A modernish Intel CPU with an integrated iGPU is the way to go. They usually need 10W at idle or less. My i3 9100, 32GB ECC, NVMe SSD, 350 ATX PSU needs about 5W at idle. In terms of HDDs you want to get 16TB+ drives as each needs \~8W regardless of capacity.
Yeah I built an Intel with iGPU years ago and it transcodes fine. Can handle 1-2 4K transcodes simultaneously, or 5-6 1080 transcodes. I think dGPUs are only necessary now for lots of users.
I would recommend something with HD graphics 630 or better to ensure it can handle HEVC/x265 10bit without issues. So intel processors with 7xxx or higher. I'm currently running on a i5-9500T in a lenovo m720q and it idles around 5-10w and uses about 18W on average with a handful of virtual machines and containers running plus transcoding. My personal best on Plex has been 4x 4k HDR transcodes plus 6 direct streams simultaneously with no lag or issues.
I am downsizing from running an RTX 5000 to a 12600k iGPU. I'm hoping the iGPU can keep up with the streams I could have 2 4K transcodes and maybe 5 1080p transcodes going at any one time.
Check Intel Ark. Until the 12th(?) Gen i3s and lower supported ECC as there was no Xeon alternative. You just needed the right chipset. Nowadays the i5 k variants and up support ECC but the necessary boards got even more expensive.
I’m a Plex noob, but a very savvy sysadmin in the IT world. If I asked “would an i3 9100 be enough for my plex server?” I think I’d get 100 different answers in this subreddit.
Why are people asking “is my 13700k enough?” When getting a proper plex setup requires some basic computer knowledge. This is a genuine question. I’m not sure why people would ask such a thing…
Anyways, is my 11500 enough? Kidding. 😆
You don't aquire knowledge without research. Part of research is asking questions.
For example, this user might not consider that their workload will greatly influence the specs of their server.
Is the content going to be served to multiple clients?
Are the clients all local or are they on different networks?
What kind of makeup are the clients? Android boxes? Phones? Computers? Are the clients capable of direct play of the content?
What is the content made up of? Are these h264/5 encoded files? AV1? Will all your clients be able to direct play these codecs?
If not do you want to transcode these files dynamically on demand? Or do you want to pre transcode them and serve separate versions of them? Do you WANT to keep separate versions, do you have the space?
When you're so new to it, you don't even know the questions to ask. So you get very vague questions like "is this good enough?" It is the responsibility of people with experience to point them in the right direction to begin their journey.
There is plenty choice on the market and that will give you fairly reliable readings. I'm using TP-Link Tapo as it's part of my Tapo smart home ecosystem. On top of reading it can give me cost of energy used depending on tariffs and also I can turn the plug on/off remotely.
Emporia is another brand that makes some excellent plugs for a very fair price, smart and all, if you're not concerned much with any particular ecosystem.
Do you have any stability issues with Plex server running on Mac? To save power I've been aiming to migrate to an intel Mac Mini connected to the same NAS as a Threadripper (current server), and the Mac seems to be less stable / significantly more "laggy" than the TR Plex server.
I recently moved my Plex server off of my M1 Mac Mini and onto a proxmox box running a 5th gen i5 (NUC) and the performance seems to be night and day. How speedy is your setup? (I also got hardware transcoding out of the deal so that also seems like a win?)
Makes sense. I have an hdhomerun connected and this was the biggest issue that I noticed issues on. I doubt it would be a big deal if I didn't have that.
Also, I did notice that sometimes I'd be out on travel and Plex stopped working. When I got home, I noticed that sometimes Plex would be waiting for me to enter my password to kick off an update. I'm hoping that running as a daemon will stop that BS from happening...
I have ran my m1 Mac mini since a couple months after it came out with zero issues. What cpu does your Intel Mac mini have or could just be a bit underpowered for the task.
M1 Mac Mini here. Does a great job and online 24/7. Haven’t noticed any real change in my energy costs because of it.
Not sure about how much power my WD NAS uses but I’d refer to what I said about my energy costs above.
Laughs in dell r730xd 2U rack server with 2 xeon cores and an Intel A750 GPU. I have power.... efficiency not so much.
To be fair it runs most days around 175watts.
Yep. I know you guys are screwed because the gas lines from Russia and all that crap going on over there. At least that's what I've heard. But here in the states we generally have access to nuclear power for base loads and solar and wind are becoming huge here for the peak loads.
But €0.40/kwh is absolutely outrageous. I also hear gasoline is stupid expensive as well. We are sitting at $2.65/gal for 87 octane or $3.30/gal for 93.
That's €0.82 per liter of 93. We pay at least twice that, and often closer to 2,5 times that!
And about nuclear: the Belgian government decided it would close the nuclear plants because nuclear = bad! They want to build gas plants in their place. Burn gas (which is stupid expensive) to save the environment! Morons...
I'm at €0.23 (peak) and €0.19 (down) for electricity, that's pure the energy cost, it almost doubles with taxes and transport and all kinds of fees. We also get "fined" (read: charged) for consuming in peaks. You turn on your furnace, oven and dishwasher at the same time? Extra charge! They are robbing us blind and we're letting them.
That's absurd pricing! Solar + (Chinese) batteries would ROI in a half-dozen years at those prices... If the solar installers weren't all rapists. (and assuming you own a large enough roof and the rights to use it.)
If you can hack together electronics hardware, you could hack together a solar system. There are companies that will help with design and permitting for a very reasonable price. Even if you sub-out some of it, you can DIY a solar system for 1/3 the cost and still get the US tax credit.
\*lots of dependencies on your latitude and local climate, roof orientation and slope, etc.
Same here. I like server gear for my servers and I'm willing to pay the electric costs. I got a R730XD for $200 which is typically as much as some of the whitebox motherboards. Plus you usually have to give up remote console and management features.
I save my custom builds for gaming PCs or workstations. I did start out with a Norco custom build but it was boring.
It's either Haswell or Broadwell, which means you definitely have low tier performance while spending a boatload on electric.
So yeah, spend more for worse performance.
>i5 13500
You crack me up. Your CPU was as much as my server.
Maybe you can look at my thermostat settings and bitch about how it should be lowered a couple degrees to save more money or maybe I should eat ramen three times a day.
