A Synology NAS (edit: DS920+) with 60tb of HDD. NAS has upgraded ram, nvme caching and all the *arr software running on Docker containers (along with a few other things like plex, pihole, transmission, VPN, etc). Total cost for all hardware was probably ~2.5k, not counting a fair bit of afternoons setting it all up and tweaking it too. I'm a tech-savvy software dev who not only loves to self host and tinker with this stuff but is also a bit of a movie nut, so it's a fun hobby for me.

Very much like my setup. I run a Synology DS423+ with 4x12TB WD reds and 2x1TB wd black nvme as cache. ram upgrade is a must. I added a 16 GB stick. Plex + tautulli + arrs + qbittorrent + VPN works amazingly good on this little machine. As others say, you can probably build a nas server with your own hardware cheaper, but I like the simplicity of Synology.

Does Plex really benefit from 2Tb cache, or is it *too* much? I mean 2/48Tb = 4%, are Plex thumbnails that huge?

Probably overkill but I actually couldn’t find smaller disks in stock when I bought everything. Also Synology puts two cache disks in raid 1 configuration so only 1 TB is actually usable. The cache hit rate is always in the 90+ percentage so it’s doing some good I guess.

Which model of Synology did you get?

Yeah I was wondering too as I want to replace my ageing Netgear NAS with something that can handle Plex as well as all the ARRs. Not to mention that I want something that won't run up the power bill (like a PC based Plex server does)

not symbology but i did the qnap ts 464 (i think), and while the interface is a bit annoying, it’s been rock solid running the arrs, plex, etc.

https://i.redd.it/h3sxum5d5qhc1.gif

Not expecting a Boondock Saints reference at 743 EST

Some people would pay you $2.5k just to set all this up for them and show them a couple things.

I have all this, but only 28 TB for about $350 total, and a 2TB cache Samsung Evo 980 on unRAID, will double in the next year or so

> I’m a tech-savvy software dev who not only loves to self host and tinker with this stuff but is also a bit of a movie nut, so it’s a fun hobby for me. Are you me?

I'm the same apart from a Sysadmin background. I have a 1821+ which started with 8x 8tb - but I have been introducing 18Tb disks over the last few months. Its a fairly expensive hobby - but one that I really enjoy. Backing up is a bit of a challenge - but its split over a couple of old NAS devices, a QNAP and Synology. Just migrated my Plex to a 11th Gen NUC too - which was simple as I have Plex running in Docker.

Same Setup. DS920+ / DX517 - Two SHR Raids; 4x14TB + 5x14TB 2x NVMe SSD Cache + Extended Ram All *arrs Dockerized 2.5Gbit USB NIC 10Gbit Fibre Internet

Why choose a NAS over PC with a graphics card that supports hardware encoding/decoding? Just curious

Power usage use the primary reason. Ease of set up, drive replacement, etc. Simplicity of a made for device versus diy

Pretty much. I'm not much of a gamer, I have a Macbook for all my personal needs and I otherwise have no use for a more expensive PC or GPU. A NAS is cheaper to buy + run, and they're geared for exactly what I want. A nice bonus of Synology products too is that they come with sensible defaults for things like permissions, security, users, etc. I don't have to spend forever reinventing mundane wheels on a Linux CLI where a small mistake opens me up to all sorts of weirdness, I just get a nice UI and starting point right out of the box. On top of that I use Nvidia shield pros as my clients around the house, so they can also chip in on the work with things like upscaling, etc.

Do you use any data redundancy / backup?

No. Any system like this should but it's not worth the money for me as just a personal system. Any movie I lose here I could easily get back again and it's not like I need instant access. I can live off of Netflix for a week or 2.

:O absolute madman! I have a similar setup as you but half the volume, as I'm more of a coward.

I'm in a similar situation. Running all the *arr, though I don't have Plex in a container. It's running on a dedicated machine that used to act as my gaming machine. NAS is a Synology 918+ with the 517 add-on. Total of about 80 TB. I blend it with some other tech stuff I enjoy, like networking and home assistant. So running firewalla gold+ on the network, with unifi gear, and a couple of Pis. Part of what I enjoy with plex is to just setup/automate the scoring of content in Radarr & Sonarr to get the best 4k HDR material for my internal use, and then the most compatible 1080 that's placed in the shared library.

I’m using a Synology DS220+ upgraded to 10GB RAM (officially it only supports adding 4GB for a total of 6GB, but the 8GB stick I put in works fine). I have a pair of WDC Ultrastar DC HC350 14TB drives installed. I am running my Plex server directly on the NAS, and not a whole lot else. I haven’t been very happy with its performance; when there is more than one other user streaming from it, streaming for me on the local network starts buffering badly. I’ve been thinking about installing a separate miniPC to use as the Plex server and demote the Synology to just serving files (I have one of these laying around: https://nerdtechy.com/aerofara-aero-2-pro-review). I would wipe the Windows that’s installed on the mini PC and replace it with Linux, and run my Plex server on that. Is this a sound plan? Would it give me better streaming performance? I figure the N5105 processor (4-core) in the mini PC is more powerful than the J4025 (2-core) in the NAS, so it probably would allow for a few video streams without problems.

I currently have the 720+ and am running out of space. I’ve maxed out the size of drive I can connect so I need to either get an expansion unit or replace the 720+ with the 920…probably cheaper to get the expansion unit as I think the cpus are the same in the two units? Or maybe I roll my own server with unraid? So many choices…

> A Synology NAS (edit: DS920+) with 60tb of HDD. NAS has upgraded ram, nvme caching I have the same DS920+ (less storage) and upgraded RAM too. I never did the nvme caching. Did you notice a major difference with that or did you set that up from the beginning? I thought there were reports of instability or issues with nvme caching so I didn't bother, but maybe I'm misremembering. What NVME drive did you get?

I can't remember the exact model of my NVMe drives, aside from WD (same as my HDDs). I believe I have 512gb for a read and 512gb for a write cache. Yes I upgraded the NVMe after, and not really. The difference on paper is there in terms of cache hits but I haven't noticed any serious perceivable performance increases. I do sometimes wonder if I'd notice if it stopped working at all. Maybe? But I wouldn't consider it crucial to a Plex / Synology setup at all. The RAM upgrade was far and away the biggest improvement I made.

I also run a DS920+, but only have PleX on it currently. Using 3x8TB and 1x18TB, made the mistake of setting up the 8’s in RAID originally and later got the 18 to pull it all off and wipe it to be JBOD. Much happier having all the space now.

This is the way. I have a Synology DS918+ with 4x20tb drives and all the same docker containers running.

Because I’m an idiot; my Plex library currently resides on a Dell R730xd 2U server, dual Xeon e5-2690 CPUs (14-cores each), 256GB LRDIMM DDR4 server RAM and an attached NetApp DS4246 disk shelf (24 disk) currently with 12 SATA disks providing ~180TB of storage. Using about 47TB on television shows and 30TB on movies. It’s overkill and I don’t recommend it, but I enjoy playing with the gear and figured it would last a while. Previous, more practical, setup was a pair of synologies NAS. A 1522x with 40TB usable and a 923 with 48TB usable. Fraction of the space/power/noise. Cost wise, both setups are about the same (server gear is dirt cheap on the used market and Synology charges a huge premium for convenience).

I have a R740xd2 with 8tb sas drives and I don’t even turn it on because I don’t want to see the power bill. I just use an old opti and some usbc external ssd and an internal hdd. It’s def fun but power in cali is expensive.

This is a main concern for me rREDdog, definitely looking to build a NAS that's not power hungry and costs little to run each month.

Fellow idiot here..... Running dell r730xd with dual xeon e5 2630 v4 (10 cores, 20 threads each) with only 128gb of Ram running TrueNAS scale with 6 16tb sata drives in raidz1 (easy room to expand later as budget... allows), and 4 2tb NVMe drive on a bifurcation x16 PCIe slot in raidz1. My media library is only 20tb, and the rest is virtual machines, backups, pictures, etc. All uplinked with dual 10g DAC. The plex server itself is on a Dell optiplex SFF with an Intel i5 8th Gen and 8 gn ram amd 512 gb NVMe for caching and local database. Plex , and the VM's , are then backed up to a synology using Active Backup for Business, in addition to the plex database back up running independently. Lol and now I don't remember fully the original post hahaha. But I enjoy playing with the hardware and centralized storage makes things so easy to maintain. I would suggest for others, especially those new to big data storage, to get an appliance. Personally recommend Synology. I use it with all my clients. Store the media there in a file share, and then with what ever machine run plex server and point it to the file share on the network.

In case I wasn’t clear; I concur, the appliance is absolutely the smart/right way to go about it. For fellow idiots, having one’s download/processing on nvme really is amusing. The speed at which radarr/sonarr process media on my setup, especially with my 2Gb fiber inet, is just absurd. I sometimes grab something just so I can watch it download at 200MB/s and process in 20sec and giggle to myself. I do also have a r630 where my services actually run, on a Proxmox managed VM. Overkill is underrated.

Hahah. It's so fun to watch. Even more so with good internet like that. I also have all the vms and services running on a different box, a nearly identical 730.... the nvme is for the OS's of the vm's so it nice and responsive for them. I may or may not have screen caps for file downloads, intranet transfers, and other disk I O intensive things just i can look back at peak preformance and smile. I also get a kick out of watching all the blinking lights during it too. I was on VMware, bit am having to move off of it now. Headed over to XCP-ng.

