I just recently started my journey setting up Plex with *Arr and have had a blast. I have the setup running on a raspberry Pi. Before I start buying a bunch of external hard drives, I went searching for some dedicated server hardware to comparison shop. Am I crazy to consider buying an old tower server for this, or will a raspberry Pi work just fine for this purpose? I don’t have that much experience but I do enjoy a good challenge.
A PI will not be powerful enough to run Plex. For one person with direct play maybe but I’d suggest a lenovo tiny or something like that. Old desktop would be fine too.
If you want to transcode 4k or have a lot of users, a desktop+video card is recommended
I think in your case it really comes down to transcoding the streams. If your player doesn’t support a video format, the Plex server will have to transcode it into a format that’s viewable. A pi might not be able to handle multiple transcodes at a time.
I personally use a Synology nas for my server and haven’t had any issues, but can be expensive.
I run mine from an old intel NUC that i got for cheap, its significantly more powerful than a raspi for very little extra power. Mine draws less than 8W running 4 VMs (pi-hole, VPN, my home assistant, and one I’m soon setting up as mediaserver).
I was using raspberry pi4 4gb with full arr stack + many more services in docker containers. Its not snappy, but it works fine. Transcoding is imposible, but with *arr stack its easy to chose quality and dodge transcoding and that was enough for me. Super low power consuption and 0 noise is amazing. But there is another problem, rpi doesnt have a sata port. I was using usb to sata adapter at first, it was perfect untill i upgraded SSD which needed more juice. That forced me to get sata dock with external power supply. Everything became bulky and not cheap at anymore. After that I got used PC with no GPU. Intel g3930 and 8 gb ddr4 is draining 25W on idle and its rock solid. It can transcode multiple 1080p at once. I still use rpi as a backup pihole and few more services.
I highly recommend getting something with sata or m2 ports, probably any intel gen 7 or newer with quicksync. DIY or SFF PC, new or used, doesnt matter.
Dell has refurbished Optiplex’s 50% off right now.
This one is $164.50 with the coupon code HOTDEAL3070
Or here are some other deals on 3070s.
There are even some 3050s for as low as $55 with the coupon code HOTDEAL3050
A Raspberry Pi will not be good enough for streaming and the wireless adapter on it is pretty terrible. I tried using a Raspberry Pi and it was literally unusable for me so I bought a cheap Optiplex. I’ve been using a 3060 and it’s been great so far.
