A Few Questions About Setting Up a Plex Server???

[Diablo2K]

I am currently running Plex on my main PC and I am wanting to build a dedicated Plex Server. I only use it for watching movies/shows on my home TVs streamed from my computer. I want something low power, quiet, and as small as possible. I have no idea where to start because I don't really know what is required.

Can a Raspberry Pi be used as a plex server?
Do I need to have a display always connected to the PC for it to work?
How much CPU and Ram would I need?
Would something like this Beelink Mini PC Work?


I currently have my media on a 1tb 2.5" HDD in a USB enclosure. I know that the HDD is pretty slow I would like to get a larger SSD for future use however I have not had any issues with the current HDD.

 

[LukeTbk]

it depends a lot if you (and you can look to be sure), you do any translation with the server during playback or your device/tv are able to do direct play.... (it simply send the media file to the device that play it itself, versus streaming a video you generate from the file that match the capabiltiy of the player), that change the type of needed device power greatly.

) You do not need a monitor, you can remotly setup the server and manager it
) An old laptop laying around is perfectly fine for this, if you do not need transcoding.
) HDD is perfectly fine for the plex server data file, a movie/tv even in high quality is not much data by second for an hard drive, the OS/plex the application and its metadata database can be on an SSD, for the movie file themselve HDDs is quite common because they are still tend to have the best deal GB per $ and you really do not need much performance. 20 MB per second is a big movie file high quality (over 150 mbps), modern HDD can easily do over 100 MB per second for large continous file read.

 

[pendragon1]

yes
yes, thats the same as #1
no
8
yes

 

[Diablo2K]

yes
yes, thats the same as #1
no
8
yes

Fixed.
Is there somewhere I can go to find out how to setup the server and manage it?

I was just looking at prices of SSDs. Seems like NVME drives are not much more then 2.5 SATA SSDs.

 

[LukeTbk]

Is there somewhere I can go to find out how to setup the server and manage it?

Many, but that one thing an free to gemini type LLM can also help, terminal / bash / linux they will be great at. You can go as slow or fast, they will go step by step, for all question regarding this, for your custom situation and hardware of choice.

You need to make sure what your transcoding need are if you have any (when you play your media on your TV, on your current plex server you can see the status, direct play vs streaming)

That change a lot your need for a plex server, real time transcoding 4k can be quite hard on a small cpu.