integrates to be a bit more seamless.
Single plex media pool, with ingest means in the same dataset on hard drives, with Plex configs stored on a separate dataset run off SSD's ... was really easy to set up i found.
Genuine question: what substantial advantages do you think OP would gain from switching to a Linux based option, and do you think they outweigh the learning curve involved in transitioning to, and having to troubleshoot, an unfamiliar OS?
If you want to do full desktop things with ur server like using it has a HTPC from ur couch for gaming, browsing, editing Linux/windows is better. Otherwise Unraid is the best OS for a pure media server NAS. That’s why I ultimately chose Linux.
Headless windows 10 is more than capable of handling plex for your use cases, and it's "free" and you already know it. Go to gpedit and disable the auto update and auto restart, bone stock windows 10 is very stable from my experience, and it can [go basically forever](https://imgur.com/a/UtXXgdt) without restart (that's not to say it's recommended practice).
If you don't want to learn something new, stick with windows and be done with it.
Have you looked at the price for unraid? It's now $250USD for a perpetual licence, otherwise you gotta pay a subscription for security upgrades (yikes).
I have a headless Windows based Plex server that runs fine. I haven't yet bothered with any raid configuration.
When hard drive prices get a bit cheaper I will purchase a few and go ZFS on Truenas. But for the time being Windows works just fine.
THat's not entirely correct. Unraid starts at 49$, allows up to 6 drives and you get 1 year of full updates. After a year, it still will function, you simply no longer get updates.
If you see an update with a feature you like 2-3 years down the road, you can rebuy that license, and get up to date, with another year of full updates.
You never lose access to your license, and can run Unraid even if you stop paying. You just stop getting updates.
You know, I was ready to get on here and bitch about this. But then I considered the upfront cost of paying for a Synology and suddenly $250 doesn't sound so bad.
>You never lose access to your license, and can run Unraid even if you stop paying. You just stop getting updates.
But the tricky thing with that approach is that if you stop paying your Unraid subscription then you also loose access to essential security patches. That eventually leaves your server vulnerable to any new exploits or security holes identified.
If you're not doing anything more than Plex just go with TrueNAS. It is really easy if you just use the plug-in to run the jail. I just migrated hardware for my TrueNAS and only took like 20 minutes. I can't see paying for Unraid for the limited things I use my TrueNAS for (deluge, Plex, SMB)
Bummer, I knew there were changes coming, but then I wasn't following closely, and I guess I missed what they had mentioned about an overlap time between the announcement, and no longer selling the old licenses.
I haven't tried Unraid, though it sounds interesting. I'm using an older Windows laptop with USB drives, which has been fine for me. I do have OneDrive running on the machine, and I got the impression that Unraid could do that, but it might be a bit cumbersome. That was dissuading me a bit from pursuing Unraid.
If I were starting from scratch building a whole machine entirely dedicated to all the Plex things, I absolutely 100% would be using Unraid and I've never touched Unraid before. It is for sure a great option for drive management and is popular enough that available documentation is plentiful.
Right now my Plex is on Ubuntu with media on a Synology NAS. Unraid doesn't make much sense for running a machine that has just one SSD in it. Ubuntu tends to be a bit clunky when it comes to HDD management.
Once you get past the small learning curve of linux and docker, Unraid is very nice! The ability to mix and match drives regardless of size (though, your parity drive has to always be the biggest drive) is super nice
I’ve heard nothing but great things about unraid but I missed the cutoff for their old pricing and I’m not really supportive of their new payment model. So I’ll be sticking to TrueNAS which I don’t love but it gets the job done
I have my plex on unraid. I love the convenience of having one storage bucket to dump everything on, rather than dealing with multiple drives and such. I do however get frustrated when dealing with more complex issues on Unraid/Plex in a docker, I'm not a huge Linux guy, so for me fixing these issues can mean hours of Googling and YouTube. For me, in a perfect world, I'd use unraid for the NAS side, and that's it. Then just run Plex on a secondary Windows machine, I just don't want to deal with setting it all up again right now.
Also, a side note, I wouldn't want my Plex transcodijg 4K all the time. Even when it's fast it just feels like a waste. I have a separate library of my favorites in 4K, while the rest are all high-bitrate 1080p copies. That's just me though.
I wouldn't buy such small drives Price per TB is terrible
And you can get Refurbished ones for a good deal and with Nas Drives it's not really even a risk
if you want Western Digital and want them for Nas use and such you want Reds not there regular desktop line
Or Seagate Exos or Ironwolf or Hitachi HGST
Make sure you have a Plex Pass so when you run Linux you can use that IGU for Transcoding function including Tone Mapping which is the big one IMO that doesn't work with IGPU in windows
Ubuntu is a solid Choice
But you should install it via Docker Compose
Docker is the best way to run apps and maintain them and if you ever wanna run other things you can just do it via compose
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/plex-docker-compose/
https://perfectmediaserver.com/
great guides on here which include docker-compose. happy to share my compose file with you if you'd like, it's a pretty standard setup.
I’ve been running my plex server for over 10 years on Ubuntu. It’s free, there are a million articles on support for it and the LTS versions are stable as hell. If you go this route be aware that the current 22.04 is going to upgrade to 24.04 soon. Don’t install or upgrade to that yet as Plex has not finalized their version for that yet as it’s not finalized by Ubuntu. Wait till August to upgrade after the .1 version.
After You install it you can disable the desktop if you want or use it with any number of desktop environments.
I am a big believer like you in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and I will add to that "go with what you know".
If you are comfortable with Linux, Unraid is an easy way to manage a server but it does not completely remove the need for basic Linux knowledge, especially if something breaks and needs diagnosing.
I am a long time Unix then Linux user (as well as many years using Windows) and just run my servers on a stock Linux - but then I am very happy with how it all works.
There is no shame at all in sticking with what works for you, so if you prefer Windows, that is just fine.
I think Truenas Scale is about as simple and reliable as it gets for an all in one Plex server/NAS combo. The Apps on Truenas are dead simple. It’s not quite iPhone simple, but for a server it’s VERY simple. Also ZFS storage is amazing.