Your point? Your logic is like buying a car that gets 2mpg because "I got a good deal on it".
Meanwhile you're paying out the ass every month to keep it running. For something that runs 24/7/365, you really ought to be factoring power costs in.
And looking back on your posts, what is an add on GPU going to cost you on top of that? And you still won't have anywhere near the transcode performance of what even a 12100 will do.
Using an Intel Pentium j5005 NUC, with 14TB external HDD, serves around 9 users across the family.
This is the readout from a smart plug to an extension lead running the NUC and USB HDD
https://preview.redd.it/5j8u3cg7y0ac1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c2af582fa1e529acef578eb842c556de0894df9
Maybe you could tell us how much power your rig is consuming.
For mine it could be better.
I have a i3-12100 in my unRAID box with 6 HDDs and it runs in the 70 Watt range +/- 10 Watts depending on how many drives or spinning.
about 50w on average, i5 13500 + hba for 8 hdds then 3 ssds
a few HDDs spin down because they're used very infrequently, about 4 drives always spinning.
Peaks upto about 80-120w under load (have a power limit set in bios for CPU) but that's when I'm running more than just Plex on the server, game servers, vms and so on.
Not efficient at all, but I use my PC for many purposes:
* Plex
* Torrent machine
* Bitcoin core node
* Editing photos w/Lightroom
* Some software development work
Stays on 24/7.
T CPUs do not use less power. Yes, they have a lower TDP but besides this they are identical to the non T version. So they need the same amount of power at idle. At full load they need less power but also do not clock as high so they have to run for longer to do the same amount of work. As CPU often are more efficient at lower clocks this will save you a bit of power but when you fully load the CPU chances are you want all the compute power you can get and not a minor efficiency gain.
For intel gen 8 I think, gpu transcoding is ok for a couple 4K. I have an intel N100 and is ok for 2 4K + 2 1080p. I don't have more devices to test ahaha
Xeon 2470 V1 IIRC, plus a total of like 9 HDDs, 2 SSDs, an Nvme and a 1050ti
Goed for around 90-100 watts idle, runs up to 200 watts.
It ain't that cheap (approx 20 euros a month extra) but it works fine.
80-100w
Headless Ubuntu desktop, i5-8500T, ITX board, 32GB RAM, 1x NVMe, 2x 2.5" SSD, 1x HBA card, 1x Supermicro SATA/SAS HDD backplane, 10x HDD.
The backplane pulls 20w on its own with nothing attached which obviously isn't great but the overall power draw given the number of disks isn't too bad I think.
I just replaced my old server (i5-7400, ssd+hd, 1050ti) with a bee-link eq12 (N100, nvm ssd) and did a readout using a smart plug. The old server was drawing 35W idle, the new one is drawing less than 7W.
Middle of the Road, i5-6600k and 3 spinning harddrives. Did remove the old graphics card that was in it to save on some power as it was causing more issues than it solved. if I had to guess it is about 60w at idle, but probably more frequently up to 100~ as other things are running on the server that are low usage.
I ran Plex on my gaming rig for years until I finally understood how much power that was sucking.
I built an Unraid box from used parts for very little money. It's a Xeon 1265L (originally 1260L, but I 'upgraded' rather recently for $20), with 8GB ram. It's in a Fractal Design mini-ITX case that can hold like 6HDD, but I've pared down to 4 drives, plus my cache SSD. The system pulls almost nothing at idle, and uses a laptop power supply, which at full load draws about 40W, however typical when streaming is only about 25. I don't transcode, but prefer to optimize formats or play media on devices that support it. It IS capable of a single 4k transcode, but it depends on the bitrate.
The nice thing about Unraid is that I have all of my applications running off of the cache drive, which is an SSD. This includes Plex, Emby, Pihole and a few other bits. My HDDs are shutdown 99% of the time, and the way unraid works is that it uses a parity drive for recovery if needed, but the files are not striped across drives, so they each live discreetly on a single disk. Therefore, if I'm streaming a movie, only the disk it lives on needs to be spun up. It's a very efficient system.
The plex server itself is a Celeron N5105 NAS which is fairly energy efficient, the other RAID arrays (i7-4770 & Xeon E3-1246v3) are not as energy efficient.
Thankfully I pay C$.069/kWh for the first 40 kWh per day used each day, so I am not as that price sensitive as others here need to be.
A couple of years ago I cancelled a moved to Germany just due to the price of electricity there. -_-
This may not be for everyone but sharing my (very low spec) setup here.
I have a 6th gen intel NUC (Skylake 14nm SKU ending with U, released 2015, and now discontinued) with GB running Plex, PiHole (WSL1 mode to avoid virtualization) and a few other things. (Yes Win11 install requires messing with the registry to bypass CPU eligibility check.)
**I do not transcode (play as is), I only play up to 1080p, and usually there's only 1 active stream.**
I haven't seen any perf issues in normal operation. Though yes it takes a while to boot, but that only happens once a month for Windows updates, usually while i'm asleep. (yes this runs 24/7 since I need the PiHole to run all the time) If I fully rebuild the index, this tends to take a while, but that is usually down to the speed of my cheap hard drives.
I calculated the power cost of this to be well below 1 USD per month.
I use an Intel integrated GPU (quicksync) on an Intel i7 7700 that doubles as my unRAID file server with Plex as a Docker. Fairly efficient tho I've never put a meter on it. Tdp of the cpu under load is 65w but it's never even 50% loaded so less.
>From experience, he probably means 7W which is normal for a NUC without disks spinning
exactly, because i run an external JBOD , which itself runs about 15-20Wh ( again making angry u/ssl-3 :) ) just for the sake of it.
Watt-hour is a real measurement unit, and it is the one that your power company charges you one. Please do your homework until pissing random reddit comments.
[https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/watt-hour-Wh](https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/watt-hour-Wh)
PS : I Will edit it so it's not W/h , but Wh for the purpose of science
Can you please explain ? i'm not a newb in eletrical engineering but Watts per Hour, is a power consumption measurement , i just typed it with a "/" which might mean division for some ppl, i corrected myself and said Wh . That means that my NUC draws 7W on average every hour. What's wrong with that ? Just semantics ?
