Hi all,
A bit of history: I got into plex in late 2012, started on a basic dedicated PC build, AMD processor, and ran that for about a year and a half. After my media library had grown to about 12TB, I did a hardware upgrade to a 2013 Mac Pro with a thunderbolt RAID, and ran that from mid-2014 - early 2017. It ran beautifully, without issues, and could handle 10 simultaneous streams with ease. Now, I'm in transition of hardware again, and I need some advice.
The Mac Pro I was running it on is no longer available to me, so I built a new dedicated PC:
-- ASUS ROG Maximus IX Hero Z270 Motherboard
-- Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake Quad-Core 4.2 GHz LGA 1151 Processor
-- 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200 (PC4-25600) RAM
-- Samsung 960 EVO 500GB PCIe NVMe M.2 Internal SSD
-- 4 6TB Seagate Enterprise HDDs in software RAID 0 for media storage
-- 1Gbps dedicated fiber internet connection, media downloaded and synced from a secondary NIC
Before anyone worries about the integrity of my library, I have 3 machines each with 24TB Raid 0 with 3 synced copies of my media library. I run RAID 0 for the speed, so that I can get maximum IO to each media storage location.
Now. I have my plex server setup on the new PC, running a clean install of Windows 10 Pro, ONLY running PMS. In the time that I've been running Plex on my Mac server, I had forgotten how nice it was running Plex on a Unix environment vs. a Windows environment. The windows install is plagued with small issues ranging from transcoding crashes to hidden application errors that require a restart of PMS roughly once a week. Small things, likely invisible unless you're running my scale of PMS with 5-10 active streams at any given time, but annoying since I didn't deal with these issues on the Mac Server.
I've been researching, and it seems like Linux provides similar stability to what I had on my Mac, possibly with even better performance. There are dozens of guides on Ubuntu, but from what I've been researching, it seems like Centos is a little more on the enterprise side of things and may run even slightly more stable than a Ubuntu install.
What I'm thinking is: Reformat the PC and install a Centos minimal install on the m.2 SSD, and re-create the RAID 0 using EXT4 (a shame since 20TB of media takes days to copy over a 1Gbps LAN connection... but oh well), and setup PMS on the centos machine, dedicating it to that machine.
I've researched Centos 7 support for 7th-gen intel processors and it seems like the support is there, so I shouldn't have a problem running Centos on this new of hardware. I also have the added benefit of being able to setup cron jobs for the syncs between this main server and my other two backup servers, both which will be accessed via SMB. Windows was capable of doing the syncing, but it was clunky and often required maintenance.
My question is: What are the thoughts of others who run Centos 7 for PMS? Am I heading down the right road here? The goal is to have a server that requires almost no maintenance, and will just run beautifully 24/7, while handling anywhere from 5-15 simultaneous streams with ease. I believe I have the hardware for it, now I just need to find the correct platform. The goal is to at least achieve similar stability with the Centos install to what I had for years on my Mac Pro.
Some notes:
-- I went with only 16GB of RAM because I read that PMS doesn't use much RAM, so 16GB should be enough. If that's incorrect, do let me know.
-- Windows software RAID is very stable. I haven't done software RAID in linux, so if anyone thinks I'll have issues with that, please let me know before I start this project. I don't want to get this all underway and then run into stability issues with linux software RAID.
-- Centos should be able to take full advantage of the 7th-gen processor for transcoding, correct? I know the 7700k is only a 4-core compared to the 8-core I was running on my Mac Pro, but it's significantly newer and more efficient, and so far I haven't had issues with multiple transcodes while running Windows 10, it's performed great.
Any thoughts from the community would be greatly appreciated.
Vince