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Cheers.
Anything I should be looking out for if I am putting hard drives in these, do I need certain level of spec given that they will be always on?
Edit: Something like this? http://www.ebuyer.com/514997-seagate-2tb-nas-hdd-3-5-sata-st2000vn000
Sam_w-
I'm not sure tbh.
I would assume the transcoding would be CPU limited rather than HDD, though I've not used Plex, so will defer to @aggi ...In general I put OS and Apps on an SSD, and vids on a [spinning] HDD
So probably Plex and any working/transcoding directory on an SSD, and then something like what you linked for the bulk of the videos -
I run a Plex server.
And I run a NAS.
I would definitely recommend making this distinct things, and not the same box.
The NAS should do nothing other than manage a number of drives, ensure that there is enough parity (data duplicated in case a disk fails), and keep the data on the drives available to the network.
From a NAS with a small number of drives (4 or fewer) look for hardware RAID5. This allows for 1 disk to fail in it's entirety and your data is still going to be OK. It's also very fast for reading data, which is good for media. Of course, if a drive can fail and you still have data this means that you don't get full capacity... if you put 4 x 3TB drives in there for 12TB total, only 3 x 3TB are actually usable... so you'll have 9TB of space.
If you go for a NAS with more than 4 disks, then start looking at RAID6. This allows for 2 drives to fail without causing data loss. It gets expensive at this point.
Off the shelf NAS is decent enough, QNAP do some nice gear. It is possible to beat the price by about a 3rd... not off the disks, but of the enclosure and software. Look at FreeNAS and google some guides. In real terms it means you can save £100 or so, but will invest a lot of time and energy to do so.
As for the Plex media server. There are things it needs, and things it doesn't need. It does need a good CPU as it will be encoding quite a bit so that media suits various screen sizes or bandwidth requirements. It will need a few GB of RAM as it runs a database... but if you have a NAS then the whole of the Plex server can just be run on a single small SSD with Windows, in a small media PC.
Spec CPU high, spec RAM medium, spec disk low.
duncs
Velocio
That HP server too would be worth thinking about. Well worth it for £110, as is the Lenovo if you want to stretch the spec and get something beefier. Both lots of machine for the money