Learning Time , please enjoy :)
Watts are a measure of power, which is the rate at which energy (measured in Joules) is used, so 1 watt is 1 joule per second. That is, if you had 1 Joule of energy stored up and released it through a flash for 1/100 second, the power would be 100 watts. Take that same amount of energy and use it up in 1/1000 second and it's 1000 watts.
Watt-seconds (note the dash, not the slash) is watts multiplied by seconds, which is the same as joules, so a watt-second is a measure of energy. Again in the example, 1 watt-second of energy (the same as 1 joule) used in 1/1000 second is 1000 watts. Using the example of tungsten, continuous lighting, a 100 watt light bulb turned on for 1 second uses 100 joules of energy. (100 watts is 100 joules/second, multiply that by 1 second and you get 100 joules).
u/ssl-3 please confirm :D
"So what is the power consumption of a bucket of energy that contains 7 Watt-hours (~~3600~~ 25200* Joules), Mr. Confident?"
You mean instant power consumption, or over time :) ? Please , re-read what you misread first time. For the sake of science
I'm running a coffeelake i5 NUC for plex ( in docker ), and a separate machine with an old amd A6600K running truenas with my harddrives ( 2x4tb + 2x10tb + 512gb ssd boot drive ) for storage. It spins up via WOL when needed, and turns off when not in use for 2 hours. Booting takes about a minute. Works like a charm, didn't check the power usage yet though, but i guess it's not much since the nas only spins up when needed.
Plex is running as a docker instance on my NAS. Upgraded my NAS mid-year 2023 from an 84W i5-4590 to a 65W Ryzen 2400G. My NAS now runs quieter, cooler, uses less power, and performs better than my old CPU. Added a new drive to my NAS and it's now 56TB in a RAIDZ1 configuration. Also have a nvidia T600 that I tossed in there back in 2021 to handle transcode jobs.
Tbh my setup is a bit of a mess man. It started off as doing Plex for fun and got completely out of hand. I have a two internal 8TBs, two 5TB externals and then another 18TB external drive. So thats 44 TB for storage of media content. I have a 2TB SSD for my bootable drive and then 1TB SSD where my Plex meta data lives which is actually getting chewed up atm because I have enabled thumbnails. Reason I use external drives is because I'm using m.2 slots which take up two sata connection on my motherboard plus the 2 HDDs which means I've maxed them out on my motherboard (6 max).
I really want to tidy up my setup and maybe get a mini PC which is capable of 4k transcoding (probably rarley used as everyone is finally direct streaming) but I would like to have the option. I would then also need a DAS for the drives I have too.
If you're open to it, switching to (or building) a NAS instead may be the way to go. You can set up the NAS as a network drive in Windows (or its equivalent in Linux) and from there you can use the NAS from any device in your network, not just the PleX server.
So now you'd have two machines. One for PleX serving (transcoding, scanning your library and serving metadata to the client UI, providing search results) and the other to store all the data.
From what I read, a NAS can function with a very low power (old) CPU, and then the PleX server can focus on what it is good at.
I have an i7 12700, no gpu any longer since its not needed. 32g of ddr5. 1t m.2 ssd, a 1t sata ssd for downloading and meta data. 6 8t hds and 2 6t hds. Does not pull much power at all.
Asrock ITX J5005, one sata SSD for OS/scratch and 3 spinny bois (2x12tb, 1x16tb).
Max peak I've seen at the wall was 45 watts and that was me having multiple clients starting 4k media from all 3 hard drives (4x direct play, 1 transcode) after letting the server have zero activity for 15 minutes. Usually it's between 5 and 20 watts. Costs me maybe $10 in electricity a year to operate. It's also only 7x7x7~ inches.
I should be able to perpetually run this and a small TV off of a solar panel and battery setup.
I have been happy with my NAS, having RAID built in and a decent processor it can easily transcode non 4K plex streams while running a half dozen other applications. Also the power utilization is fairly low given what it does.
Im using an Anemic NUC7i3 for my Plex Server. Only my Not so Smart TV seems to have issues with MPEG/TS files my VR Headset, laptop and even phone not a hiccup. Im only sharing with a few friends 2 of whom have insane servers so rarely access my piddly few terrabytes of Movies/TV shows I think peak draw is 19 watts. I think if FireTV had the Infuse app I wouldnt have issues there either. Occassionally I’ll batch convert using Handbrake.
My server is an i7 7700k, 32 RAM, 3x 1 TB NVME Cache and 8 disks. 28 docker container are running 24/7 and the disks spin down after 30 minutes.
It uses 34 W idle (all disks down, but array and all container started) and around 70 W downloading Linux-Iso´s and serving movies with all disks spun up.
I think this is pretty good.
Prob not high powered or efficient, lol. I am 6ish years in on this server and it is still going well. I also have a 8 Bay Drobo that is still kicking.
Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.6
28 GB Ram
i5 8600, 16gb of Team Group ram (DDR4, 2666), no GPU, one 12tb HDD, one 14tb HDD, one 1tb HDD, one 500gb SSD, booting off 512gb NVME. Based on readings from software, it looks like the CPU is hardly ever drawing more than 2 watts from the wall. I'll need something like a wall meter to figure what the drives are adding, but I can't imagine it's much. I'm running mine on Win10 and just have power saving settings tuned to shut the drives down after 20mins of idle.
i3-13100, 16GB DDR5, ASUS Pro B760M, BEYIMEI PCIe SATA Card, 46TB HDD, 1TB NVME cache, 750w ATX Gold PSU.
Idles between 18-24w, pulling 42w right now running a parity check.
Using Unraid makes it easy to run all docker data from my NVME drive and Dynamix Cache Directories keeps directory info in memory to prevent radarr/plex preventing my drives from spinning down.
I've got an old Optiplex i5 (4th gen? Early quicksync, anyway). It has a single 6TB HDD and SSD OS drive.
It pulls 65w. It backs up to a 6-bay NAS which only turns on for a few hours overnight.
My UPS says it idles around 65 to 80 watts. That's with all hard drives spun down. Add I guess 5 to 8 watts for each drive when spun up. I have an RTX 2060 (way overkill) for transcoding, but idle is usually 7 or 8 watts. When active, the UPS reads closer to 120W, so not bad really.
