My current Plex Build and Use Of ram Drive Transcoding

Technology Hardware
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Lets start off with my build:

Poweredge R610 - Plex server
Intel X520 DA 10GB, Dual Port SFP+, PCIe-8 NIC
Embedded Broadcom, GB Ethernet NICS with TOE
2x 146GB 15K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
RAID 1 for H700, PERC 6/i, H20 0 or SAS 6/iR Controllers
2x Intel Xeon E5645 2.40GHz, 12M Cache, 5.86 GT/s QPI, 6C
96GB Memory (12x8GB), 1333MHz 2R LV RDIMMs at Std Volt for 2 P, Optimize
Dell 0N743J Perc H800 512MB 6GB/s SAS RAID Controller Card W578J w/Battery

My cost for this was not a thing, my friend’s work had decommissioned it and he gave this and another that is just beastly PowerEdge R610 with the same stats and 256gigs of ram.

This and a little more running Windows 10. I have my Plex server installed on this with the Media on my NAS.

NAS:
Dell PowerEdge R720XD 12 Bay 3.5" (LFF) Server
2x INTEL XEON CPU 6 CORE E5-2620 15M CACHE - 2.00 GHz
128gigs DDR3 ECC memory
Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller H710 512MB
2x 1100W Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply
2x 10GB & 2x 1GB Network card
Dell 0N743J Perc H800 512MB 6GB/s SAS RAID Controller Card W578J w/Battery
12x Seagate Constellation ST33000650SS ES.2 3TB 3.5" 7.2K SAS

My out of pocket for this build what close to $1200 us all parts off eBay but this is beast. I installed Open Media Vault and it’s running stable for 1month straight so far. I spent a little more money than I wanted to because this will be my main NAS and I will be getting the Chenbro NR12000 1U 1x 8m QUAD CORE E3-1220 3.1GHz 8GB RAM NO HDD with 12 8TB for back up and VM’S.

These are connected via the 10gig network. I have created a 20gig ram-drive partition using https://bityl.co/4ZIu and I am transcoding 10+ streams at 1080p with no issues. The server runs great and remains stable.

How does mY build look, you guys?

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Looks good! I think you should get an external Plex transcoder that uses QuickSync. It’ll free up a lot of resources from your main server.

1 Like
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Using a dual-core Zeon with 256gigs of ram and that’s all that server does is my plex server. I am not sure that would be a good expense and use for a true server that has more than enough resources to handle anything that is thrown at it.

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do you have any media that’s VC-1 codec? the ffmpeg software decoder is single threaded, I wonder how those chips with lots of cores but relatively low clock speed do.

does your ram drive ever start to get full when transcoding a bunch of streams at once? Wondering if plex keeps it tidy enough. I know with emby I’ve run out of space on a transcoding drive.

to be honest, it seems like you’d be able to host plex as well on the 720xd. it’s got the storage and the ram and the faster processors already.

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I have a lot of videos and not sure about the encoding. My r720xd is my NAS running Open Media Vault. I only have 36TB of storage right on it.