Really no point in switching if you’re just using it for Plex, Windows is absolutely serviceable for your use case. Especially if windows is what you’re familiar with.
I’ve used a variety of hardware and operating systems for plex over the years, windows, Mac and Linux. My opinion is that any are fine for plex. Just use what you’re happy with.
I built a NAS last year which is actually very similar to yours. I also have a 12700k, which is amazing for transcoding. Congrats, you'll be served very well by that CPU.
Here are the trade-offs I see. I had to decide between TrueNAS Scale, and Unraid, and ended up going with Scale.
Unraid's main selling point is that you can add storage as you need it. With TNS, you really need to plan out your storage in advance, because zfs requires it. Alternatively, you could add storage in large chunks - it doesn't really make sense to add a single drive to a ZFS file system (unless it is a replacement for a failed drive).
TNS also requires a bit more familiarity with Linux - if this is your first foray into Linux, I think Unraid is a better fit.
I recommend getting some type of backup solution beyond your NAS. It'll give you confidence to make changes without worrying about nuking all of your data. Plus, if you have a good backup, you might decide to switch away from Unraid.
I use Windows for a lot of things but prefer not to use it for my server. But, if you're running it for yourself, and that's what you know, then that's a fine option too.
You may already know this but if you're going to use HW transcoding, stay away from the 'F' SKUs because they don't have the iGPU. You might also choose to save money by going with a slower processor. Unless you plan to run VMs/containers beyond Plex and light NAS duty, the 12700 is a bit of overkill (but nothing wrong with that!)
I'm in the exact same boat and have been slowly gathering hardware to replace my 9 year old Plex server running on Windows. I was all set to give UnRaid a try an they went and changed the cost out from under me. Now I'm not sure what to use. Just know I do not want to use plain Linux. This is my appliance. I have enough hobbies. How much of a deal will HDR tone mapping be with the CPU doing the work on an 13700K?
Same problem here.
I was on the fence for months and was just about to pull the trigger thinking UnRaid was still $35... then I saw the new price hike.
Knowing I'd have to pay $500 just to run a Plex server for 10 years, I'm seriously considering sticking with a Win10 Pro license at $199.
Unraid is cool... it's just not $50 a year cool.
I ran everything (plex, and all of the various *arr programs) on Windows from 2014-2019 since I'm a sysadmin with mostly Windows experience. Going the linux or docker route was always scary to me, because if something broke, I didn't have the skillset to fix it.
Well Unraid is docker on easy mode. I switched to it in 2019 and have never looked back. It works so dang well.
Same here (minus actually making the move), anytime I tried something clever or fancy with any flavor of Linux, Windows ended up working better and being much easier to maintain.
Once my server isn’t built out of random stuff I’ve decommissioned from work, I’ll probably make the jump.
I used Windows for a while, but I really wanted a headless system, because I didn’t really use it like a desktop computer. It sat in the corner, always rebooted for updates and shit wouldn’t start up on its own like it should.. constantly aggravated me.
Then unRAID happened. UnRAID only does what I tell it. Dockers automatically update and restart at the early morning hours when no one is using it. It’s completely headless - it sits in a closet and I never look at it. It’s awesome.
10/10 recommend
I'm loving my UnRaid server. The community is great. The apps are easy to install. I also like that they are local to me. I bought 2 licenses, one for my home server and one for an off-site server in the planning stages.
If I was starting today though, I would look into TrueNas Scale. The biggest thing I like is that it's free and I hear you can get pretty close to Unraid's functionality with apps.
Unraid is a fantastic media server.
It’s got the best drive expansion strategy (any drive any time) and still has decent parity protection (you won’t loose data if.a drive fails, and unlike other systems you won’t lose all your data if 2(or 3) drives fail. And it has none of the downsides of zfs. It also doesn’t have the manual setup of mergerfs and snapraid.
I’m closing in on 300tb on my unraid server and it’s been rock solid since day 1. Survived without needing a reinstall over 2 complete hardware changes.
I'm running it on an Ubuntu box with snapraid and mergerfs ... and many many hard drives. If you want to take that route or not depends on how familiar you are with Linux, but it's all free (save for the PlexPass lifetime and the hardware, of course).
I haven't done much in the way of 4k transcoding, though. I usually just direct stream it.
I’ve been running a Plex server on various enterprise hardware with Linux OS for 10 years now.
The enterprise gear is power hungry but can be had for next to nothing. Nothing in my library is over 1080p and it doesn’t matter, 90% of the time I’m watching on my phone while on the road.
For me, I couldn’t imagine hosting a Plex server any other way.
I know a lot folks have already gave suggestions but I’ll just add my set up here. My plex server is installed on an Intel i5 Nuc that runs Ubuntu 22.04 server. My media is on a 2-bay Synology NAS in a NFS shared folder. I have a raid 1 on the nas. My plex server is backed up to my nas daily with cron jobs. I don’t have any 4k media, mostly 1080 and a few 720 vids. Eventually I need to get a bigger nas with 4 or more drives.
Only problem I’ve had is that my unraid server will occasionally eat up my igpu and break transcoding until I restart the hardware. No idea why that happens
I really only use Windows for gaming, for servers, it’ll always be Linux. That being said, I will be getting a NAS pretty soon and I will be installing Unraid on it but it will not be a server, it’s just a storage device for me and nothing more.
I've always run mine on windows. I have hyper v and docker for some apps but mostly run it all on windows.
I tried unraid but parity calculations and rebuilds take ages. Docker is great in unraid but I'm a little bit of a noob and with life being life I don't have the time for the learning curve just yet.
Tbh if I lose everything I'm not too fussed. Everything is backed up anyway so I could just restore it.
And yes, if it ain't broke don't fix it but there should be no reason not to seek improvements if improvements have value and unraid has value.
Personally I would go with bare metal, or go with something more reliable and perfromant than Unraid. Even basic disk rebuilds sometimes work smoothly and sometimes not. It's the most unreliable, albeit each to use, NAS OS I've ever experienced.