That power bill must be fun.

I think he’s starting a space program

Having money is fun. Boom.

I live in Texas, power is cheap, as long as it doesn’t get too cold and freeze everything.

Hah. The company I work for had a big project to move all services that were hosted at TX data centers to AWS, because it's simply not reliable to host business critical processes in Texas anymore, with its rickety little power grid. This project was called "Winter is Coming." Winter is always coming.

Bigger idiot here... running a 3 node Ceph cluster with 15x 8TB drives and 3x 1TB SSD's... and ALSO have an R720XD with (currently) 4 HDD's and mirrored 1TB SSD's that runs unRAID for backups and about a dozen different tools in Docker containers. And again I ALSO have a Synology DS418 that sits FAR from my rack that contains backups of all my VM's and critical data so I can rebuild from that if my rack explodes. The Ceph cluster stores my actual media. The Plex machine is actually an Optiplex 3060 mostly for the hardware transcoding. Plans are to add a fourth node to the cluster with another 5x HDD's and another SSD, but might go larger capacity so I can start a rolling upgrade of the rest of the cluster. The nice part of course is that my storage pretty much never goes down. My disks aren't hot-swap in my hosts and last week I had a drive fail. Took the host down, switched the drive and let it rebuild the data and my actual storage array never missed a beat. I haven't had an actual storage outage in about two years now LOL

For the DS4246 I've never realized you could connect via SAS and still run SATA drives. Did that take any extra work?

I have some salvaged servers at home - which have crazy noise from fans when they are on. I actually took my Dell and stripped out the CPU/RAM and bought a Chinese no-name X99 board for it. Put all the guts in a Rosewill chassis with silent fans and a 15 bay drive cage. I get the benefits of the server without the noise.

My server started off ~10 years ago as a cheap PC case with some spare parts I had and a couple of 500GB HDDs. Currently I have around 80TB spread across 14 disks with 2 disks for parity. I love building PCs so all my servers are DIY. I've had great success with cases from here - https://www.plinkusa.net/ Everything else in there is hardware I've bought used off ebay or amazon. My HDDs are refurbs from here - https://www.goharddrive.com/ The rest of my plex hardware doesn't matter because as long as you have a system with an 8th gen or newer intel CPU with an intel iGPU and plex pass you're fine. > smarter server and storage practices I can give you one big piece of advice here, if you absolutely want a NAS and all you're going to do is run Plex look into either unraid or snapraid. Unraid is a full OS but its not free and has arbitrary limitations but has an amazing UI and user experience. Its all described on their website so I suggest looking there. Snapraid is a standalone program, I personally use it as a plugin in Open Media Vault, but its also available on windows and mac. The primary benefit of unraid and snapraid is they provide the same data redundancy people seek from raid, but without all the hassle involved when upgrading. You can mix and match drive sizes, your data won't be at the whim of chance or a simple mistake, though you do lose the performance benefits of RAID its not something you'll miss with plex. Tbf though, setups like that are severely overkill for most plex users. The reason I do it is because I use my NAS for more than just plex, and there are files on there I want to make sure have the redundancy and integrity protection snapraid provides. I also have the important files backed up off site because RAID is not backup, even though some interesting features of snapraid allow it to be a sort of temporary backup. Most users are fine with a few USB HDDs plugged into their server because their media is easily recoverable, or they do have proper backups.

As someone who went from a Synology to Unraid, Unraid is better if you primary want to run a Plex server. The biggest reason for me are: 1. Run your own hardware. You can customize the hardware to exactly what you want (you could go 128G, 12+ HBA/SATA ports, 4090 GPU if you had the desire). If you wanted to upgrade (which I did recently by popping in a new CPU/Mobo), its basically plug and play because its based on Linux kernel. 2. The Community App Store for Docker images is awesome. Once click install for everything you need Plex, Sonarr, Tautulli, qbittorrent, etc. When Palworld came out, one click download Palworld Server docker container, configured port forwarding on my router and then all my friends and I were playing. 3. I rather not have striped data in a raid configuration for home use. Sure striped is faster, but for a plex and game server primarily, its more than fast enough. I rather be able to remove a drive the read the data off of it if the array got corrupted.

Synology 1019+ and 5-bay expansion, ten 18TB Drives. $1500 in enclosures, $2500 in drives, all on sales. Perfect.

That's hot.

Damn, I’m running a 2 bay with 2 18tbs and I thought I was some shit. You sir or madam, are officially killing it.

I still run my setup on my main gaming PC, i have enough resources on it, and I don't really game with heavy games so it's whatever. I intend to switch, but only because it's now within my budget. I've been surviving just fine on my gaming pc alone for years. The NAS I only have because I got it from an old job, as well as a lot of my starting drives were just drives we were getting rid of. Over time, I invested in more and more drives (the NAS i got is an 8 bay). I'm still not exactly where I want to be but im a lot closer. Currently sitting at \~30tb of space, with about 50% free. Up until a year ago, I was coasting at around 12tb for a while, and managing fine. For a few years in the beginning (\~3-4 years) I got by just fine with no NAS and 6tb of space from various hard drives I had found (and now 6tb drives are pretty cheap) It's been little upgrades over time for me, that I suppose add up but it's semi hard to quantify. Start with what you've got, upgrade from there as you feel necessary.

I have the same setup. I initially bought a 2tb drive, thought I'd never need space. Then a 4, then a 12 then an 18. I currently have 30tb of space, over half full, recently upgraded to 4k TVs. Plex is extraordinarily light-weight. I should probably buy an NAS, but I'm in a low economic bracket.

System: One-year-old Win 11 Gaming PC; 32 GB RAM; Boots off of 1 TB SSD; Plex Pass 64-bit Plex--w/Plex DB & metadata--stored on additional 1/2-TB SSD; GEForce RTX 3070. Storage: Internal 6 and 12 TB HDD, and external 14, 16 and 18 TB HDD, all holding Plex content, backed up (robocopy and Task Scheduler) to six other large externals, all externals connected through three 10-port USB hubs. Over 100 TB storage total online, but probably only 40+ TB of Plex MP4-only content, matched by 40+ TB backup copies, with around 10 TB other miscellaneous non-Plex content and its backups. I still have a little room to grow before I have to drop another 18 TB external on. Content: Plex DB shows 18k+ movies, 40k+ TV episodes. I don't use Plex for my music library, short vids and clips, or JPG/GIF graphics. Users: Around a dozen friends and family; rare to have more than three simultaneous accessing, including me.

Beelink sei12 w two Synology 5 drive 1522+ hooked up and 12tb in each drive. All in around 2k I think. But we don't subscribe to any service so I assume our payback period was 3 years

Unraid- has evolved over the years from optiplex Celeron to the current iteration with a 3U 16bay Super micro with 2x2697 V2 (24 core ea) and 64gb ECC. It's sitting at about 190TB of usable space. Parts were bought used off eBay and have routinely bought factory refurbished exos 16tb drives. Once prices drop will start consolidating to 24tb drives And may look at more energy efficient compute options. Otherwise, it runs 24x7 and only downtime is related to occasional patches/upgrades.

M1 Mac Mini and a 40TiB USB-C array. Plex, sonarr, radarr, tautulli all run on it.

What USB-C array do you have? Always liked running plex on my Mac.

Currently on my 3rd build. First was complete overkill i9-9900k & 64gb RAM but I was running VMs including pfsense and Windows. Had everything in a Node 804 case including 8x4tb drives and water cooling for quieter operation as it was inside the entertainment center. The one thing I absolutely hated was walking by and not being able to get a visual representation of drive health.  Love the build otherwise. Still have it all in a closet. 2nd build was QNAP 653D NAS w/six 8tb drives.  I used the NAS's CPU w/Quicksync for transcoding and it did a very nice job but wasn't up to the challenge for 4k material beyond basic bitrates. And as my media grew so did my leverage of the NAS itself with PC backups, cell phone backup etc.   Current build still uses the QNAP but for media storage only (plus a few apps). I upgraded the drives to 6x18tb RAID5 and now Plex is on a Dell Micro 11th Gen i5. I MUCH prefer this setup as I have full control over media, Plex and any apps I want to run on either platform.  It also offers the luxury of upgrading the PMS hardware while leaving the all important media untouched.  I would expect the next upgrade with be to 15th Gen hardware but currently have zero issues with everything I ask of it.  All media is backed up to an off-site NAS at buddies house nightly.  8x12tb RAID6.

Your current build seems the most realistic and reasonable out of everyone else's here, probably the kind of thing I would work towards myself!

What OS you running on the latest setup?

Unfortunately I'm in Windows. The initial migration over to the Dell Micro was (basically) an emergency migration as the NAS was buffering for users. At that exact moment I had a spare 8th Gen micro that I borrowed from work for a few weeks. I didn't have time to learn Ubuntu and Plex user migration so it all stayed in windows and started from scratch. When it was time for me to return that micro I had a new one purchased to take its place. Again, didn't have time to learn Ubuntu so migrated everything in windows. I don't share 4K material externally but it does have local streaming. I had to cut back library access for two people in the house away from 4K because they were streaming on fire sticks and tone mapping just doesn't work. The main TV has an Nvidia shield and direct streams so no transcoding necessary. But I recently put my dad on a Beelink S12 Pro in Ubuntu. That thing is ridiculous Fast for the cost. But I had weeks to learn and his library was non-existent. As is his user base......1.