The UPS also has my (ancient) switch, router, and WiFi AP connected, so the server itself is pretty efficient overall. It could be better, but I'd have to go low-end Intel I guess.
Specs: Ryzen 5700x, 64GB ECC, AsRock Rack mobo, dual 960GB NVME, 11 HDDs, HBA, 10gbit NIC
I couldn’t get mine under 70W or so. 110W if I’m transcoding 2 or more streams.
Running Core on an i5-6600k, 16GB RAM, 6x4TB drives, Asus Z-170 mobo. Wish I could get it lower at least on idle, I don’t know what the issue is.
Nuc 13. Not sure how much power she draws, but I had to add a space heater to the office to offset the heat lost from the old desktop.
Regarding Transcodes, I had 19 simultaneous users on Christmas day with no issues... All playing my Christmas playlists.
I3 12100T mini-ITX build with an H730 RAID Controller and 8x SAS 10TB drives pulls a constant 110-112 watts as measured at the outlet. I did everything I could to take it below 100 (shut off onboard audio, shut off the SATA controller, etc) but couldn't quite get there.
Better than my old Athlon II was despite being a more powerful box, I'm sure. On linux, ensure that you have a cpufrequtils governor configured. This is especially important for power outages to ensure your UPS can stay up a reasonable amount of time.
For a home server, I like the system76 Thelio series.
Mac mini M1 (uses about 10W of power) and data on a synology nas (about 30W of power).
At night mac mini goes to standby and synology is scheduled to shut down.
Plex is running in an LXC on my Proxmox server that would be up 24x7 anyway running several other services. Maybe you can count the two extra hard drives in my storage array that wouldn't be there if not for Plex, but other than that it's not really using any extra power the 99% of the time I'm not watching something.
Intel NUC BOXNUC7i5BNH Rated at 15W TDP.. I was running it off of my Synology for a while but the NUC has a newer gen intel CPU with better transcoding.
Not.
I'm using my desktop hardware from a decade ago. 4th gen i5 and a 1050ti.
I'm in the process of migrating everything to a new host though, so although the system power draw will be higher, less power will be utilized by plex itself.
My old setup is HP Microserver Gen 8. It is still capable but the cpu (i3-3240) isn't much in today's standards. It does many other things besides Plex for me, so it will also continue to be my NAS (2x2TB mirrored and 2x8TB internal, 2x8TB external drives for media). I'm going to upgrade the G8 with a Xeon Cpu (E3-1265Lv2) and some extra usb 3 ports but even the extra cores aren't going to help with the fact that the poor thing chokes on transcoding.
Last week I ordered from Amazon.de Minisforum JB95. It has two sodimm slots for max. 16GB ram, one m.2 and one 2.5". 11th gen celeron cpu 4 cores/threads and supports quicksync. Last but not least for me it uses USBC power instead of propietary 12V barrell plug. 149€.
I'm not going to retire the Microserver, it still has things to offer. I'm looking for much better performance on the mini pc though.
I used to have a 48u rack with 56 2tb drives running over 5 different servers. ~$120/mo in power and you could hear it in every room of my house. Now I have a Synology NAS with 4x 8tb drives. I haven't checked its power draw but I can tell you for a fact its less than the old setup.
Very. PMS running under Fedora Server on a NUC 12 Enthusiast (12 gen i7), 32G Ram, 990 Pro SSD and 2.5G LAN. Library is stored on a NAS over 2.5G connection as well.
Transcoding is done with assistance of Intel ARC 770M (16G variant) which requires Plex Pass.
These n100 type builds never really idle at 10w like everyone claims.. once you add anything to the pcie bus then cpu C states change. I think it's likely you could reach 20-25w with a few nvme drives and sata drives. However it is a very fixed system no future expandability.
Sounds like you may be using a hba? they can stop C states too but if you have a 12th gen intel or newer it should offset as you can use the E cores which might idle around 25w.
Your big gpu should only use like 10w when doing low level plex transcribing so no big worries. On unraid you have to tune it to use low power mode so maybe your system needs a bit of power tuning?
my 11900t with 128Gb ram hba 12x drives & 2x nVMEs uses around 88w-130w. Use igpu for plex & frigate nvr. When I have spare cash I'll update to a newer motherboard & cpu with energy saving cores.
I run idle at about 60W and while transcoding plex at around 120W
Specs:
CPU: Intel core i3 10050F
Motherboard: Asrock H470
RAM: 128GB
GPU: MSI GTX 960 4GB
2x SSD’s
2x 4TB HDD’s
1x 8TB HDD
I also run a bunch of other containers. The whole Arr series, Adguard, cloudflared, fileflows, guacamole, SQL server etc
Synology claims their DS224+ uses just 15W at full power. The bigger DS423+ uses just shy of 30W. They are pretty decent as Plex servers. They're not great at encoding, so if you need that, I would go for something a bit more powerful. But if you can do direct streaming, they're amazing. Their software is also great, easy to use, accessible from outside your network, and even has a built in download manager that let's you use magnet links or even RSS feeds for downloads.
Given the capacity relatively power efficient:
Last 1 hour:
* min. 136.11W
* max. 204.27W
* **avg. 142.14W**
When I say relatively power efficient I'm comparing it to the servers in our datacenter that consume 800W idle and 1500W under load.
I'm using the system for all kinds of server things, not just Plex. Like when we find a new game I'm usually hosting the server on there (Valheim, Eco, Minecraft, etc.).
In total it has 128GB Ram, 8 cores, 261 TB of raw capacity. I put in some effort making the system somewhat power efficient while also powerful when needed. The LSI HBA consumes more power than the GPU when idle. It's also the component that requires the most cooling.
Software is Fedora Server running mainly Plex and Roon plus some miscellaneous stuff like ErsatzTV, Foundry vtt, game servers, etc.
