I run an actual 'server' mobo with an ES 10-core CPU, but that's because I got the RAM as cast-offs from my company. I've got a couple inexpensive SATA SSDs in the system as well, configured as a RAID 1 array, which is where my VMs live so that they're snappy in terms of performance. Sequential writes are way more moderate at ~300 MB/s, obviously, but still plenty fast to write out various media to disk. It's a full hardware RAID 6 implementation, and with my exceptionally shitty 3TB 5400 RPM drives I get sequential read speeds in the 1 GB/s range. I paired that with one of the cheap HP SAS expander cards I bought on eBay for I think $18. But you could 100% do whatever you want on Hyper-V or even VirtualBox or whatever.Īs for the RAID, I bought an inexpensive LSI 9265-8i card for like $50. I run VMware (which is paid) rather than Hyper-V (which is free) because my work involves a ton of VMware stuff, so it's a closer test environment than Hyper-V. Plex runs on this Windows 10 machine natively.īut since I do need VM support, I then run VMware Workstation on top of Windows, and use it to virtualize a few systems. It's got a RAID6 array (12x 3TB disks) for the data that, in Windows, is just a big D drive. In my signature, the system marked 'Server' is actually running Windows 10 Pro. With that said, your last option - a Windows 10 box with a SMB share - is actually what I use. Hell, most of them don't even like RAID controllers because they handle their data redundancy in the NAS software. Most NAS operating systems expect to have real control of underlying disks. I also share the files in openssh ftp to the internet (ip filtered, but whole ISPs opened up, low rent DHCP users) & plex completely open to internet, so its nice having that little bit of extra security of everything being read only & I hated it when plex messed with my files. I'm currently 10gbit limited (pcie 2.0 10gbit card) going 40gig next month when I rebuild my rack. My array does north of 800mbytes/sec, not that it needs to be that fast. I've allocated 4 cores of an E5-2640 to plex, so far haven't had any issues, but I have very little concurrent usage. I also have my plex VM on pcie ssd so that all the tiny thumbnails load nice n quick on my TVs Startup script to mount fileshares at boot time, example: mount -t cifs -o ro,noperm,username=guest,password= //192.168.1.11/TV_Shows /plex/TV_Shows Windows 2012R2 vm as the NAS, read only fileshare to plex user (I use the guest account)ĬentOS vm for plex with plex repository added for easy updating Server: Dell T630 (it uses an LSI hardware raid card), everything is VMFS

Nas plex server