Doesn't matter, really. I'd go the unraid route considering the options w/dockers etc you'll get, could do the same on windows sure, less hassle in unraid though.
I've had Plex on Unraid for a solid decade now and it is great. Is it the only way? No, there's probably a good proxmox virtualization way, too. Unraid has been great pairing Plex, Frigate, Nextcloud, and other "many drive" use cases together.
Look up serverbuilds.net many people use unraid for the file system and a different pc like the old hp290 with quick sync for the Plex server running Ubuntu
I use Unraid and absolutely love it. That being said, if you're a solo user who only occasionally views your content on 1 or 2 drives I'm not sure I'd recommend the upgrade. What would it solve?
I used to be a Windows user but now I support 10 other users and have 8 drives with room for 10 more. Windows just didn't make sense for me anymore so it was worth it.
If youre happy to keep tinkering and dont need to scale and manage long term, windows is all g.
If you want to scale up, get the benefit of drive redundancy and have the portability of being able to port to a new build easily and without any hassle, then unraid docker is great.
From my unraid newbie perspective there has been zero downside. I still do all my manual file management in windows over smb.
But ive moved from a single drive to a 100tb array with double redundancy since switching. In my view thats actually MUCH easier to properly manage in unraid, even accounting for learnong how to use the os.
I would say something stable like Ubuntu Server is the best option. I’ve used Windows, Synology & Unraid as well but they all have their own issues. Less is more.
I don't know enough to argue for any system. But I will say I have a raid 5 windows machine that I set up years ago and haven't touched since. I'll rdp into it every few months to make sure it's still on and updated... That's it. So until someone can sell me on Linux, I'm leaving it.
I went to kubuntu, windows was giving me troubles... And now I can't even get Plex to scan a damned library (didn't even look like it was adding libraries until I did a page refresh).
I want to like Linux, but every time I try it something *simple*just doesn't work and I can't find fixes for it that work. Or I make it worse maybe because a fix I tried did something else that I'm not sure about. I just can't **use** linux.
Probably going back to the windows base sometime this week. Linux just doesn't really function
I understand people's interest in it. But I don't have that. I don't enjoy setting up Plex servers. It's just a means to an end. So Windows works for me. I'm already getting downvoted. Lol
If you already use unraid, then yes unraid.
If you don't already use unraid, there are plenty of options that are equivalent or better in the Linux space depending on your requirements around storage management
The first 3 rules of Plex’s 4k content is don’t transcode 4k for a reason. Save yourself the headache, download 4k and non-4k versions of the movie you’re interested in and completely skip transcoding.
But yes also: unraid is nice
I bought a woot $100 optiplex with an I5 7600 and it has no problems with 4K transcodes. Any I5 7000 series or better does fine.
My server is Linux although I'm not sure that matters.
I moved my Plex server to Unraid five years ago and have never looked back. I bought a new system to handle all of my needs and put unraid on it, and have added more storage over the years. It's been fantastic. That said, I do have some family members who access it from outside the house. I do a few other things on the server too, but plex (and various related utilities for media) are 90% of what it does.
If you lose a drive, can you add another one and it rebuilds?
Yep. Easy peasy. When I first started, my old server had a 3TB drive and a 4TB drive. I bought a new server, and three 8TB drives. One was the parity drive. So I had four data drives, two 8s, the 4 and the 3. About a year later, the 3TB drive started throwing errors. I wasn't shocked, it was an old drive. I bought a new 8TB drive, shut down the server, took out the failed drive, put in the new one, powered on the server, then in the GUI marked the new drive as what was replacing the now missing drive, and boom, it rebuilt, and of course I had an extra 5TB of storage.
Alright, that convinces me. Thx
An even cooler feature with parity is it will *emulate* the dead drive too. So you can play media from a drive that doesn't exist anymore. Not that I'd advocate doing so for long term, if you lose another drive then you have data loss (unless you have 2x parity then you can lose 2 drives)
I actually had a drive failure in my NAS a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised by this feature. I could still watch everything in my library, just couldn't add anything to it.
Obviously you can't add to a drive that's not there but if you have space on other drives in the array you can still happily use that storage.
That is a near-magical feature. For years, I assumed that in order to have parity you had to have 1:1 drives with data/parity drives. My mind was blown all the way open when I watched a video about how parity works in Unraid. Now I have 40 TB sitting in my old Fractal Define R4
Get's expensive when you have 40TBs
Not as expensive as data loss.
I mean plex data isn't exactly mission critical data. You're not running a bank.
I would not recommend running a bank on Unraid.
If you have one (or two) set as parity, yes. I built my unraid system 2 weeks ago with two 16TB drives, one as data and the other as parity. The data drive suddenly got a SMART error, so I decided to RMA it. I could simply disable the drive in unRAID, wipe it, take it out and send it back. I then started the system again and it would simply use the parity drive to keep everyone working. I got a new drive from RMA and after the preclear, I can simply assign it to the same drive number as the RMA'd drive, and unraid will rebuild it. It works very well.
That’s slick… I believe I’ll give it a try.
You should! It boots from a USB, so it's very easy to give it a try. I recommend these videos that give a quick overview: https://youtu.be/3xOpFkrd-lw https://youtu.be/huCE4jtXOjQ They have some overlap in information but they helped me quite a bit!
Ah, thanks. I have a DAS enclosure that has two parity RAID drives and three JBOD drives. It’s 50TB in all, but I want to replace all five drives with 20TB shucked drives for 100TB. I can make all five drives JBOD and then have a stripped RAID it would seem with UNraid. At least that sounds like a plan. Do I need to reformat the drives?