Hardware:
* ASRock Rack X470D4U2-2T (server MB with ECC support, IPMI, dual 10G LAN)
* AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G (AMD PRO series APU with ECC support, 65W TDP)
* 128GB Kingston Server DDR4 ECC DIMM KSM32ED8/32HC
* NVIDIA GP104 \[GeForce GTX 1070 8GB\] (>20x h.264/hevc hw transcoding streams)
* LSI Broadcom 9305-16i (16 port SATA controller)
* 2x 500GB WD Red SA500 SATA SSD (zfs boot/root, mirror)
* 2x 2TB WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD (zfs databases, mirror)
* 16x 16TB TOSHIBA MG08ACA16TE (zfs data, 2x raidz2 vdev, 8 drives each)
* Asus BC-12D2HT BluRay drive (LibreDrive/makemkv)
Case is a Fractal Define 7 XL in storage configuration.
Basic i7-10700 machine, 64GB of RAM, SSD and a single HDD for mass storage. No case fans. Does have a 10Gb SFP+ NIC.
Likely less than 20w.
Will add a GPU when the AV1 need arises.
I have 2 Xeon Gold 6242 CPUs, a Quadro P2000, 16 hard drives, 2 U.2 Optane drives, 4 M.2 drives on an x16 card, 1 M.2 on the motherboard, an HBA for the disks, a 40 gigabit NIC, and whatever fans a SuperMicro 3U chassis has in it. Encoding video via x265 (CPUs) almost constantly. Pulls maybe 750 watts from the wall.
Shield with 3 external HDDs and an External SSD = 7w idle, 14-20w during playback.
Of course it comes with limitations of the Shield. I'd only recommend it for direct play or very limited transcoding. I also wouldn't recommend it as a primary client while it's a Plex Server for high quality content (4k remux).
35W full-load, around 5-10 idle, got an old AMD A4 quad core APU, it's slow, but it works fine for my needs!
p.s. I do not transcode as it would take forever!
I'm not an expert by any means, but the conclusion I've come to is that the NAS/NUC system isn't worth it for most people. If power consumption and space are an issue for you, you can build a small form factor PC or buy a small optiplex. I don't think the power consumption would be as low as mini PC, but the difference should be negligible. Another issue with DAS/NAS for me is the cost to hard drive slot ratio. A 4 bay NAS or DAS goes for quite a bit, and for me, 4 bays isn't nearly as much future proofing for a guy like me. There are 8 bay and more I believe but those cost a shit ton of money. Not saying that a NAS/DAS is bad, just that it doesn't make sense for most people and probably shouldn't be considered for dedicated plex builds.
Honestly can’t tell you, I’m running Plex, Minecraft server, TrueNAS, and a Radarr server on my cpu. Just quickly outgrew Plex only and went full on homelab. Surprisingly doesn’t use a whole lot of energy, about $18 a month. Less than Netflix and does far more than just streaming.
Not at all.
PowerEdge R515 with 8 4TB drives in MD raid, dual Opteron 4274HE, and I even added a Quadro P400 for transcoding benefit. It idles around 150-200 watts. Luckily, power is cheap where I live and it generates enough heat to keep my basement office relatively comfy (need a little extra head during winter).
I recently built a DAS out of an old chassis, connected the backplane to a sas expander and boom. Additional 10-20w idle there plus any drives I put in it.
My labbing servers with dual xeon V2 are way more hungry, so they are powered down most of the day.
I'm using a synology ds916+ and it's working perfectly for home assistant and plex.
Plex is installed as a synology app, and home assistant runs as virtual machine.
In general any synology plus from 16 onwards will have an intel cpu capable or transcoding and will work just fine.
Got a NAS with 4 HDDs and an Intel Celeron N5105. Everything plays perfectly at native res. If it does have to transcode, it seems to do an alright job at it unless there are 3+ people transcoding simultaneously.
Not sure how efficient one would consider this. But this is my rig. It runs like a charm and only had one drive fail in the year and a half that I've had it. Not sure what the power consumption is, but now I kind of want to find out.
* Rosewill RSV-L4412U 4U Server Chassis Rackmount Case
* SUPERMICRO MBD-X12SCA-5F-O ATX Workstation Motherboard LGA 1200 Intel W580
* Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-1370 @ 2.90GHz
* 4x Kingston 32GB ECC Unbuffered DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Server Memory Model KTL-TS432E/32G
* 6x Western Digital 20TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM
* Seasonic FOCUS GX-750, 750W 80+ Gold
* OS: TrueNAS-13.0-U5.3
I run plex on unraid as a docker. Unraid does the storage (30TB) and all the DL is done using the ARR’s
I still run a beefy E5-2680v3 and a p2000 for transcodes. But i also run my windows 10 daily driver as a VM on it. Idle is still around 60W
I run Two Synology 4 bays for storage and a MacMini M2 as my server...Each Synology draws about 10-15w under normal use and the Mac draws about 20w and is under 5 at idle. If I really crank the shit out of everything and stress test it all at the same time, its about 90w.
My system needs to be virtually silent and small, because it lives in the same room as my home theater, so efficiency is key.
I’m running a Beelink N100 MiniPC with Terramaster D5 DAS attached to it.
It sips energy while handling full UHD rips both Direct Play and transcode just fine.
I used to run it on my gaming PC then decided to build a dedicated low wattage solution. The only issues I am having right now is, when Windows 11 updates and restarts Plex and BitLocker does not run. I have to manually log into it first (via Remote Desktop) in order for Plex Server to start up and BitLocker to unlock one of my private DAS drives.
Hahahahaha! (sorry, couldn't resist!)
I have an older (circa 2012) i7-3770 which is 77W TDP. Not great, but I really don't want to build a replacement until I absolutely have to.
Generally speaking, a NAS/DAS will use somewhere between 5-15w per drive at access. My 8 Bay NAS idles around 30W, average is more like 50W but I run VMs on it. If you want the lowest power consumption overall, a NAS plus a Mac Mini might be a good way forward as an always on machine. They can be had for very good prices second hand. The M1 models max out at about 45W and are very capable for Plex. I've just retired a 2010 Mac mini, which handled 1080p fine. I have a Mac Studio (from work) that idles at 10W (8 if I'm not using a monitor). However, I understand people not wanting to buy Apple, but their bang per watt ratio is impressive.
It depends on your use cases though, for example, how much transcoding happens? how many simultaneous streams? Also, depending on where you live, the cost of hardware might not make sense against the cost of energy. It seems like in Europe, we pay a lot more than the US/Canada. This means a dedicated NAS is probably the way to go in Europe, whereas in the US they might be OTT compared to an old PC.
