Loren Lang

I had been wanting to deploy a NAS in my house to centralize my media - I took a workstation tower and built a simple deployment: 1TB NVME SSD for OS, (2) 4TB SATA SSDs for fast media & (2) 8TB HDDs for slow media. It's running without issue but I think I want to go further. I am out of SATA ports on the motherboard so I was considering adding an HBA but other than being able go add another NVME (one of the SATA ports on the motherboard is linked with that slot making it to where I can only use one or the other) and another couple hard drives I think my case is going to limit how much expansion I can do without needing to build or buy an external hard drive chassis and pass thru the cables. I currently run Plex on a separate box with a similar footprint but I didn't do Plex on my HexOS instance initially because I don't relish going thru the initial config again (issues with media getting incorrectly associated). If I am going to go thru the effort, I need to get creative. Are there any users out there that used a standard PC tower - how many drives did you use in your setup? I think I want to add 2 more SATA SSDs and 4 more HDDs - I will migrate the 2060 from the tower hosting Plex to speed trancoding and add another NVME (probably caching). Just curious if anyone else has used a host bus adapter in their setup and how it went

Nice - it definitely isn't perfect but I am fan of Plex. I get the compulsion - my family owned a video store when I was young so I have been a collector my whole life. If I hadn't already gone thru the misery of fixing a lot of the auto-labeling errors on my existing Plex server, I would have deployed the Plex app on my NAS when I built it. I haven't been purchasing as much physical media since pre-COVID just because my local brick and mortar resource for used 4k Blurays have closed but there are some holes in my library I need to fill. If I upgrade my switch in my office to 10GB, I might spin up an instance and try to figure out how to get 4k and HDR/Dolby Vision to actually playback over Plex on my network so I only have to keep one extra tower running. It's not a latency issue, I am sure it's either a limitation of the plex app on Roku/Xbox or in the file format because it plays local from file. I just cracked the shrink on HexOS and only thing I am configured thus far was immich so I could consolidate my wife and I's photos into a single source backed up to personal cloud. If you get froggy and are a cord cutter, there are integrations for over the air TV into plex though not sure if that would be supported with a virtual instance of plex though I have no doubt someone has gotten it working. Good luck and enjoy!