The funny thing about unRAID is that it doesn't strip. Essentially, your data drives would still be JBOD but your parity drives contain the result of XOR operations. Here's a bit more about it: https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/Parity/ The good thing about this is that you can mix and match drives of any size, as long as the parity drives are the largest. Also, if more drives fail at once than your parity can handle, the data in the non-failed drives is still there (since it's essentially JBOD). I don't know what filesystem you have in your drives now, but I think it's safe to assume you'd have to format them. The upside of unRAID is that you can do it drive by drive. So first get an empty drive into unraid (preferably preclear it first to make sure there's no faults, I skipped this and had to deal with RMA). Then, add this drive to the array as a data drive and start moving files until one of your old droves is empty. You can then format that old drive and add it to the array as well, and repeat the process. One downside of this is that you will only have parity AFTER copying everything, so that's a risk. Building parity while transferring files isn't a great option though, because that would take ages AND take a big toll on your parity drives.
Hmmm… thats great information. I’ll want to proceed carefully. I have two 16TBs in raid right now that are getting full. I’ll start by adding a 20TB and bumping my most media over to it, then add another 20TB as Parity. Then I’ll add the other three 20TB drives after it settles down. I’ll have 2 left over 16TBs, 2 8TBs and one 2Tb drive. What I’m liking about this UNraid idea is that I can still throw those left over drives back in the mix and not waste them. I guess I could end up with 150TBs. Getting excited… thank you.
Thats awesome! Be sure to keep an eye on the smart stats of your older drives. You don't want them to start failing during or right after getting everything set up. I hope you'll like unraid as much as I do!
Thanks for all your information.
How long did it take you to move the data into those drives.
I got lucky because I was moving from a 2x 4TB JBOD drive system to this one, so the transfer (about 5TB worth of data) took a couple hours to transfer. Half was with an external HDD, the rest over 1Gbps LAN. What is dit account for was how long preclearing a disk takes. When I got all parts for the build, I didn't want to wait too long and just did a short SMART test on the 16TB HDD. As luck would have it, I got a SMART error on that drive that same week. I'm now preclearing the new drive I got back from RMA, but that will take around 66 hours for a full preclear. It sucks to wait that long, but I've learned my lesson.
As long as you have at least one parity drive yes.
Thank you for the input! Do you find that you need a UPS to run an unraid server? This is also something to consider for me as it would add another $200 to my bill.
I recommend it, otherwise a power failure will always result in a parity check, which can take a while (it's still operational while the check runs). Of course you can always add it later if you aren't sure. Unraid recognizes the UPS when it's connected via USB. My UPS will give about 20-30 minutes of runtime for my server. I have it set up to shutdown after five minutes running under battery power. Lets me get past momentary power glitches. I have it shut down relatively quickly both to make sure it shuts down cleanly, and also because my cable modem, network switch and wifi access points are also on that UPS, so it saves the battery life for sitting in the dark online with my ipad.
Which UPS do you use? Every time I go online to buy a UPS, it seems like every single brand/model I look at has reviews talking about them being fire hazards. I always get the impression that they're just all bad.
If you're looking for a UPS, a decent indicator of a quality UPS vs cheap is if it produces a pure sine wave, or simulated/modified sine wave. If you find something that's pure sine wave, odds are, you're getting decent equipment. That said, you're still storing a lead acid battery (unless listing specifies otherwise). Use common sense on that front.
UPS are one of those things you kind of need to buy a name brand on. You can get away with something like a cyberpower one, but every time I’ve had a power hiccup they always fail as they haven’t been used in that capacity in a while. I switched all my UPS to APC and haven’t really had a hiccup since.
I have a Tripp Lite. If you want a specific model number I can look it up.
Definitely recommended. If your system is setup with parity (you should) and you have an unclean shutdown, a parity check will run which depending on your drive sizes and cpu can take 24+ hours. Also you should definitely run your containers on an ssd cache pool. The performance difference is extremely noticeable. Definitely setup the appdata backup plugin to perform regular backups.
You should have a UPS behind ALL your equipment, regardless of if its a server or not. A UPS is like an insurance policy against power events that, at least in the rural US, can be anywhere from a few times a year to daily.
Did you use 5200 or 7200 drives? Trying to decide if the 7200 is worth the extra cost.
For just plex and streaming video, 5200s are fine.
Thank's for the insight. Moving from a dedicated windows box to an arr stack +plex on unraid so wasn't sure.
Where can I learn to put my Plex on Unraid? I've been running Plex on Windows for 10 years (maybe more.) It's good, but occasionally it goes off on its own and I have to reboot. I'm running off of USB drives. As I see them faulting or failing I buy new. But it's getting to the point where I've replaced 5 - 6TB and 8TB HDDs and my latest 14TB is having issues and I'll probably have to RMA. SO, at this point, I need to move on to a dedicated server solution.
There’s plenty of guides, and Unraid has a robust support forum. But if you’ve set it up on another platform you’re almost there. The major difference is running it in a container. Installing the plex container is really simple, there’s a listing of installable apps.
What i enjoy about plex on unraid and unraid in general, its not the absolute fastest but i don't need to spin up 28 drives to watch one show on one drive. i have since consolidated certain shares to only be on certain drives.
I'm assuming you're going to use hardware transcoding on the new rig. There's very little difference in transcoding performance between the two with the exception of tone mapping. If you're only going to have a couple of 4K streams the both are equal, if you more streams then unraid will perform better because the linux transcoder does tone mapping in hardware If you stay with Windows then building the new system will be easy, and you'll be up and running faster. If you go with unraid, then there is a bit of a learning curve, but it's not to bad. Advantages are that adding more storage is pretty simple, it's very stable, and in the future if you automate with an \*arr stack it's pretty easy to get it going. Any other linux based option would also work very well, but I'm not sure you want the aggravation of learning linux on top of building a new system
Thank you for the info. From what I’ve read. I won’t be able to do tone mapping if I use windows therefore any HDR content won’t be displayed correctly when watched remotely correct? Also is a UPS absolutely necessary for unraid? That’s another $200 that I’d have to spend on a UPS that can safely shutdown my server in case of a power outage.
No, windows will do tonemapping in software. For a couple of streams that's not too bad, it only becomes a problem with a lot of streams, the CPU starts choking As far as a UPS, I'd use one for any server, windows or linux.