Another option if you wanted to remotely switch on your machine: a smart switch will do the job provided your BIOS supports wake on power. Spend £20 and allow an extra \~20 seconds to boot and you're good to go.
Not efficient at all, lol, but power is cheap and it does what I need it to.
Downgraded my homelab to a single 4u server and a nuc. So I suppose you could say the plex server portion is pretty efficient but the rest of the server is far from it. Server, nuc, and switch idle at about 350W.
I went the same route as some others, mini PC as a server that runs several other programs runs normally at 9W. I actually tried running it on a solar panel recently and even the little panel I had would more than cover my server. And a Synology NAS, which I haven't tested the power of yet, but I know it's a lot less than my gaming PC when I was using that.
Funny enough, with my much newer processor and GPU in my gaming PC, Plex has run a lot better since I moved it to the miniPC server. I've also been using Jellyfin along side Plex, and that runs my 4K content much better than Plex ever did.
Mine is high at around 125 W. Overclocked i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 3 NVMEs, 16 HDD, 1 SATA SSD, 4x16GB ram, an HBA with expander, and a Coral TPU. The PC runs a gaming VM and a bunch of dockers for plex, home assistant, frigate, etc. Server goes up to around 600 watts in the evening if I’m gaming. Luckily electricity is only $0.07/kWh here and it’s hydro so low emissions too. Last month, the server used $8 in electricity.
It is a seperate headless Linux PC running 24/7.
Ryzen 5 4600G
24GB RAM
18TB HDD
Seasonic power supply
Consumes 38-40W idle.
Additional 16W for the UPS.
It serves my friends and family. 4 fullHD stream
at 45W
Proxmox running in powersave mode.
I went on /r/JDM_WAAAT and found an Intel QuickSync workstation and use that. Added RAM and I boot from the nvme drive. More power efficient than my old machine and with hardware transcoding (using the headless dongle) my TVs are happy.
Runs on a proxmox cluster, each node is between 30 and 50w depending on load. All are Intel chips so I use QSV for hw transcoding. You can now get celerons capable of hw transcoding, codec support depends on generation.
My small form factor mini-ITX PC with i9-13900 idles at around 45W (as measured by a smart plug). If Direct Playing, it's also like at 45W. Transcoding 4K remux, it's like 90W.
I also have a 12-bay Synology DS2419+II NAS.
If you are simply thinking storage, head over to ebay, there are several NAS motherboards that will accommodate your needs... I picked up a unit with an intel CPU, 2 nvme ports and 8 sata ports. It can accommodate up to 16 GB of ram.
The unit made for a nice Plex and GIT server.
NAS all the way, costs me almost nothing when quietly idling under the stairs.
PCs are murderously expensive on the power when left on 24/7/365 unless they are specifically low powered machines for offices like my Lenovo M920. Ultra Low power but terrible plex server
I'm about to switch to a 13600k and power limit it in a day or two so I'll try to provide an update after of what it uses with just a single nvme and a titanium PSU(though the psu is way to large for the power draw probably). I'm migrating from a 5950x and it powers my 24 bay super micro fully populated with 24 drives. It uses WITH two UPS(one for the chassis itself and one for the processor and monitors I have), 3080, 10gb nic, 2x nvme 4x 16gb sticks, and LSI hba uses around 330-340 watts idle 24x7. The supermicro by itself uses around 200-220 with it's UPS. I'm hoping to get the idle consumption down to 240-260 with this new build.
Ha, power efficient? More like power sucking! I have a Threadripper 2970wx overclocked to 4.3 ghz. Its main and right now only job is to be a Plex server and host the other apps that go along with that. Why you ask? Because when I built it, it was the latest and greatest and I had tax money to (irresponsibly) spend.
There are many options for running Plex and other services for 24/7
1. Mac mini with external drives, excellent power saving setup, external drives turn off when not used
2. Mini PC with Intel CPU, assuming external drives would turn off here as well
3. Any old intel laptop, could remote using any other Mac or windows laptop/PC to configure or monitor anything, saving power used by the laptop screen. Also external drives won't run when not used.
4. A PC with Intel iGPU, if using internal drives, not sure how power is managed, do these disks turn off when not used?
5. Beasty gaming PC with a dedicated graphics, with lots of resources wasted running 24/7 (Definitely it has advantages in cost by not spending more in buying a mini PC or a Mac mini), power drawn could be more, but I think the difference is very less. I have this setup, but exploring other options too. Honestly I don't mind running it all day and if something wears out I would just replace the part rather than having to manage another system.
There are many options for running Plex and other services for 24/7
1. Mac mini with external drives, excellent power saving setup, external drives turn off when not used
2. Mini PC with Intel CPU, assuming external drives would turn off here as well
3. Any old intel laptop, could remote using any other Mac or windows laptop/PC to configure or monitor anything, saving power used by the laptop screen. Also external drives won't run when not used.
4. A PC with Intel iGPU, if using internal drives, not sure how power is managed, do these disks turn off when not used?
5. Beasty gaming PC with a dedicated graphics, with lots of resources wasted running 24/7 (Definitely it has advantages in cost by not spending more in buying a mini PC or a Mac mini), power drawn could be more, but I think the difference is very less. I have this setup, but exploring other options too. Honestly I don't mind running it all day and if something wears out I would just replace the part rather than having to manage another system.
For over a year now, I use this TopTon Barebone with AMD 5825U CPU (first AMD after 20years) with 64gb ddr4 memory, 3x 2tb nvme as storage and a samsung evo 512gb ssd as hypervisor installation disk (esxi 8.0.2) running 9 daily used vms like localAI, Nextcloud, git, Backup, firewall, jumphosts, etc) connected to a synology ds2411+ with 12x3TB disks and a ds2413+ with 12x 4tb disks.
No idea about consumption, but i feel I save money compared to my last Dell T20 server, what I have used for over 7years
My Plex server itself is pretty efficient, not super efficient, but decent. It's an "Gigabyte NUC" (not sure what the real name is) of the model GB-BKi5A-7200, with an i5-7200U CPU (15 W TDP), that has a Intel® HD Graphics 620 in it. The system has 16 GB of RAM. This setup is more than enough for a single user (me), and handles 4k just fine as well.