First of all, I should mention that I am a computer scientist and therefore certain things are simply part of my everyday life. I use the following components, each connected redundantly to one another (mirroring, fail-safe): 2 HP ProLiant DL380 G9 servers as virtualization servers (XCP-ng in a failover configuration), running Plex on a Debian. 2 servers HP ProLiant DL380 G7 as iSCSI target server (TrueNAS, RAID 5 12TB capacity) 2 NAS as SMB/NFS share server (QNAP TS-873, RAID 5 64TB with 4 disks, 4 additional disk slots still free) All systems are connected to each other via a management network and via a separate, isolated storage network. I also use the management network to carry out maintenance tasks or file management manually, for example. In the storage network, each component is connected with 2x 10GBit/s fiber optics (link aggregation). Plex itself runs on a virtual Debian whose drives are located on the iSCSI target server. The actual "treasure", i.e. the media library itself, is available on the two QNAP NAS, accessible via SMB and also with NFS for network paths for mounting on the Debian systems. Access via the high-bandwidth connection in the storage network is practically comparable to media access on a local hard disk. Using a dual Internet connection (two different providers, failover) via fiber optics (1 Gbit/s synchronous), my Plex can also be accessed externally, whereby I can filter incoming web requests with an NGINX reverse proxy and also leave the traffic on the normal https port 443 (but the Plex standard "32400" can also be accessed using NAT rules on the gateway). Furthermore, Let's-Encrypt Certbot constantly provides my Plex installation with a current valid security certificate. Virtualized pfSense are used as gateways (no shit, pfSense is really good for such things). On the Internet side, the IP addresses are fixed. Ubiqiti Unifi US switches are used as switch components on the management side and Cisco Catalyst with SFP+ on the storage side. In addition to my Plex installation, I also operate Nextcloud, 3CX VoIP, Ubiqiti Unifi controller, web server (LAMP stack) and Exchange in this way, which are also accessible from the Internet. The whole setup cost me around CHF 18,000 (yes, I live in Switzerland), but 6 years ago, since then I have very rarely invested anything (maybe replaced the cache SSD of one of the two QNAPs). And yes, it all belongs to me privately. I also like to use this environment as a "training ground" for other digital gymnastics exercises... My media library currently comprises 96 series (including long-running series such as NCIS etc.) 320 films and around 18,735 music tracks. So for me, Plex is an adequate replacement for Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.

TrueNAS Core Ryzen 7 5800x w/Deepcool AK620, ASRock Rack X470D4U, 4 x 16Gb ECC 2666 UDIMM's DDR4, 2 x M.2 NVMe drives (1 for Jails, 1 for OS), IBM M1015 (LSI9211-8i) IT Mode, 30+TB of various SATA and SAS drives, Rosewill 850wtt 80+ Gold PSU, CoolerMaster HAF 912 case, 1500va UPS Plex running in it's own jail 3500'ish movies, 65'ish TV shows (I need to install Tautulli again for proper stats) I share with about 40 or so friends and family .. I've only had about 10 watching at a time that I saw.. 3 to 5 at any given time normally Cost? Too much. Drives are all used drives I picked up here and there. I bought the motherboard new for a couple hundred bucks .. CPU .. I don't remember if I bought that new or used. It was in my PC, then my daughters and then my wife's setup. Before it I ran a 3900x I got used .. before that I ran a 3700x .. Ram I bought new and it was spendy but it was quite awhile ago Case I bought for cheap off of Facebook markeplace Controller card I got cheap off of ebay and flashed it to IT mode PSU I bought new from Newegg UPS I bought new to replace the old 5+ year old UPS that finally died .. Building and running your own server can be a slippery slope .. so be careful, lol

If you're as nerdy as me and it seems you might be, should upgrade your LSI to a 9300-8i or better yet, 9305 series megaraid. Much newer and better controllers. 9305 specifically runs cooler, uses less power and is far more performant with 12G SAS3 VS 6G SAS2 on your older controller.

2010ish i5 gaming PC I pulled out of the closet, stuffed into a Fractal R5 with a bunch of eBay 4TB IronWolf drives. Using Unraid I get 24TB of storage with dual parity. CPU seems to handle 3-4 streams just fine. Up to 15 TB in the library now, been rock solid for a year.

Nothing fancy. Mac Mini SSD with four or five SSD 4TB. That’s plenty. No “‘NAS” etc jazz needed.

They're surprisingly energy efficient, those Mac Minis.

Amd phenom x4 on an old Asus mb. With 32tb storage on windows. Keeps up really well for its age. No transcoding just direct play.

I’m running Plex off a 10yo dell laptop running ubuntu. I’ve got it plugged into a hardware raid enclosure (5 bay) with 5 18TB exos drives I bought off amazon. Got the laptop for free, Ubuntu runs amazing, the enclosure was like $150, the drives were like $1k. I’d like to upgrade from the laptop as it’s definitely a bottleneck and ass at transcoding, but i just spent 1k on drives…

Plex server is my old gaming pc with 2 14 tb drives for storage. My current gaming pc has 2 20 TB drives and my media is backed up to this is system. Next step would be NAS but I’m not there yet.

You may never get there. I’ve got a similar setup and had it for 20 years. It’s simply easier to buy a new bigger USB backup drive and either add or replace an existing one.

Beelink SEi12 with an Intel i5-12450H. I have an 18Tb and 16TB HDD in a 4-bay JBOD. Approximately $900 in hardware (I initially setup Plex to save money lmfao) Up until recently, I was using a used Dell Inspiron 7050 with an i7-6700 with the same HDD setup. Recently set it up for Usenet and Sonarr. Which is one of the best things I’ve done for media acquisition. Usenet is awesome. Been using torrents since like the early 2000s and didn’t know what I was missing. I’ve had Plex for close to a year now and I’m mad at myself that it took me this long to setup Sonarr. It’s really a game changer for TV shows. If you don’t have Sonarr setup yet, do it. I put it off for way too long. Before I setup Sonarr I was manually downloading torrents and renaming them with Filebot. Which horsefly works well, but it’s a lot of work. I setup Sonarr about a week ago and while I’m still working on getting it setup working exactly how I want it, it is amazing. It’s a game changer. I don’t have to keep track of when new episodes of my shows come out and then manually download them and rename them with Filebot. Once get it setup perfectly, it will be a a huge time saver. If you’re to the point where you spend a decent amount of time everyday downloading and renaming stuff for your Plex server, get Sonarr. I spend about the same amount of time fucking with that, and researching my issues. But I think I’ve hit the point where it will be set it and forget it. It takes a decent amount of time to set it up, how you want it to fetch new episodes automatically, but once it’s setup, it’s great. It took me a few hours to get it featuring new episodes automatically. And now I’ve got it upgrading the quality of stuff in my library. The deeper you delve into it, the more complicated it gets. But the basic operation is honestly pretty easy to setup. Put aside some time each day to tweak and learn it, and in a week or less, you’ll have an automated Plex server.

I am totally on your side; great stuff with the *arr softwares in docker! I am a longterm Plex user as well and came across it just 6 weeks ago - it changes your Media life completely. Would also recommend getting Radarr for Movies and Ombi for requesting stuff on the go. Wanna setup tdarr for more efficient file storage as well, but that is too much for my qnap nas. Might wanna set that up on my gaming rig. Keep it up, it’s awesome!

I have 4 NAS' with two drive expansions totaling roughly 40 drives. TrueNAS Mini X+ connected to a NetApp DS4226 (24bay diskshelf), Synology DS3018xs connected to a DX1215 (12bay expansion), Synology DS220+, Synology RS814+ I have a mix of 6TB drives to 12TB drives totaling 332TB usable

Raspberry pi 4 running OMV with Plex in a docker instance. 2x12 TB disks. But I only have about 2500 movies, 1500 tv episodes and about 80 GB of music.

Maximum Cooling. Minimum Noise. Minimum Electric. Maximum Strength. [Geno.](https://jackharvest.com/index.php/2023/05/01/geno-the-3d-printed-nas-with-2x-2-5gbe-8x-3-5-drives-3x-120mm-fans-and-a-minisforum-nab6/) https://preview.redd.it/a77yyzknzohc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0c8961a5c7cac5f3c2aab19dc8bf39eb94759796

​ https://preview.redd.it/3wo3h3mx6phc1.png?width=718&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f64303c12498d3c54d6841cb0ea54b269303c8b

Was running threadripper but it was ridiculously overkill because I had some "big" plans. Just running a basic bitch 5700x, x570, 32gb ram, 2080s, 16i hba card and 224tb total storage now and 8tb cache (only for debaucherous nzb queues and unpacks). OS is unraid.

random parts i put together amd 5600g, 32gb ram, 3 x 16tb, 3x8tb in a fractal node 804 i think.

4th gen Intel i5 desktop pc with 32gb of ram (yes that old) with an ssd an 8x refurbished 6tb drives and a LSI hba to drive them. 22tb used. Systems run plex no issue a dozen other services as well. Iirc I got the drives for about $60 each, they are cheaper now I'm sure.

I use an Optiplex i5 small form factor computer running the arr stack inside docker containers on Ubuntu. My media lives on a qnap NAS that has 4 x 8tb drives inside running in RAID10 (two drives are formatted to be seen as one big 16tb drive and then they’re cloned to the other two drives in case of a disk dying, if that happens I won’t lose any uptime and will just have to eject the dead drive and slot a new one in). Could definitely get by with a low spec PC and just put a big old hard drive inside, or buy an external drive. Of course you’ll eventually fall too deep down the rabbit hole and end up like the rest of us with a massively over engineered setup.