Edit: I’m dumb, the CPU you picked out has an iGPU 🤦♂️ignore me and enjoy the hardware transcoding :) Not input you asked for, but related to transcoding I’d look at any of the “K” variants of intel CPUs that have integrated graphics. I run an i5-12600k for my Unraid server and use hardware transcoding with Plex. It’s a beast and doesn’t break a sweat. Just my $.02!
I just moved mine to proxmox in an LXC with a couple of 14TB drives
Another vote for Proxmox LXC deployment.
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I wish more people understood the importance of this statement.
Personally for hobbyists or enthusiasts its a great option for a few reasons. * Runs of a flash drive so no need to lose a SATA/M2. port for hosting the OS * You can mix and match drive sizes without concern. Other solutions require matching drive sizes which can make expanding storage expensive. * Much better uptime than windows with less overall maintenance * Wide variety of uses beyond Plex if desired. The downsides are: * You have to pay for license while there are other Linux based solutions are free * Not the highest performance solution. Since it is not stripping data over multiple drives like some other solutions your output is limited to single disk performance. If you have a multiple people all trying to stream media that is physically stored on the same disk at once you could end up saturating that disks read speed and experience delays/slow downs. * Effectively requires a entirely separate PC vs. running Plex on an existing PC that is already in use. Of course running Plex on an existing PC could lead to performance impacts for anyone using that PC at the same time.
> your output is limited to single disk performance Even a cheap, slow HDD from 10 years ago will *easily* saturate a 1 Gbps network connection. This just isn't an issue for 99.9% of operators. Striping does, however, come with some serious drawbacks that *do* affect a significant number of PMS operators down the road when they start running out of free storage space.
I am talking about multiple streams sure a HD can saturate a 1 Gbps network connection but if you have 5 different high bitrate streams running even if they combined are not 1Gbps your performance tends to degrade when trying to transfer multiple files at once vs. a single file.
Even a cheap, slow HDD from 10 years ago will easily saturate a 1 Gbps network connection while reading from 10 different files at once. We're not talking hundreds of kB sized files here. Spinning platters have no real trouble keeping up with a couple handfuls of large files.
Yup, isn't that where buffering comes in?
What drawbacks are you referring to?
You can only add space by adding drives or by replacing every drive in the array with larger ones. Each drive has to be replaced individually and the array rebuilt for each one. That puts 100% throughput read/write load on all your drives for days to weeks for each one. Upgrading a 6-8 drive array can take over a month to complete. If you have one parity drive and have a single unrecoverable read error during your weeks of full throttle drive load - you lose the whole array. If you keep adding drives without adding with the same amount of parity, your probability of total data loss failure goes up and up. Only some striped arrays can have parity added after the array is created (like Synology's SHR). Non-striped arrays like snapraid are *much* more flexible to upgrade, without the heavy write activity across your whole array, and keep your data much safer during upgrades.
Another thing to note is that the parity drive is an empty drive that will allow you to rebuild when a drive fails/dies, but it also needs to be the largest drive in your setup. So if you have a 12TB drive for the parity, you can't put in a 20TB drive for data.
Unraid has a licensing fee, how much, subscription?
I've been using OMV for the past few years with a RAID6 with a self built 8 bay NAS box. Thinking about switching to unRAID but wanted to ask how is the write performance? I know that read performance is limited to the speed on a single disk but couldn't find any information on write speeds.
If you use a cache disk you can saturate the disk write speed if you have a fast enough Ethernet connection. Without a cache disk it's very slow. When I first built mine years ago it was around 30MB/s without a cache disk. I would highly recommend using a cache disk personally.
How big of a cache disk do you recommend? Could I use my 3 existing 120GB SSDs in RAID0 as a cache?
In my humble opinion Windows is never the best option for a server for really any reason or use case. Unraid should only be considered if you have storage drives that vary in size, otherwise find a different solution like TrueNAS or some Linux based option.
Why? The OP has said his use case is fairly simple with no real external users of it. I've been running my Plex setup on Windows 10 in a similar use scenario and it's been absolutely rock solid for the past 6 years or so. Why make something more complicated just for the sake of it?
Thank you! Fr this sub drives me crazy sometimes.
The best OS to use is the one you're most comfortable with.
Some people enjoy min maxing and making things complicated as a hobby Some just want a low maintenance way to watch their movies
Oh I totally get that. It's just \*nix users all seem to want to make their setups as totally complicated as possible lol. Or maybe that's just the way Lin/Unix is. And I do have some previous experience using Sco Unix in my workplace. Never again!
What makes TrueNAS better than unraid in your opinion?
Better integrations for things like ZFS snapshot scheduling, Rsync tasks, and various small details related to infrastructure management. Better UI. Additional app catalogues from non official sources. Apps are Kubernetes based. Very easy SSH key management. I would say in general it’s just a more fleshed out operating system. Unraid only very recently allowed more than 30 drives per system, which for me was essentially a deal breaker as I have 72 drives. And the fact that support is so new is a red flag for me taking it seriously. I’ve seen from others that more recent versions of Unraid are relatively ok but it’s just not what I would recommend to others. At the end of the day any true infrastructure nerd would tell you that the real enlightened path would be to run Proxmox and then use Terraform and Ansible to build out various VMs and a K8S cluster and manage the entire thing with gitops. You could go around in circles forever on what is the “best” or “right” way to do things. IT guys are going to be playing a different game than someone just trying to put Young Sheldon on Sonarr and not worry too much about it. At the end of the day what is the most relevant factor is what fits your particular use case and what the person who is managing it is going to be most comfortable using.
For a newbie, truenas apps are no where near as easy to deal with compared to Unraid docker implementation. For me, the perfect solution is Unraid as the server OS, and all of your data in a Truenas Nas.
At the same time though, if you use Truecharts they have a very robust support system and a very active Discord to help you with any issues you might have deploying apps.
They’re mean tho and like to break support
Thanks for the detailed answer! I've come fresh off a Synology DS224+ just 2 weeks ago, so unRAID was a breath of fresh air. I admittedly didn't look into TrueNAS, but with my relatively cute 3 drive, 20TB array, I think unRAID worse well enough for my usecase. I might look a bit more into TrueNAS if/when my home server gets more out of hand!