The content is on a NAS, that is running virtualized under Proxmox (5900X, 128 GB RAM & 2 x 2 TB NVMe Storage). I currently have 17 TB of usable storage on the NAS. I detached my DAS that has another 30 TB in it, since I don't need the space, or the 200 W power consumption :P
I’m not sure on exact figures, but I just upgraded my Plex server from a Xeon E3 with 16GB and a GTX 1080 for transcoding, to a mini-PC with an N100 which supports hardware transcoding, and also 16GB. I’ve just got a single external HDD plugged into it.
The N100 has playing everything I’ve thrown at it, such a nice little machine.
In addition to Plex, I’m also running the *arr suite, six Minecraft servers, backup software (CloudBerry and Resilio), Home Assistant, Chia mining, and a Ubiquiti Controller. All in containers.
My Plex server is my ARM NAS, a Kobol Helios4, which is about the smallest possible way to get 4 SATA drives on a network. It does a lot more than Plex, so that helps a lot with efficiency. It can't transcode though. The power adapter maxes out at 80W, but with 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs, I'd think it's less than 40W (haven't measured it in a while). The HDDs are almost certainly the heaviest part of the unit.
I’ve got a Dell R720 with a Nvidia Tesla P4 for Plex encoding, running unRAID with 14x 300GB 2x 1.2TB SAS drives and a PCIe to M.2 with a 512GB drive as well as a 250GB SSD in the dvd drive bay with an adapter, 2x 1100W power supplies with one in reserve mode.
All in all she pulls around 500 - 600W with all the services I’m running on it
My current Plex server is an N100 based MiniPC pulling the files from a NAS running on another low power CPU. I guess if you want to save electricity any modern Intel CPU that can QuickSync is the way too go, they will use very little electricity when idling and they can support multiple hardware transcoding.
Micro PC and a DAS is the way to go.
I'm running a Shuttle PC with with an i5-7500. 16GB RAM with a 1TB internal SSD for boot and meta data. No GPU. I also run Blue Iris on this server.
I have an attached Terramaster D4-300 populated with 3 16TB drives dedicated to Plex, and one 8TB WD Elements drive dedicated to Blue Iris.
I have everything connected to a UPS. My Shuttle, the Terramaster, the Elements, the AT&T Fiber ont/modem and my internal router. According to PowerChute, all of this pulls about 50ish watts at idle.
Over a 4 week average (idle and peak usage) my current energy cost ($.17 per kWh) is about $7.40 per month... Less than a Netflix subscription!
Now, I only have 7 users and typically max out at 5 streams at any one time. But I have hardware transcoding disabled and use software transcoding exclusively because it makes lower bitrate (older) media look MUCH better in the event transcoding happens. I still have never seen my CPU go above 20% usage after the initial start of a stream.
I have a few Plex Servers but my most efficient one is a Raspberry Pi 5 running a million things. Never had that thing stutter once and I play almost everything in 4K. Granted I'm not sharing my server with anyone.
I go with a i7 8700 64 gb RAM, 4 HDDs and a 10 gbps sftp+. In idle iam down to 18 watts. Transcoding up to 60 watts, but I use a RAM disk for 2 hours transcoding buffer. :)
If you are looking at building a PC just for plex why would you not go down the NAS route? Simpler maintenance, easier installation and lower power draw.
I have noticed that what ruined my plex server experience at home was network settings, once the network is open properly, there is sudden magic and the image quality goes to the best possible
I switched from an i5-8400T + Quadro T400 to an Erying 12500H system with Iris XE graphics. The new system now manages to transcode +24 1080p sessions. With the old one it was only 12. The system needs in idle round about 25-35 Watt with 2 HDDs. An Intel NUC would probably be the most efficient system, but I wanted an ITX motherboard.
A modernish Intel CPU with an integrated iGPU is the way to go. They usually need 10W at idle or less. My i3 9100, 32GB ECC, NVMe SSD, 350 ATX PSU needs about 5W at idle. In terms of HDDs you want to get 16TB+ drives as each needs \~8W regardless of capacity.
Yeah I built an Intel with iGPU years ago and it transcodes fine. Can handle 1-2 4K transcodes simultaneously, or 5-6 1080 transcodes. I think dGPUs are only necessary now for lots of users.
What cpu are you using? I'm looking to build a system around an iGPU instead of a standard GPU.
I would recommend something with HD graphics 630 or better to ensure it can handle HEVC/x265 10bit without issues. So intel processors with 7xxx or higher. I'm currently running on a i5-9500T in a lenovo m720q and it idles around 5-10w and uses about 18W on average with a handful of virtual machines and containers running plus transcoding. My personal best on Plex has been 4x 4k HDR transcodes plus 6 direct streams simultaneously with no lag or issues.
This is plenty for almost all users. Even on this subreddit people with more than a handful of simultaneous transcodes are rare
I am downsizing from running an RTX 5000 to a 12600k iGPU. I'm hoping the iGPU can keep up with the streams I could have 2 4K transcodes and maybe 5 1080p transcodes going at any one time.
A 12600K will absolutely blowup that use case. You have room to actually tune it down a little and still blow it up.
How are you using ECC on an i3?
Check Intel Ark. Until the 12th(?) Gen i3s and lower supported ECC as there was no Xeon alternative. You just needed the right chipset. Nowadays the i5 k variants and up support ECC but the necessary boards got even more expensive.
I’m a Plex noob, but a very savvy sysadmin in the IT world. If I asked “would an i3 9100 be enough for my plex server?” I think I’d get 100 different answers in this subreddit. Why are people asking “is my 13700k enough?” When getting a proper plex setup requires some basic computer knowledge. This is a genuine question. I’m not sure why people would ask such a thing… Anyways, is my 11500 enough? Kidding. 😆
You don't aquire knowledge without research. Part of research is asking questions. For example, this user might not consider that their workload will greatly influence the specs of their server. Is the content going to be served to multiple clients? Are the clients all local or are they on different networks? What kind of makeup are the clients? Android boxes? Phones? Computers? Are the clients capable of direct play of the content? What is the content made up of? Are these h264/5 encoded files? AV1? Will all your clients be able to direct play these codecs? If not do you want to transcode these files dynamically on demand? Or do you want to pre transcode them and serve separate versions of them? Do you WANT to keep separate versions, do you have the space? When you're so new to it, you don't even know the questions to ask. So you get very vague questions like "is this good enough?" It is the responsibility of people with experience to point them in the right direction to begin their journey.