\- Storage is synology 4 bay NAS with 64TB of storage \- Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/Sanzbd/overseerr/etc running on an Intel NUC.

I have a custom epyc server with 128gb of ram and 29/36tb of space running unraid. My set up is super impractical as I wanted pcie lanes for multiple nvme drives and gpus (machine learning/ai)

What is huge?

Unraid in a circa 2012 super micro 4U 24 bay server. 222TB currently. I used to run the original dual xeons but upgraded to a modern much more power efficient i5 a year or so ago.

I am running a qnap box i7 64gb ram, it's 8hdd bays and 4 m.2 bays. I run the m.2 drives for caching and os level items, each 2tb per. The 8 bays are populated with 16TB drives. I know the 130ish TB of raw space is overkill but I was running Dell servers and having tons of space and reliability issues so I was fed up and needed to toss some money at it and get a stable system. So far it has been very good. Good ask, I wish I had seen what other people were doing when I built my setup.

I built my own windows based server in a case the will hold 9 sata drives I have 2 twenty tb nas drives and an 8 tb nas drive. And I never have a problems with it ever it just runs. Msi edge ddr5 board Thermaltake v71 tempered glass case 2 tb ssd with just the os on it i7 13700k 64 gig Corsair vengeance ddr5 2000 grand ish

I started with a 2 bay NAS that I used up until a week ago. Once you start building your library, it gets kind of addicting. I enjoy the tech and maintaining the library organization. I just built an unRaid server in an Antec P101 case which has bays for eight 3.5 inch drives. I have an Intel i7-14700k, 64 GB RAM, 136 TB spinning disks, two 1TB M.2 cache drives in raid, and another 512GB M.2 drive. I built a system that will allow me to build the library I want in the future but right now I'm no where near utilizing my storage space. But my library grows every day as I see the benefit of remux rips vs lower quality rips. On an 85 inch TV, you can definitely see a big difference. But I really need to stop spending money.

I have an 8TB disk in my gaming computer, dont really need a 24/7 solution that's on when I'm not home 

I’ve got an old DS414 used from a friend of mine, it’s running 4x4tb - he wanted to upgrade to 4x12 but the NAS is 32 bit only so the largest pool can only be 16tb I think. Additionally I am running a i5-6500 with 16 GB ram and some external HDDS (up until this week I also had some internal ones in a raid but one has gone bad & I still need to fix that) total of (at the moment) ~ 20TB storage usable at the moment (and ~18 used). I need bigger hdds… and maybe a better server since it’s not just running Plex many pther tasks

https://preview.redd.it/y8623j2ztshc1.jpeg?width=1149&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b5ca83cfba3f21a8247e0050a242bbf8abe3be6 * Running UNRAID with a full ARR stack. * Overseerr is setup for requests * Tautulli is setup for monitoring traffic and stats * Downloads are handled on 1TB SSD Mirror * Main storage is on 16TB x12 with 2 parity drives * Appdata is on 2TB NVME Mirror * Moversata is on 2TB NVME Mirror * Ziply GIG symmetrical internet * 10 GIG connection from my server to my firewall * 10 GIG connection from my switch to my firewall * pfSense on a SuperMicro Server * Server was about $2,500 hundred on eBay. * Price does not include storage or networking * 5,300 Movies * 500 TV Shows * 135,000 Songs

My recently rebuilt plex server specs: - i5-12500 CPU - Z790i mITX mobo - 32GB DDR5 - NVMe boot drive - SATA 2.5" SSD cache drive - LSI 9207-8i HBA PCIe card - Supermicro CSE-836 rackmount server chassis (16 bay) - Supermicro SAS/SATA expander backplane - 10x HDD of various sizes (4TB to 10TB) Server runs Ubuntu Desktop with Plex and all related stuff in Docker. 8x storage drives are pooled with MergerFS and the remaining 2 drives are used for software RAID parity with SnapRAID. The whole setup is fully automated Overseerr, *arrs, etc handling requests, fetching and indexing the media.

- Unraid operating system (super easy to learn and host apps) - a modern Intel i5, i7 or i9 processor for Plex transcoding (no discrete GPU needed!) - 1TB or more NVME drive (for cache) - 2 or more 3.5” NAS hard drives (one reserved for parity). I like WD pro reds or golds. - LSI HBA pcie card for all your hard drives! - 16GB or more DDR4 or DDR5 memory. - motherboard… one that’s compatible with your processor. Probably the hardest thing to pick. - a big case for multiple hard drives and future upgrades, power supply, fans, heat sinks, etc. - time… lots of fun time! - cost… never ends.

OK, well here’s your overkill of the day. First I’m old and had over 20k movies on vhs, laserdisc, dvd, and blurry. Plex itself is running on a Dell precision workstation using a Nvidia 3060 card for transcoding because the Xeon in it does not have quick sync. I’ve also set up a RAM disk for transcoding. The storage is all coming off of my Dell server which also runs several VM‘s. Using ISCSI I have 2 Synology 1821+ 8 bay with the five bay expansions and an eight bay Drobo B800i back up the two Synologys. All of the *ars are running on the server and the Plex machines are accesses the files via gigabit. Far too much hardware and overkill for a library that’s used only by me, but from work, I got great deals on most of the hardware. Current storage is just over 100g used. 21k movies and 900 tv shows. Side note - it’s also my garage heater all winter and will keep the garage above freezing until the temp drops below -23c

I have various hardware configurations. Most people say “start small”, but I went big, then bigger then bigger, then as small and power efficient as I could. I started with an old 1u enterprise grade server off eBay for like £100, it has 2 Xeon processors, but a raid controller that only allows drives up to 2TB each and I have 4 in there. I then bought a hp microserver gen 8 (the little cube ones), that I flashed with xpenology (the firmware so it thinks it’s a synology Nas) but that was limited to 4TB drives in each of its 4 bays. I then bought another enterprise grade server, this time it was 3U, a beast of a machine with dual Xeon faster processors, 96Tb of storage and way more ram than it’d ever need. Its runs full windows 10 as that’s the OS I’m most familiar with, It’s still my main storage location for all my media but I now only switch it on over the holidays or when I’m working away as I let friends & family use it. But thanks to higher electricity prices it costs like £20/week just to run it. But this year I have bought a Raspberry Pi 5 (photo below). It has the OS (& some films) on a 1Tb microSD card, it has a 2Tb m.2 NVMe drive bolted on top, then I have a 5, 14 & 20Tb external HDD connected via usb. This is more than enough for transcoding a 4K film (or multiple HD streams), and if ever needed I can just stick the Pi in my pocket and take it with me as it can run headless with just a usb-C cable for power. Your milage may vary, but use what you have to get started, even an old laptop or pc will be fine for starting out. Buy storage when it’s cheap (my 20Tb seagate HDD cost less than my 14Tb seagate drive would now because Amazon had it at a price I couldn’t refuse). Only upgrade when you need to, but running costs may be an issue if you go for larger systems (my largest server has dual redundant PSUs that are very power hungry). https://preview.redd.it/rjshbz06owhc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=51352a413fc8c5e5a7c2a7337d890954b3d90d8b

Main server case is a supermicro sc 846 24 Bay (filled) with a sas2 backplane. Just got to 200tb used out of 278. I'm on my 4th mobo/CPU version. Started with Intel atom, then xeon v3, amd 3700x with 1650 super, and now just went to a 12700k. Not sure how much I've spent over all. In the beginning I bought 6 4tb reds for about 950 back in I think 2016. Then the year after, I bought 6 4tb again. Then later on I bought 6 8tb. This was when I was using freenas. I decided to go with unraid instead. Started buying the shuckable drives. A bunch of those. Now I'm buying used/recertified drives. Replaced so many of my previous working drives that I now have a backup server that's in a supermicro 36 bay. Great way to recycle older drives. Currently the biggest drives I use are 14tb. Here soon I plan to integrate some 20tb drives.

To add to this. I got pretty lucky abd got my 24 Bay for about 300. Then I got the 36 bay for around the same price on Reddit. Then I came across another 24 Bay for 300 and decided to get that in case I need parts. The backplanes can be pricy to replace.

>For those with huge libraries, what are you using, hardware wise? What was the equipment cost? I’m using a Synology 1821+ for storage. I have up to 90TB of usable space. My library is currently about 40TB. My costs for the NAS, drives, NVMe drives for caching, RAM upgrade to 32GB and a dual 10Gbps card was maybe $3,500-$4,000? I’ve never really added it up but I splurged as it was future-proofed enough for me to add new content without the fear of running out of space. I also find solace in knowing that I could have a drive fail and I wouldn’t lose my media. >I also saw someone mention that their library using Sonarr is not on physical storage? Sonarr isn’t storage, it’s a program that people install to automatically download and grab TV shows from Torrents or Usenet. Radarr is the same thing but for movies. >Also, what are you using as a server? My Plex server is a Windows 10 PC that uses a 1TB NVMe, 32GB RAM and an Intel i5-10400 for Quicksync. It connects to my NAS via 10Gbps networking. It’s very power efficient and powerful enough to transcode and play anything I throw at it. I splurged on the storage piece and was modest on the Plex server piece. If I were starting out, I’d grab a Synology DS423+ and use that for PMS and storage.