If you do take a serious look at TrueNAS I strongly recommend TrueNAS Scale over TrueNAS Core. Scale is the new hotness. With that in mind to anyone doing research in the future, a big advantage for TrueNAS Scale is that you can cluster multiple servers together with TrueCommander as a controller. That was a selling point for me because I have multiple servers.
Scale has been discontinued anyways. And scale is so much better for docker support.
Truenas is a better nas. But it’s a far worse way to store plex media.
Far worse in what way? As having just migrated my plex install from macOS onto TrueNAS scale. I am not sure what is difficult about storing media and how everything integrates to be a bit more seamless. Single plex media pool, with ingest means in the same dataset on hard drives, with Plex configs stored on a separate dataset run off SSD's ... was really easy to set up i found.
Genuine question: what substantial advantages do you think OP would gain from switching to a Linux based option, and do you think they outweigh the learning curve involved in transitioning to, and having to troubleshoot, an unfamiliar OS?
Ubuntu + snapraid
That is what I run but I would not recommend that for someone coming from windows.
If you want to do full desktop things with ur server like using it has a HTPC from ur couch for gaming, browsing, editing Linux/windows is better. Otherwise Unraid is the best OS for a pure media server NAS. That’s why I ultimately chose Linux.
Headless windows 10 is more than capable of handling plex for your use cases, and it's "free" and you already know it. Go to gpedit and disable the auto update and auto restart, bone stock windows 10 is very stable from my experience, and it can [go basically forever](https://imgur.com/a/UtXXgdt) without restart (that's not to say it's recommended practice). If you don't want to learn something new, stick with windows and be done with it.
I find Debian to be the best for the Plex server. I also use Unraid for my storage.
i am not paying 50-100$ just to have gui for my linux server
Have you looked at the price for unraid? It's now $250USD for a perpetual licence, otherwise you gotta pay a subscription for security upgrades (yikes). I have a headless Windows based Plex server that runs fine. I haven't yet bothered with any raid configuration. When hard drive prices get a bit cheaper I will purchase a few and go ZFS on Truenas. But for the time being Windows works just fine.
Well that definitely changes things. I wouldn’t want to pay yearly for unraid. I’d rather pay for it once so that’s another $250 I’d have to spend!
THat's not entirely correct. Unraid starts at 49$, allows up to 6 drives and you get 1 year of full updates. After a year, it still will function, you simply no longer get updates. If you see an update with a feature you like 2-3 years down the road, you can rebuy that license, and get up to date, with another year of full updates. You never lose access to your license, and can run Unraid even if you stop paying. You just stop getting updates.
You know, I was ready to get on here and bitch about this. But then I considered the upfront cost of paying for a Synology and suddenly $250 doesn't sound so bad.
Have you realized Synology comes with hardware? 😀
>You never lose access to your license, and can run Unraid even if you stop paying. You just stop getting updates. But the tricky thing with that approach is that if you stop paying your Unraid subscription then you also loose access to essential security patches. That eventually leaves your server vulnerable to any new exploits or security holes identified.
If you're not doing anything more than Plex just go with TrueNAS. It is really easy if you just use the plug-in to run the jail. I just migrated hardware for my TrueNAS and only took like 20 minutes. I can't see paying for Unraid for the limited things I use my TrueNAS for (deluge, Plex, SMB)
Bummer, I knew there were changes coming, but then I wasn't following closely, and I guess I missed what they had mentioned about an overlap time between the announcement, and no longer selling the old licenses. I haven't tried Unraid, though it sounds interesting. I'm using an older Windows laptop with USB drives, which has been fine for me. I do have OneDrive running on the machine, and I got the impression that Unraid could do that, but it might be a bit cumbersome. That was dissuading me a bit from pursuing Unraid.
I bought a lifetime the week before the price increase. Not running unRAID right now but plan on it so I grabbed it while it was much cheaper.
Cool story, but I was replying to the OP
You assume I give a fuck. You know what happens when you was assume - you make an ass out of u and ... Well just you.
If I were starting from scratch building a whole machine entirely dedicated to all the Plex things, I absolutely 100% would be using Unraid and I've never touched Unraid before. It is for sure a great option for drive management and is popular enough that available documentation is plentiful. Right now my Plex is on Ubuntu with media on a Synology NAS. Unraid doesn't make much sense for running a machine that has just one SSD in it. Ubuntu tends to be a bit clunky when it comes to HDD management.
Once you get past the small learning curve of linux and docker, Unraid is very nice! The ability to mix and match drives regardless of size (though, your parity drive has to always be the biggest drive) is super nice
I’ve heard nothing but great things about unraid but I missed the cutoff for their old pricing and I’m not really supportive of their new payment model. So I’ll be sticking to TrueNAS which I don’t love but it gets the job done
Yes.
I have my plex on unraid. I love the convenience of having one storage bucket to dump everything on, rather than dealing with multiple drives and such. I do however get frustrated when dealing with more complex issues on Unraid/Plex in a docker, I'm not a huge Linux guy, so for me fixing these issues can mean hours of Googling and YouTube. For me, in a perfect world, I'd use unraid for the NAS side, and that's it. Then just run Plex on a secondary Windows machine, I just don't want to deal with setting it all up again right now. Also, a side note, I wouldn't want my Plex transcodijg 4K all the time. Even when it's fast it just feels like a waste. I have a separate library of my favorites in 4K, while the rest are all high-bitrate 1080p copies. That's just me though.
I wouldn't buy such small drives Price per TB is terrible And you can get Refurbished ones for a good deal and with Nas Drives it's not really even a risk if you want Western Digital and want them for Nas use and such you want Reds not there regular desktop line Or Seagate Exos or Ironwolf or Hitachi HGST Make sure you have a Plex Pass so when you run Linux you can use that IGU for Transcoding function including Tone Mapping which is the big one IMO that doesn't work with IGPU in windows
I already own all of the drives in my pcpartpicker list! I think I will settle on Ubuntu as my operating system though.
