My Plex server is nothing more than a Raspberry Pi tied to a SSD.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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I'd love to get mine all on SSDs but 80tb of SSDs gets pretty expensive
With that much data I'd go for standard hard disks too. Probably gets the job done just as well.
I just am getting started. My plex server is very aging gaming PC running while i game lol.
That's how I started, when I upgraded my PC my old PC became a dedicated Plex server running Linux, then the CPU gave up after 8 years (3 years as a 24/7 sever) then bought a PC to run unraid. Its a slippery slope, I started on 16tb of media 6 months ago, I'm now on 24tb...
December 2023 update... Now 30tb
Mine is a NUC running Jellyfin tied to a HDD via USB
+1 for Jellyfin!
I have refurbished off-lease PC running Jellyfin which we connect directly to our TV for easy access to various streaming services as well
Gah I want to switch to Jellyfin but there is no PS5 app.
My way is just a chromecast.
Sadly thats currently the only solution by adding yet another device but for 40/60€ it's not very expensive. I would give it a try
I had to upgrade from that once it started struggling more and more with higher definition content. I ended up upgrading my desktop and using the old parts to build a server machine. The only things I had to buy was a PC case and some hard drives.
Care to share the “how to” with a budding enthusiast who received a RPI4 yesterday?
pimylifeup.com taught me everything
SSD? Check out Mr fancy pants. Mines an old USB 2.0 HDD.
Same except usb stick!
Mine runs as a kubernetes app on my truenas scale NAS.
I just run mine on an old laptop to save energy.
You can get a Mini PC with a modern laptop chip inside it to get the power savings and save some space too. Not only that, but you get the advantage of a potentially more modern chip too. I tried my new setup (Ryzen 5 5560U) with 4K HDR decoding last night and it worked without a hitch.
I thought plex didn't play well with amd gpu encoding. Any tips?
I migrated from Plex to Jellyfin years ago and haven't looked back. It might play better with AMD hardware but I can't say for sure. All I can say is that I spun up a container and it Just Works™
Same for mine, I run jellyfin on an old laptop connected to my NAS for storage.
mine's not quite so glorious 
>make a 3D printed case
>make the motherboard rest on top of the case
better cooling, besides it didn't really need to protect the server.
That looks incredible! what is that cooler? Did you 3D print the case yourself?
I printed full case, but cant fit gigantic cooler inside xD
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4171229
I printed this for my LSI card to mount my fan. Works great!
This thread came at the perfect time. I'm looking to set up my own Media server.
I love the suggestions already posted, does anyone have any more suggestions about which software and hardware to use for this sort of thing? I have an old Macbook 2013 running PopOS that I was thinking about using but I worry it'll have issues being powered up 24/7.
Or, and hear me out here, get an old dell i3, and a couple 6tb hdd to run unraid, with the arr's and plex in dockers. Then decide that's not enough storage, so you get some 8tb drives. Then decide you need some mote space, and you might as well upgrade the chip. Plus you need a GPU to transcode, and the Dell won't support that. So now you've got a fractal Define R5, Asus MOBO, Nvidia GPU, i5, 8 14tb hdd, 2 more 14 tb hdd's for parity, 2 120gb ssd's for cache, and noctua fans to keep the noise down. So what I'm saying is I might have a problem.
I see no problem here. Carry on.
In use an i3 12100 with whatever cheep motherboard from a good brand and 16gb of ram (it would be fine with 8gb, but DDR4 ram is cheep so more the better) if you look at ZFS and a real raid, it gets expensive quick, I use Unraid which is ideal if you have SMR drives and/or different sized HDDs. You can get cheep LSI HBM cards off eBay in IT mode which is perfect to connect HDDs to (my mobo only has 4 sata ports)
That's how I run mine, though I think I may have a 10 or 11 series i3. It idles just under 30W, which isn't too bad, and - though I don't have lots of users - never breaks 40, even during 4k transcodes, thanks to quicksync.