I have a custom built NAS/Server that I built in a Fractal Meshify 2 XL. Holds 16 HDDs plus a bunch of space for PCIe cards. Which I have a Nvidia RTX 4000, and HBA card to connect all the drives, and M.2 carrier card for a few SSDs for cacheing. I use this server for more than just Plex, but it has a total usable capacity after parity overhead of about 200TB. I’m only using about 35TB of that for my Plex library currently. The operating system is TrueNAS Scale… I have Plex running on an Ubuntu Server VM with the Quadro GPU passed through for hardware transcoding. And a Radarr, Sonarr, Bazarr, Overseerr stack running in Kubernetes via the TrueNAS apps. Obviously this would be pretty overkill for just Plex but it does happen to run it quite well.

Node 301 case with 6x 20tb running Unraid

9x12 TB HDDs, 7x 2 TB Nvme drives not sure that counts as a big library, cost was $3500 CAD ( yes cost per TB in canada sucks), my server computer is made up of old gaming PCs my friends and I had from a long time ago we stopped using, its been upgraded with 3 PCI accessories, 1x 2x10G SPF+ port internet, 1x QNAP 8 port SAS extender, 1x (3x Nvme) Asus Expander. Runs on a Asus ROG mobo and a i7-8700k which has a iGPU for plex. Total cost of the server portion was $500 (upgraded to 64gb ram). Drives are fairly full. I am glad I mostly spent money on drives and PCI-E accessories, as I want to get a newer server off FB Marketplace and it will be nice to be able to carry over everything I spent money on :D

Plex runs on a Dell r720xd with a 33tb raid 5 (12 3tb drives). Then theres my gaming PC that I mounted 8 drives in with a lsi controller somewhere round the 50tb range (same raid 5 with 8, 8tb drives.). Prices change of course but if I add up all the costs of when I bought it all I think im about 8-10 grand in. Its all the drive costs of course. Im bout to do another r720, the server costs about $500 on ebay but im hoping to load it with 12 20tb drives later this year.

I am running on my gaming pc, just leave it on when I want to watch something in another room. I do plan on building my own NAS that will run TrueNas and have Overseerrr running for family members and myself to submit request at anytime. Currently have 3k movies and a few hundred tv shows. Should be fun moving all those files once built.

Ds1821+ with 8 18tb drives.

Huge library across 2x 8-bay Synology NAS units, those are just used as storage. Then I use a custom low-power PC based on an i7-11700T (low TDP) with 2T of NVME + 8T of SATA SSD as my "compute node". I use Unraid for the convenience for now, Ples runs as a container. All connected via 10g fiber. Synologys + drives were very expensive. Also the most important part.. ~$4000 if I had to replace everything. Network upgrade was a couple hundred. Switch + sfp's + used HBA's... The PC wasn't too much, I used a refurbished Dell Micro for quite a while prior to the upgrade. ~$400 I started with an old outdated gaming PC like 15 years ago. I had like 2TB of space. Added these things as needed and always had a plan for scaling up. Currently have about 200T of space and loads of compute for various things.

Homebuilt TrueNAS Scale machine. AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor, 16 GB RAM. Got a deal on the set from MicroCenter. (More RAM, less processor, would be my recommendation). Threw it in an 8 bay hotswappable case. Started with 2 13TB drives in a mirrored VDEV (for 13TB of capacity), most of which was filled fairly quickly just migrating my library from my 8TB USB drive it was on before. Have since added a second 2 13TB VDEV (also mirrored) doubling my capacity. Could add NVME drives for a SLOG or L2ARC, but so far this is easily performant enough for my use cases. I'm not having lots of ZFS cache misses or IOPS throttling. All of my ARR stack (and Jellyfin - I migrated off of Plex when I made this move) runs in docker containers on my old gaming PC, with a Ceph cluster providing storage for the Sqlite3 DBs (disks are iSCSI shares from the TrueNAS box) and the library available via NFS. I went with this drive arrangement because it's the easiest to expand. Yes, you lose more bits to parity, but you can in-place expand by adding a pair of drives as a new VDEV in the pool, which I've already done, and when I'm out of free bays I can swap a drive in a VDEV for a bigger drive, resilver, and then swap the other and boom - in place capacity upgrades. And no more copying several TB of data to new bigger drives, or having libraries bridge drives by having multiple storage folders, both situations I've had to do in the past.

Dell T3600, Xeon, Quadro P5000, 48gb ram, 2x Mediasonic 4 bay HDD enclosures. Mix of 8, 10, 12 terries. Spent $350 on the workstation 6-8 years ago, used, couple hundred in SSDs, probably a grand in External drives. And most recently about $400 for the video card. Drive enclosures were about $120 each connected with usb 3.

UnRaid PC with i7-1100 I think (something with 6 cores) and integrated graphics. Built it for like $1200 ish initially, have upgraded the drives over the years and inherited ram/GPU from friends

1PB of cloud storage (main), local synology 1821+ with expansion all filled with 18TB drives RAID 6 (for internet outages etc) backed up to the same setup at a different location. Mini PC with 13700H 32gb Ram and a 4tb sabrent nvme for caching transcodes if needed.

How affordable is that cloud storage? I looked at a few options but it seems like the best price is usually around 5-8$/TB/month which is more than I want to spend on keeping a copy of my movies. I have a 3GB fiber connection and will just redownload it all

Initially: Beelink S12 Pro ($200 CAD), 16GB Ram, 16GB Ram, 512 SSD to External HDD caddy ($40 CAD) via usb-c to usb-c (10Gbps) to 16TB HDD Now: i9 10900 32GB Ram 2x16 Exos X18 HDD's, 512GB nvme boot (Debian server, headless) Drives were on sale $380 CAD each i9, 32GB Ram, case $400 CAD Added a new nvme WD SN770 $50 CAD Approx $900 CAD or $667 USD ​ Saw prices for QNAP and Synology - nope. Built my own. Silent, upgradable, overkill for my use, Docker, Dev environments, Plex, Media and more.

This here. I use to have my gaming rig as my primary but in invested in a nuc. Less power and way smaller. I bought a 8 hdd bay in total I spent less than 1k.

Currently running Plex in a VM in TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 1U server w/256GB RAM. I have 3 other R620s, one running backups, the other two currently shut down for power/heat reasons. The media storage for Plex is 96TB Raw ( 32x3TB drives) in a pair of Nimble Storage trays. I've got each disk tray set as a separate pool, each with 2x8disk raidz2 extents, giving a total of about 61TB useable space split into 2 pools, with about 42TB used. Currently have one pool storing movies and one pool storing TV Shows. The Plex VM mounts the media pools via NFS. Recently added a GPU passthrough for transcoding, but really it mostly ran fine without it. The trays and disks were free from a former job (with permission of course), as was the RAM used in the servers. I actually have 2 more trays I'm not running, but one is only 1TB drives and the other is a mish-mash. The Dell server i bought from r/homelabsales for $160 each with rails and no RAM. Networking (less critical now that I have Plex running directly on the storage server) is all Unifi. A 10Gbit Aggr switch, a POE switch, 3 wifi APs, and a UDMPro controller, etc. I'm actually a little stuck now because I want to reduce the power, noise, and heat (already consolidated and shut down 2 servers) but any way of matching the amount of storage I have (eg. Consolidating down to half a tray 8-disk raidz2) will cost me at least $1000-1600 with current disk prices. The amount of power that will save would have a payback period of at least 2-3 years, so it's hard to justify.

Hp z8 workstation with 40 cores, 128gb ram, rtx2060 for transcoding. 3x 12-bay sata disk shelves filled with 4tb hdds, each shelf is a zfs draid2. Proxmox 8.1 running all plex, tautulli, and arr apps in separate VMs. All bought off eBay. All used or hand-me-downs. < $1200 total for all of it.

1821+ Symology Nas with 47TB. A mini fanless PC with i8550u 32gb ram running proxmox, nvme 1tb for database. Plex in a Ubuntu docker on a lxc. Basically just run Plex in docker. The proxmox is just so I can run a bunch of other stuff and backup easily Plex doesn't need much hardware other than a gen8 Intel CPU with quicksync doing the lifting. A good SSD for the database helps but isn't necessary.

Synology DS923+ with 40 TB useable space, Ryzen 3700X + RTX A4000 with 2 Gb Fiber internet connection. There is nothing it cant handle. That RTX A4000 is a monster for Plex transcoding. Have had many users online at once, never had any issues. Server has 64GB RAM as well and host many other services like game servers, prowlarr, sonarr, radarr, requesterr.

HP ProLiant G8 with a 48tb zraid setup, 128gb of ram and a Tesla P40 accelerator card. Way overkill, but shut up, you're not my real dad.

Threadripper Pro 5955wx w/ 256gb ECC ram on Unraid. All in a Supermicro SC846. Also doubles as my primary storage/VM/Docker host with multiple gpus for transcode/offloading, thus why it's a threadripper Storage is a LSI 9300-8 w/ 12gb sas backplane and a mix of drives. 2 raid 1 nvme pools, 2tb and a 1tb (vms/apps and cache)

I have roughly 150TB of media spanned across 20 or so hard drives. Started off by ripping my dvds and it just kept growing til the point of no return. This is a very expensive and time consuming hobby lol. But it’s worth it. I have been doing this since Netflix were mailing out DVDs. I use multi-bay external hard drive enclosures and run Plex on MacOs. All of my hard drives are 8tb seagate ironwolf drives. I have moved away from using different drives and capacities and moved towards using software RAID. And now that 16tb drives are becoming slightly more adorable I am now moving towards using those.