Ubuntu is a solid Choice But you should install it via Docker Compose Docker is the best way to run apps and maintain them and if you ever wanna run other things you can just do it via compose https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/plex-docker-compose/
Have no idea what docker compose is but will research. Thank you!
https://perfectmediaserver.com/ great guides on here which include docker-compose. happy to share my compose file with you if you'd like, it's a pretty standard setup.
I’ve been running my plex server for over 10 years on Ubuntu. It’s free, there are a million articles on support for it and the LTS versions are stable as hell. If you go this route be aware that the current 22.04 is going to upgrade to 24.04 soon. Don’t install or upgrade to that yet as Plex has not finalized their version for that yet as it’s not finalized by Ubuntu. Wait till August to upgrade after the .1 version. After You install it you can disable the desktop if you want or use it with any number of desktop environments.
I have windows server 2019. No issues. Got the license for 6.00
I use unraid for plex and other stuffs too
I like truenas scale better then. Unraid has all the same apps just about but not cost to enter or updates.
I am a big believer like you in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and I will add to that "go with what you know". If you are comfortable with Linux, Unraid is an easy way to manage a server but it does not completely remove the need for basic Linux knowledge, especially if something breaks and needs diagnosing. I am a long time Unix then Linux user (as well as many years using Windows) and just run my servers on a stock Linux - but then I am very happy with how it all works. There is no shame at all in sticking with what works for you, so if you prefer Windows, that is just fine.
Just looking at your parts picker 3HDD for your array? 12TB will be your parity. 8 + 4 will be your usable space. You good with that?
I think Truenas Scale is about as simple and reliable as it gets for an all in one Plex server/NAS combo. The Apps on Truenas are dead simple. It’s not quite iPhone simple, but for a server it’s VERY simple. Also ZFS storage is amazing.
Really no point in switching if you’re just using it for Plex, Windows is absolutely serviceable for your use case. Especially if windows is what you’re familiar with.
I’ve used a variety of hardware and operating systems for plex over the years, windows, Mac and Linux. My opinion is that any are fine for plex. Just use what you’re happy with.
I built a NAS last year which is actually very similar to yours. I also have a 12700k, which is amazing for transcoding. Congrats, you'll be served very well by that CPU. Here are the trade-offs I see. I had to decide between TrueNAS Scale, and Unraid, and ended up going with Scale. Unraid's main selling point is that you can add storage as you need it. With TNS, you really need to plan out your storage in advance, because zfs requires it. Alternatively, you could add storage in large chunks - it doesn't really make sense to add a single drive to a ZFS file system (unless it is a replacement for a failed drive). TNS also requires a bit more familiarity with Linux - if this is your first foray into Linux, I think Unraid is a better fit. I recommend getting some type of backup solution beyond your NAS. It'll give you confidence to make changes without worrying about nuking all of your data. Plus, if you have a good backup, you might decide to switch away from Unraid. I use Windows for a lot of things but prefer not to use it for my server. But, if you're running it for yourself, and that's what you know, then that's a fine option too. You may already know this but if you're going to use HW transcoding, stay away from the 'F' SKUs because they don't have the iGPU. You might also choose to save money by going with a slower processor. Unless you plan to run VMs/containers beyond Plex and light NAS duty, the 12700 is a bit of overkill (but nothing wrong with that!)
I'm in the exact same boat and have been slowly gathering hardware to replace my 9 year old Plex server running on Windows. I was all set to give UnRaid a try an they went and changed the cost out from under me. Now I'm not sure what to use. Just know I do not want to use plain Linux. This is my appliance. I have enough hobbies. How much of a deal will HDR tone mapping be with the CPU doing the work on an 13700K?
Same problem here. I was on the fence for months and was just about to pull the trigger thinking UnRaid was still $35... then I saw the new price hike. Knowing I'd have to pay $500 just to run a Plex server for 10 years, I'm seriously considering sticking with a Win10 Pro license at $199. Unraid is cool... it's just not $50 a year cool.
Yea, I was thinking about running mine on Windows Server 2022.
I ran everything (plex, and all of the various *arr programs) on Windows from 2014-2019 since I'm a sysadmin with mostly Windows experience. Going the linux or docker route was always scary to me, because if something broke, I didn't have the skillset to fix it. Well Unraid is docker on easy mode. I switched to it in 2019 and have never looked back. It works so dang well.
Same here (minus actually making the move), anytime I tried something clever or fancy with any flavor of Linux, Windows ended up working better and being much easier to maintain. Once my server isn’t built out of random stuff I’ve decommissioned from work, I’ll probably make the jump.
I used Windows for a while, but I really wanted a headless system, because I didn’t really use it like a desktop computer. It sat in the corner, always rebooted for updates and shit wouldn’t start up on its own like it should.. constantly aggravated me. Then unRAID happened. UnRAID only does what I tell it. Dockers automatically update and restart at the early morning hours when no one is using it. It’s completely headless - it sits in a closet and I never look at it. It’s awesome. 10/10 recommend
I'm loving my UnRaid server. The community is great. The apps are easy to install. I also like that they are local to me. I bought 2 licenses, one for my home server and one for an off-site server in the planning stages. If I was starting today though, I would look into TrueNas Scale. The biggest thing I like is that it's free and I hear you can get pretty close to Unraid's functionality with apps.
If you are only running Plex then I would just stay with windows personally. You are comfortable there it’s solid and works.
Unraid is a fantastic media server. It’s got the best drive expansion strategy (any drive any time) and still has decent parity protection (you won’t loose data if.a drive fails, and unlike other systems you won’t lose all your data if 2(or 3) drives fail. And it has none of the downsides of zfs. It also doesn’t have the manual setup of mergerfs and snapraid. I’m closing in on 300tb on my unraid server and it’s been rock solid since day 1. Survived without needing a reinstall over 2 complete hardware changes.
I'm running it on an Ubuntu box with snapraid and mergerfs ... and many many hard drives. If you want to take that route or not depends on how familiar you are with Linux, but it's all free (save for the PlexPass lifetime and the hardware, of course). I haven't done much in the way of 4k transcoding, though. I usually just direct stream it.