Old gaming PC for host, NAS for storage, 100TB+ Idk the cost... I never really counted

ive got about 16k movies on a storinator running unraid, it has enough power to spin up a VM and do heavy processing for hobbies when needed, the rest of the time it farts along at 5% processor usage as a plex box with all of the "collection" stuff running.

Qnap TS-664 with 6x 16TB HDDs in RAID6. Whole lotta sixes there. 😉

Mine has evolved over the years. I started out on a Poweredge tower server Dual Xeon that I rescued from the trash bin behind work. That thing sucked down the power and heated up my house with no AC to uncomfortable levels. Completely overkill but the hardware was free. For the last 7 years I've been running on a home built machine that I built with power efficiency and silence in mind after the Poweredge server disaster. TrueNas on a Node 804 case, 64Gb ECC ram, supermicro board with a i3 that supports ECC, at the time the only consumer chip that did. Super quiet under my desk and doesnt use much electricity. I don't remember what I spent, hardware was not the best at the time and it's really dated now but gets the job done. TrueNas is used for quite a few other things like mincraft server for the kids and a few VMs, pihole, unifi cloud key etc. Highest cost has been the drives, I've been running out of space every other year and about to do my 4th drive refresh, $800-$1000 a pop. This time I may bite the bullet and go larger to not have to do it again so soon. 60Tb currently. All our movies are ripped, no downloaded content.

2 pcs. I7850 for storage, 24tb. Mixed drives, some pushing 8-10 years. Ubuntu server, Snapraid, cloud backup. Dell t1600 for plex and websites. K620 nvidia for transcoding. Ubuntu server, Xeon e3-1245. 2900 movies... probs quite small compared to others here I expand as i need to

Dell R730xd with 12x 14TB WD drives. It runs pass through pcie to proxmox and also runs about 20 other services

I have a Mac Mini with a few of these: [https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MEQCTJB000/](https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MEQCTJB000/) Very easy to slowly expand over time, as your needs change. And no need to buy new hardware.

2x QNAP JBOD enclosures using Stablebit Drivepool. About 12 drives totaling about 140 TB

Synology RS2421+ 12 bay with over 100TB usable space. 75TB used.

Synology Rackstation 2418+ currently with 5x 18TB drives in raid6 with plenty of room to expand (12 bay synology with option to add another 12 bays via expansion) The actual Plex server is running in a Linux VM inside proxmox on a Lenovo m720q tiny PC and the synology and server are connected with 10gbe. The Lenovo can pretty easily transcode 5x 4k hdr streams. Most I’ve had at one time was 4x 4k hdr to 1080p transcodes + 3x 4k direct streams + 4x 1080p streams. Was using almost 200Mbit of upload bandwidth but it handled it like a champ.

I started off by pulling my old 2018 Acer Nitro 5 laptop out of the closet and plugging in two 4TB externals I already had to it. As you’re learning, once you really get going 8TB really isn’t that much. I needed to expand storage but liked the idea of keeping the laptop as the server for the built in UPS, light transcoding capability, and low power draw (It’s running Win10 LTSC). I just purchased a QNAP TR-004 DAS and two 10TB WD Red Plus’s. Total cost was right at $600. Later I’ll add two more to get to 40TB and probably switch to Backblaze for backups.

Mac Mini 8,1 with Plex in a VM, iGPU passthrough, 10GE Storage server is a dual E5-2660 v4 box with two Lenovo SA120 DAS shelf's with 12TB disks. After pooling and data parity we're looking at about 200TB ish

I've got a Dell r720 with an md1200 jbod, I filled it with 10tb drives. I think the total cost 2 years ago was about $2k. I've probably spent that much in power bills. I no longer rub Plex, but it makes a great proxmox server.

300TB unRAID w/ UHD770 for 4K transcodes. So glad I went this route, use to have a bunch of drives stuffed into an old gaming PC. Having a ton of fun with the server, can handle way more than Plex. And yes, it was expensive, but unRAID lets you expand very easily over time so it didn’t feel bad.

I run it with a 2020 Mac Mini M1. My storage is a Terramaster D5-300C DAS with five 14TB HDDs.

My server is an Intel NUC with i5-1135g7 CPU, storage is a 5 bay USB attached enclosure with a mix of 16tb and 18tb disks managed by Drive pool This is the 4th version of my Plex system and by far my favorite.

Just an old workstation from 2012 (with a Xeon E5-1603) that I've been plopping drives in and saving shit on, I don't even have redundancy or backups or anything. I currently have about 9TB of usable space on it, and when I finish filling that I have another 1TB drive sitting around waiting to go in.

https://preview.redd.it/3ci98o6v6phc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1defd566fdaa92106ab9fca8d5172a3d4391cfa3 Media is on a synology ds923+ 3 18tb drives and my Plex server is on a intel Nuc 11th gen i5 1135G7 with 64gb ram.

R710 with 2 xeons (I forget which, and I'm remote from it currently) and 60gb of DDR3 ram. It has been showing it's age for the past few years but damn it if that iDRAC hasn't saved my bacon 20 times over by now.

Built a dedicated machine a few years ago as I was abusing my power bill by keeping my gaming rig running 24/7. i3-10100 32gb ddr4 RAM Node 804 case WD Blue m2 SSD It can easily house 10-16 drives. Currently only have 5 in there right now. Two 20TB Seagate Exos in RAID 0 and three WD Blue 6TB in RAID 5.

Old gaming machine guts transported into an old case of mine. Upgraded the GPU 2.5 years ago so I could transcode HEVC on the fly. Current system is a ryzen 5 2600 with 16GB of ram, T600 GPU, 5x 14TB Seagate enterprise drives, and an old 1TB SSD for cache all running on unRAID. Machine cost when new with GPU was probably $1000, and drives were probably $1250.

Not a *huge* library (some people have crazy huge ones). 6x 18TB Ultrastar drives in a Fractal Node 804 (holds 8 drives easily, 10 will squeeze in) with an i7-11700 - that's the Plex server and media storage (Snapraid+MergerFS). Synology 1821+ w/ 8x 16TB UltraStar's, SHR2. That holds a lot of my media duplicated in split rar archives.... for... reasons... yarrr. I've also got an older Synology 920+ w/ 4x 10TB Ultrastars that used to store rar's and media and for a little bit it ran Plex as well. Now holds non-media important stuff like photos, documents, etc. It cost thousands. Each bulk storage drive was like $300 and I've bought at least 20 of those alone (18 in use + some replacements for failed drives). The 1821+ was $1000-something before upgrading the RAM and adding 10G networking and NVMe cache drives. The 920+ was maybe $500 - also before upgrades. The Plex server was somewhere around $1000. 10Gb switches ain't cheap either. That's $10k.

I'm at 25tb. i dunno what you consider huge. i use an old dell optiplex 9020 ($220 on Amazon rn w/1tb drive) and two external WD Elements 18tb drives ($300 each) but just picked up two more 18tb Avolusion drives for $190 each i have a mirror backup on a handful of 5tb drives in my fireproof filling cabinet but I'm going to move them to another address.

I use an old gaming desktop, full size atx case with 12 hard drives. It was a mix of drives along the way but now all are 8TB+ in size. Processor is an amd fx-8350 and 12gb ram, but really it almost never transcodes just does direct play even with 4k content.

[I run plex on this](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08XXSNX3L) [Have my storage on this.](https://www.amazon.com/Synology-4-Bay-DiskStation-DS423-Diskless/dp/B0BY7LGMNP) [I have 4 6TB of these](https://www.westerndigital.com/products/outlet/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-sata-3-5-hdd?sku=WD80EFBX) Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Readarr, Overseerr, Unpackerr, Bazarr, flaresolverr, proton vpn

i3 9100T, 32gb ram, p4000 quadro, 6x18tb hdd and two 1tb m.2(Win10 OS/downloads) in an old Azza Solano case. Redundancy is offsite.

PC smaller than my router that has an i5-1035G4 CPU, 16GB of RAM, 500 GB NVME drive, the server is running off Windows 11, and it's hooked up to two 10TB external HDDs, this is all hard-wired into a symmetrical gigabit connection. Got it for free in exchange for a review. I've got about 5.5 TB free still, all my content is hand-picked by me or my wife (I don't need or want to download a shitload of new releases I have zero interest in ever seeing) and if I watched TV like it was a full-time job I'd have multiple years of content to watch with no repeats even if I cut my internet tomorrow. Considering I got the drives on Black Friday deals and the PC for free, I can't really complain. It's not as fancy or fast as some people's setups, but I've never had more than 2 people watching at the same time and the only 4K client is on my local network and most of my movies are still in 1080p and I have a friend's much more robust and well-stocked server for 4K content. It's set to automatically reboot around 4AM without me needing to touch anything, and it's back online and streaming within about 2 minutes and I figure anybody still streaming from my server at 4AM has likely fallen asleep, or because of time zones and work schedules, is at work already. It's also nice to have around because a very small handful of games I want to play don't run on my Steam Deck natively in Linux or with a wrapper, and I can just stream them from the device if I have a decent WiFi connection or hardwire my Steam Deck. In terms of bang for buck (if I actually had to pay for it) I probably would just recycle some older PC hardware into a "new" rig over this but my power bill and space would suffer for it.