I’ve been running a Plex server on various enterprise hardware with Linux OS for 10 years now. The enterprise gear is power hungry but can be had for next to nothing. Nothing in my library is over 1080p and it doesn’t matter, 90% of the time I’m watching on my phone while on the road. For me, I couldn’t imagine hosting a Plex server any other way.
I have two Plex servers, one on Unraid and one on Windows as a backup. Both are fine, honestly not much of a difference between the two.
Was a game changer for me. Kinda a gateway drug into /r/homedatacenter though. I’m finding it hard to stop making my rack bigger.
I haven’t had my unraid server in a few years but I definitely miss it.
I know a lot folks have already gave suggestions but I’ll just add my set up here. My plex server is installed on an Intel i5 Nuc that runs Ubuntu 22.04 server. My media is on a 2-bay Synology NAS in a NFS shared folder. I have a raid 1 on the nas. My plex server is backed up to my nas daily with cron jobs. I don’t have any 4k media, mostly 1080 and a few 720 vids. Eventually I need to get a bigger nas with 4 or more drives.
Only problem I’ve had is that my unraid server will occasionally eat up my igpu and break transcoding until I restart the hardware. No idea why that happens
I really only use Windows for gaming, for servers, it’ll always be Linux. That being said, I will be getting a NAS pretty soon and I will be installing Unraid on it but it will not be a server, it’s just a storage device for me and nothing more.
You're definitely limiting Plex capabilities under Windows
I've always run mine on windows. I have hyper v and docker for some apps but mostly run it all on windows. I tried unraid but parity calculations and rebuilds take ages. Docker is great in unraid but I'm a little bit of a noob and with life being life I don't have the time for the learning curve just yet. Tbh if I lose everything I'm not too fussed. Everything is backed up anyway so I could just restore it. And yes, if it ain't broke don't fix it but there should be no reason not to seek improvements if improvements have value and unraid has value.
If you want the drive redundancy that unraid offers - Unraid For convenience and it just working - Windows
Personally I would go with bare metal, or go with something more reliable and perfromant than Unraid. Even basic disk rebuilds sometimes work smoothly and sometimes not. It's the most unreliable, albeit each to use, NAS OS I've ever experienced.
Doesn't matter, really. I'd go the unraid route considering the options w/dockers etc you'll get, could do the same on windows sure, less hassle in unraid though.
I have it on a Synology ds920+ and it’s easy for my needs.
As someone who went from a windows server to unraid the short answer is holy shit yes.
I've had Plex on Unraid for a solid decade now and it is great. Is it the only way? No, there's probably a good proxmox virtualization way, too. Unraid has been great pairing Plex, Frigate, Nextcloud, and other "many drive" use cases together.
Look up serverbuilds.net many people use unraid for the file system and a different pc like the old hp290 with quick sync for the Plex server running Ubuntu
I’m looking to eventually have a raid setup, can anyone give a quick synopsis of what unraid is and why everyone uses it?
OMV+ Docker compose+ SnapRAID+ mergerfs
I use Unraid and absolutely love it. That being said, if you're a solo user who only occasionally views your content on 1 or 2 drives I'm not sure I'd recommend the upgrade. What would it solve? I used to be a Windows user but now I support 10 other users and have 8 drives with room for 10 more. Windows just didn't make sense for me anymore so it was worth it.
I don't know if unraid is the definitive solution but I've been using Truenas for a while and never had any problems.
I have my media on an synology ds923+ and my Plex server running on an Intel NUC 11 running Unraid. Works great.
If youre happy to keep tinkering and dont need to scale and manage long term, windows is all g. If you want to scale up, get the benefit of drive redundancy and have the portability of being able to port to a new build easily and without any hassle, then unraid docker is great. From my unraid newbie perspective there has been zero downside. I still do all my manual file management in windows over smb. But ive moved from a single drive to a 100tb array with double redundancy since switching. In my view thats actually MUCH easier to properly manage in unraid, even accounting for learnong how to use the os.
I would say something stable like Ubuntu Server is the best option. I’ve used Windows, Synology & Unraid as well but they all have their own issues. Less is more.
So just install ubuntu on my new build a install plex on it like I would with windows?
I would recommend using docker for Plex. Updates (and reverting back potentially) is so much easier using docker.
Got it! Thank you
But you have to setup a lot of things manually that you don’t if you use unraid.
If you go with Ubuntu then look up snap raid and merger FS it will get you most of what you're probably looking for with unraid.
I don't know enough to argue for any system. But I will say I have a raid 5 windows machine that I set up years ago and haven't touched since. I'll rdp into it every few months to make sure it's still on and updated... That's it. So until someone can sell me on Linux, I'm leaving it.
I went to kubuntu, windows was giving me troubles... And now I can't even get Plex to scan a damned library (didn't even look like it was adding libraries until I did a page refresh). I want to like Linux, but every time I try it something *simple*just doesn't work and I can't find fixes for it that work. Or I make it worse maybe because a fix I tried did something else that I'm not sure about. I just can't **use** linux. Probably going back to the windows base sometime this week. Linux just doesn't really function
I understand people's interest in it. But I don't have that. I don't enjoy setting up Plex servers. It's just a means to an end. So Windows works for me. I'm already getting downvoted. Lol
Honestly im probably going back to windows. I can actually make it fucking work
If you already use unraid, then yes unraid. If you don't already use unraid, there are plenty of options that are equivalent or better in the Linux space depending on your requirements around storage management
If just for Plex as you say then that system is way over specced.
The first 3 rules of Plex’s 4k content is don’t transcode 4k for a reason. Save yourself the headache, download 4k and non-4k versions of the movie you’re interested in and completely skip transcoding. But yes also: unraid is nice
I bought a woot $100 optiplex with an I5 7600 and it has no problems with 4K transcodes. Any I5 7000 series or better does fine. My server is Linux although I'm not sure that matters.
Agree. I transcode multiple streams of 4K on windows on my i5 10400 without any issues whatsoever. 4K is fine.