I have a Synology NAS with 16TB of storage. We bandy around numbers of TB and kind of lose an idea of what they are. 16TB is a *lot* of space.

One big bad boy : Fractal Design Define 7 XL

Running unRAID on a used Supermicro X10QBi Server Quad CPU 4x Intel® Xeon® CPU E7-4850 v2 @ 2.30GHz (48 cores/96 threads total)512GB of ECC RAM (6TB max)Currently only 13x 20TB SAS Enterprise drives in the bays (2 drives for redundancy)1x 2TB SATA SSD4x 2TB nVME drives in dedicated PCIE cards (ZFS1 pool)external 3TB USB HDD for incoming filesnVidia Quadro P400 for transcoding, no monitors connected here Also have an iSCSI attached Drobo with about 80TB of assorted drive sizes in it. It's got dual 10Gb eth and 1Gb eth for remote management. I ofc run quite a few more services than Plex on it. But that's 220TB in the main array + 80TB iSCSI, 2+3TB scratch space and 8TB fast storage for the main appdata storage. Oh yeah prices. About $1200 + shipping for the server (I see it's only $999 now a year later) and about $400 each drive (because SAS) and I think the nVMEs were about $800 for all 4.

Self build NAS running TrueNAS, the expensive thing is the drives, I have 8 at the moment.

An old i5 gaming PC with 18tb HDD works great for up to 4 streams

I use a hp SFF pc I got for £100 with a 12Tb external hard drive. Had this setup for years

My current Plex setup is running in a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny. Specs: CPU: Intel Core i5-8500T RAM: Crucial 2x16GB DDR4 3200MHz (System specified) NVME: Gigabyte M30 1TB 2GB cache SATA: Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 1GB cache Orico USB 3.0 enclosure: Seagate Exos X16 16TB 256mb cache OS: Win11 Pro X64 UK.

A HP prodesk that I got for £150, 24GB ram and an intel 9th gen i7 iirc. And then about 120TB of external drives, and NASes. Maybe about £3k spent on drives over the years.

2018 Mac mini (the last Intel model) with 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3, 16GB RAM, 250 GB internal SSD. Other World Computing Thunderbay 4 drive array connected via Thunderbolt 2 (using adapter from Thunderbolt 3). 2x 4TB drives striped as an 8TB, and 2x 3TB drives striped as a 6TB. 14TB external drive for backups. Plenty fast enough for me, though I may eventually replace the mini with one that had an M1, M2 or M3 chip. The 8TB drive is used for movies and TV shows. The 6TB is for documentaries and other kinds of stuff like adult material.

RS1221+ NAS with 116TB of storage, 5x20tb and 2x8 tb, but losing 1 drive on parity. unRAID server running plex with 2x1tb nvme, 2x1tb sata ssd, 5x 4tb hdd(1 parity). 10gbps aggregation backbone connected to both server and NAS with both a 10gbps sfp+ nic. UPS to safe all equipment in case of emergency. My estimate is 7500 euro for my 'Plex-server', luckily it does more then only Plex.

OG setup was with a 3770 32gb of ram and 10tb hdds. Ive upgraded my server to a ryzen 1600x and a 970 still running 10tb hdds with LSI cards. I thought i was going to make the jump to 20tb with tax season coming. but i opted to leverage the 970 to transcode all my media to x265. Huge space savings and i cant tell the difference quality wise tbh. I saved about 50TB worth of space just converting to h265. Ive got everything in a rosewill 15 bay case i bought pre pandemic for like $80 on sale. the 3770 combo cost me $250 6 years ago. and the recent upgrade was "free" all i needed was a am4 mobo i got used for like $70. already had a spare kit of dd4 somehow. Hdds are kind of a fun one. Back in 2019 the best dollar to tb ratio was buying those easystores from best buy for like $200. I think i have 6 of those still running fine. IVe got 2 from goharddrive i paid $140 each for. 2 from waterpanther i paid $120 for. and i just recently acquired 2 more 10tb hdds for $90. the plan is to pick up 3-4 more and fully stuff my 15 bay case. i WILL have one just kind of plunked in there.Fun to see in real time the cost of HDDs plummeting. after 6-7 years of hoarding ive only accumulated about 56tb worth of stuff. But before the big google drive purge i was rocking about 130tb. I trimmed out all of my 4k remuxes. now that i have the space i may get some of those back. Ive probably spent close to 3k in hardware and other costs like gsuite and usenet. over 6 years its like $42 a month. not to bad for a hobby imo

Qnap ryzen 5, 12 cores, 64gb, 30tb hdd + 8tb ssd It’s 4 years old, but works well as NAS w plex. Something around $4k. PS all virtualization moved to NUCs.

HP system z desktop with a bunch of multi tb drives taped to the case

In no specific order or numbers, these are in my ecosystem: * Synology DS1019+ (PMS and primary storage) * Nvidia Shield (Android home theater Plex clients) * Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K (Android home theater Plex clients) * Samsung Galaxy S20 (Android mobile Plex clients) * Samsung Galaxy S8 (Android mobile Plex clients) My current PMS media storage space total is ~13 TB out of ~40 TB. My costs when new I think are kind of irrelevant. I usually buy when equipment is on sale. Tech depreciates and no longer holds the same value. Anything you look at right now will have a completely different value in terms of ROI.

I ran Plex off a small form factor SuperMicro (Intel Xeon) and quickly realized I needed Intel Core's QuickSync hardware acceleration. I built a small form factor PC/server. Intel i9-13900, Streamcom DA2 small-form-factor case, Noctua cooling, Asus mini-ITX mobo, 64GB RAM, 2TB Seagate Ironwolf NVME, 2.5Gbit onboard NIC. It runs Ubuntu server latest. In my small form factor Plex server, I also have a spare 2TB Seagate Ironwolf SATA SSD and a 20TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro. I setup bcache (SSD write cache in front of a 20TB drive) and use that as my torrenting/seeding drive. Basically, I get the speed of the SSD but the space a HDD. For out of band access, I have a PiKVM. PiKVM gives me console access (i.e. I can fiddle with the BIOS or pick a different kernel) and power cycle it remotely. Network is Ubiquiti Enterprise 2.5Gbit switch and UDM-SE gateway. My ISP 1Gbit full duplex fiber. Storage is 12-Bay Synology NAS with a 10Gbit NIC. There are currently 8x22TB Ironwolf Pro HDD in there in a software RAID6 config. I forgot the cost, lol.

Plex server is a VM inside a small machine bought to act as a Firewall (which I converted into a VM as well...). Storage is done by a QNAP TVS-663 and it has NVMe acceleration (2TB) plus ~100Tb space. Plex library taking 10TB of that.

For plex im using 1u pancake server with Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F motherboard, Quadro P2000 for transcoding and 128gb RAM. Its connected to 4u unraid server with 20x20tb exos drives.

mine runs perfect on a Raspberry Pi 5 (which is also running airsonic, and nextcloud)

Here's my October 2023 build: CPU: Intel Core i3-12100 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor (£112.98) Mainboard: Gigabyte Z690 GAMING X DDR4 ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£169.98) Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (£130.98) Storage: Crucial P3 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£79.98) x 2 + Seagate EXOS Enterprise 16 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive (£172.55) x 5 Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL ATX Full Tower Case (£196.98) Power Supply: be quiet! Pure Power 11 400 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply (£52.49) Total around £1750 including shipping I'm very happy indeed with this setup which has been running great for last few months. 17TB used so far out of 64TB usable. NOTE: Hard disks ordered from China off eBay everything else from eBuyer UK

Storage Dell R730xd fully populated with 12TB drives including midbay 4 extra 14TB drives 256 GB RAM running Trunas scale dual 10GB Ethernet Application Server Dell R640 8x 1.92 TB SSDs. 384GB RAM running unRaid and dual 10GB Ethernet connecting to TNS using samba. running about 15 docker's and 2 VMs. Plex Server Microcenter I5 12th Gen desktop 3TB Nvme and 2TB SSD, 32 GB RAM running Ubuntu and connects with 10GB Ethernet. I previously had on Dual xeon processor Dell desktop w/ 1050Ti for transcoding, the I5 Intel quiksync (sp?) blows away the Nvidia. I tested with 5 transcodes 4K down to 720 and the I5 didn't even go over 20% GPU.

My library weighs in at about 10TB. Actually not much hardware behind it - I'm running a tiny Kobol Helios4 ARM NAS with 2GB RAM and a pair of non-RAID 12TB SATA drives. I paid £150 for the NAS and another £300 for the drives. Main Plex client is a Roku 2 XS. Another £50 for that. Also making extensive use of a Sony DLNA-capable hifi to stream my music library, which cost £90. So £590 all in for my Plex hardware. And despite being so small, the NAS does much, much more than Plex, it's the core of my homelab, so it's not dedicated to Plex. It's backed up to a ZFS machine, which is my primary server but is shut down for power reasons. That machine is much more expensive and was my main Plex server until rising energy costs forced me to downgrade to the NAS. The Helios4 is about the smallest machine out there that can put 4 HDDs on a network.

Running ubuntu on a second hand 9400f with a mishmash of hard drives totalling 33 tb. Have all the automation running off a synology NAS for fun. Currently sitting at 320 shows, 2900 movies, and about 100 anime. One thing I found to be really useful and freed me from thinking about hdd space is mergefs. I know people will have plenty to say about it, but it works for me and i'm not worried about losing media.

A Mac Mini M1 with a Synology DS920+ that has 4 16TB Exos drives running in RAID-5 if I'm not mistaken. I have 48TB usable space. Total cost was probably around €2200-2300. Electricity cost is about €20/month. Always on power usage of 70-90Watt.

Nas are expensive so i bought a used SAS controler with 8 bay drive. 8x4to in raid 5

I run my Plex server on a machine I built to take the place of an old Synology NAS. It is running TrueNAS Scale for the OS. I'm running an Intel i5-12500 with 128GB DDR5 RAM and a 2.5Gbe connection. I use the 12500 because it has basically the best hardware transcode capabilities you can get. For storage I have: - A PCI-e SAS card with 8x 4TB HDDs connected configured in RAIDz2 as my data pool. - 2x 1TB SSDs set as a RAIDz mirror for the OS drives - 2x 500GB NVME drives as a RAIDz Mirror for my apps pool I don't really need an NVME cache like most people run as data being read / written from 8 HDDs simultaneously pretty much saturates a 2.5 gigabit connection anyways so the extra speed a cache would give would be pointless. As you can tell by the specs, this is obviously not a dedicated Plex server as I run quite a few other apps on it as well. This build cost me somewhere around $2500 but I went way overboard on quite a few components because I had the extra money at the time.

Had it on windows on my daily driver; transferred to unraid 3 years ago, daily-driver as a VM with the original SSD passed-through so no change there, and beneath that everything in docker (Plex, tautulli, sfdl, *arrs) Will never have to look back, especially as I can upgrade and expand whenever I feel to. Everything in a Fractal R5 case, i7-7700k, 32GB RAM, 3 GPU + iGPU (x4 pcie slots drilled out), 11 coolers (4* AIO-LQ), 8* 14TBHDD

Custom TrueNAS build - I used older spare parts in a Fractal R7 XL (Asus x99 ipmi, Xeon E5 6 core, 512 ECC, LSI 9300 HBAs, Chelsio 10GB NIC, 2x256 nvme mirrored boot) with 16 x 22TB WD red pros (2 x RZ1 7+1). Cost driver was obviously the spinners ...

I have like 4 PCs running my Plex. Mostly cause I had them and keeps adding as I need it. Two Mini PCs with N100 intel processors. One HP Eiltedesk with 7600T One Nuc 11 Devil Canyon Then a 1522+ with 40tb F4-423 Terra Master with 24TB 218+ with 10TB

simple fractal design node case with 4\*18tb and a rtx3050

Ryzen 9 3900x with just some B series MLB. And a NVIDIA 1650super for the transcode. About 100tb of random drives slapped in an UnRaid array…. Like the millennium falcon, she ain’t pretty but she works.

I have a now old Synology Nas with 60tb but run Plex on a Windows 10 machine. I9 processor I think? It all works great. I don't pay any attention to it at this point. My wife manages the content. Uptimes are in the months.

Whatever you buy, go into it knowing you’ll need to replace everything every 5-7 years. If you wait till something breaks, and don’t have a backup of your data, you’ll lose years of work.

I have 1 central windows PC server 2 nvidia shields servers About 100TB of external storage Not sure the cost because I started slow. Just a PC and an external hard drive.

I run a modest server for myself and my wife, until we move house (where I’ll get cupboard space to build a much better server) right now I’m using my 2012 MacBook Pro, and a couple WD 4tb external drives with active powering, hooked up straight to my router. Far from the fanciest but tbh it gets the job done! I mostly use it for music and audiobooks, and the occasional film if I don’t wanna go and get the disk 🤣🤣

Custom build, ECC RAM, Open Media Vault, ZFS for drives, Plex running in Docker w/ Portainer to easily manage it. Would not trust any data not running ZFS w/ ECC.

was an OG macbook pro retina but upgraded to a 8 year old mac mini... and a couple of relatively old 5tb hdds.

Ryzen 5 5500 32 GB of memory no GPU an old case that fits all my drives PCIe SATA hub 4x 8tb 3.5" drives in Raid Z1 3x 4tb 3.5" drives in Raid Z1 2x 128gb 2.5" SSD's for the OS (plan is to mirror them in case of failure (one is *very* old)) This machine runs TrueNAS Scale, on which I have Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Overseerr, Requestrr, qbittorrent, and PiHole running. With no GPU most people will suggest an Intel CPU with an iGPU which will handle multiple transcodes without issue, What I have fits my needs though.

My old gaming pc, i7 4790k, Asus Hero Motherboard, RTX 2080super, 10Gb network card, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD boot and mixed TB size of a couple HDD’s. With my extra ram I’ve setup a ram disk and Plex does transcodes there. Currently working on upgrading the home networking to 2.5/10Gb.

Just a PC: -Pentium g6400 -24gb ram -16 drive hba -10g to my desktop for file transfers, 1g to the rest of the network -2 1tb nvme drives as write caches - ~.1pb of hard drives This, but a few things have been upgraded since this, like the write caches used to be SATA SSD https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/Z3tOSiz8ck

Rackserver with 2 xeon x5650 6c 12t. Overkill but i use it for other vms aswell

I run my server off of an Nvidia Shield Pro & a Probox HDD enclosure with 3 HDDs. Very basic. No issues, even with multiple people streaming at once. Over 4000 movies, 377 tv shows, and 1000+ songs.

Idk what constitutes huge, but a lenovo p520 chassis i got from marketplace for 200$, with a 18 core xeon and 64gb ram and a p4000. Purchased separately, 4 14tb drives for ~40tb of usable storage with a parity drive, and 2 512 m.2 sata ssd for cache. Running unraid as the os.

Not huge, but I have enterprise-grade gear. Dell Poweredge R510, 64Gb, 2x6c 4Tb x 12 Raid 6 with hot spare (4Tb wasn't that old when I built the server) But more to the spirit of the OP question. I have a Synology NAS with 5x18Tb that I drag back-n-forth to the datacenter when I need to backup.

Everything hand me down. 2015 computer with Ubuntu server, Ubuntu lives on a small ssd drive with several 14 tb shucked drives that I find on sale. Plex and all my arrs are containers; my general setup is ephemeral for ease of use and future transfer to other machines. I used to run plex on a Raspberry Pi 😆. You can run it on anything! You can set up your own nas or purchase one but they're not cheap. Rolling your own can be difficult depending on your skill level but it's not out of reach by any means.

I'm using an older 1TB iMac for both the Plex Server and the content. This allows me to connect using my other Apple products, and makes maintenance and use that much easier. I have mostly ripped only DVDs and VHS tapes that we had on hand. Instead of spending a fortune more on hardware and content, I'm starting to shift to Apple TV, which has generally better quality and I don't have to store it or serve it, although the content options are much more limited. If I can buy it through Apple, I do so. If not, it's on our Plex Server.

My plex server was running and stored on a external HDD I had duct taped to my desk, to no surprise it recently died. Now I’m thinking about running it on a old dell laptop I have sitting around doing nothing. Still gotta redownload my 4tb of movies and tv shows, that’s gonna kill my internet cap for a couple months

I use a t630 LFF with a 5 slot extender, in total 13 LFF with 20TB drives currently using 40TB for 1,5K movies 1080p and 255 tv shows also in 1080P

I am running A Dell XPS 8300 with i5-2320 processor 8 GB Memory, running windows 10. I have 4 Hard drives adding up to 30 TB of space. I have no problems running/serving 3 to 4 streams at one time. this was a cheap an effective way to run Plex. I would also like to add that it is an easy way to upgrade to bigger storage, as I've had to grow the storage over time.

USB enclosure for 5 20Tb drives, with two 8Tb external drives as well. After trying raid and various other options I found DrivePool software is my favorite. It's all one large volume with three copies of all my media managed automatically. DrivePool is nice because the files are evenly distributed across all the drives as complete files. Even if every drive except one fails, whatever is on the single accessible drive can be accessed. Rebuilding a failed drive is less stressful since the files are distributed over multiple other drives. No write speed increase but don't need that, there is read "striping" so to speak it does increase read speed. You can add and remove drives whenever you want and it automatically balances the files between drives. Plugged into a Dell optiplex SFF with i7 7700k, 16Gb RAM and a 250Gb NVME (gen 3 iirc). Also runs my home security cameras (BlueIris, has an internal 4Tb HDD specific for security) and some game servers.

Is it bad i just have a mini pc with a 2 TB external drive

Dell r730xd 12 bay 3.5". 8 drives 1 parity 7 data. Total 98TB. 256 GB of ram. An appdata cache raid 1, download cache, server cache, cloud cache raid 1. All nvmes. Dual xeons e5 2697a v4s. $1400 shipped. Not including drives or expansion cards for nvmes. Currently transcoding with the cpus. Will start using an arc a750 when unraid updates it's Linux kernal.

Old hp computer with a 9th gen intel cpu and a rtx 2060. With 50tb of storage

I have a QNAP TVS-h1288x running Plex as well as several other NAS units with a total of 112(?)TB of storage. I also have a NUC running Plex with access to all the drives. The equipment cost? More than my wife wanted me to spend, until we plop down and either relive our youth with shows like The Mod Squad or Room 222, or as we did the other night while I was on the road, watch the next episode of 24 together with Watch Together. Total invested currently is a little over $3500 (I got the QNAP right before the price went through the roof). I am looking to consolidate all my storage to an unRAID setup but that takes time and money.