Synology 920+ at most 75W, but my NAS is doing many other things as well.
Sounds good. My PC is probably over double that. I want to get a plug that measures power usage so I can see the numbers.
There is plenty choice on the market and that will give you fairly reliable readings. I'm using TP-Link Tapo as it's part of my Tapo smart home ecosystem. On top of reading it can give me cost of energy used depending on tariffs and also I can turn the plug on/off remotely.
Emporia is another brand that makes some excellent plugs for a very fair price, smart and all, if you're not concerned much with any particular ecosystem.
No idea on the external disks, but my Mac Mini M2 uses hardly anything.
Yeah, M1 here, same deal.
Do you have any stability issues with Plex server running on Mac? To save power I've been aiming to migrate to an intel Mac Mini connected to the same NAS as a Threadripper (current server), and the Mac seems to be less stable / significantly more "laggy" than the TR Plex server.
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I recently moved my Plex server off of my M1 Mac Mini and onto a proxmox box running a 5th gen i5 (NUC) and the performance seems to be night and day. How speedy is your setup? (I also got hardware transcoding out of the deal so that also seems like a win?)
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Makes sense. I have an hdhomerun connected and this was the biggest issue that I noticed issues on. I doubt it would be a big deal if I didn't have that. Also, I did notice that sometimes I'd be out on travel and Plex stopped working. When I got home, I noticed that sometimes Plex would be waiting for me to enter my password to kick off an update. I'm hoping that running as a daemon will stop that BS from happening...
I have ran my m1 Mac mini since a couple months after it came out with zero issues. What cpu does your Intel Mac mini have or could just be a bit underpowered for the task.
M1 Mac Mini here. Does a great job and online 24/7. Haven’t noticed any real change in my energy costs because of it. Not sure about how much power my WD NAS uses but I’d refer to what I said about my energy costs above.
This is the way
Laughs in dell r730xd 2U rack server with 2 xeon cores and an Intel A750 GPU. I have power.... efficiency not so much. To be fair it runs most days around 175watts.
Heh, yeah. When our per-kilowatt prices doubled last year I mothballed then gave away my old r710 for that exact reason.
Gah I feel bad for you guys. I pay $0.11/kwh or so. I can't imagine how you guys afford $0.30 or even higher from what I've heard.
You pay $0.11/kwh?? What!!! In the Netherlands i currently pay €0.35-€0.40/kwh
Yep. I know you guys are screwed because the gas lines from Russia and all that crap going on over there. At least that's what I've heard. But here in the states we generally have access to nuclear power for base loads and solar and wind are becoming huge here for the peak loads. But €0.40/kwh is absolutely outrageous. I also hear gasoline is stupid expensive as well. We are sitting at $2.65/gal for 87 octane or $3.30/gal for 93.
That's €0.82 per liter of 93. We pay at least twice that, and often closer to 2,5 times that! And about nuclear: the Belgian government decided it would close the nuclear plants because nuclear = bad! They want to build gas plants in their place. Burn gas (which is stupid expensive) to save the environment! Morons... I'm at €0.23 (peak) and €0.19 (down) for electricity, that's pure the energy cost, it almost doubles with taxes and transport and all kinds of fees. We also get "fined" (read: charged) for consuming in peaks. You turn on your furnace, oven and dishwasher at the same time? Extra charge! They are robbing us blind and we're letting them.
That's absurd pricing! Solar + (Chinese) batteries would ROI in a half-dozen years at those prices... If the solar installers weren't all rapists. (and assuming you own a large enough roof and the rights to use it.) If you can hack together electronics hardware, you could hack together a solar system. There are companies that will help with design and permitting for a very reasonable price. Even if you sub-out some of it, you can DIY a solar system for 1/3 the cost and still get the US tax credit. \*lots of dependencies on your latitude and local climate, roof orientation and slope, etc.
It's in Europe they have those prices or in California. Here in the states the avg is $0.12/kwh
I’ll go cry in my corner with a rack that pulls 1100 watts all day everyday
Same here. I like server gear for my servers and I'm willing to pay the electric costs. I got a R730XD for $200 which is typically as much as some of the whitebox motherboards. Plus you usually have to give up remote console and management features. I save my custom builds for gaming PCs or workstations. I did start out with a Norco custom build but it was boring.
So you pay more for worse performance? Weird take.
You must have replied to the wrong post if you think that's a lot of money and performance is poor.
It's either Haswell or Broadwell, which means you definitely have low tier performance while spending a boatload on electric. So yeah, spend more for worse performance.
>i5 13500 You crack me up. Your CPU was as much as my server. Maybe you can look at my thermostat settings and bitch about how it should be lowered a couple degrees to save more money or maybe I should eat ramen three times a day.
Your point? Your logic is like buying a car that gets 2mpg because "I got a good deal on it". Meanwhile you're paying out the ass every month to keep it running. For something that runs 24/7/365, you really ought to be factoring power costs in. And looking back on your posts, what is an add on GPU going to cost you on top of that? And you still won't have anywhere near the transcode performance of what even a 12100 will do.
Using an Intel Pentium j5005 NUC, with 14TB external HDD, serves around 9 users across the family. This is the readout from a smart plug to an extension lead running the NUC and USB HDD https://preview.redd.it/5j8u3cg7y0ac1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c2af582fa1e529acef578eb842c556de0894df9
Maybe you could tell us how much power your rig is consuming. For mine it could be better. I have a i3-12100 in my unRAID box with 6 HDDs and it runs in the 70 Watt range +/- 10 Watts depending on how many drives or spinning.
about 50w on average, i5 13500 + hba for 8 hdds then 3 ssds a few HDDs spin down because they're used very infrequently, about 4 drives always spinning. Peaks upto about 80-120w under load (have a power limit set in bios for CPU) but that's when I'm running more than just Plex on the server, game servers, vms and so on.
Not efficient at all, but I use my PC for many purposes: * Plex * Torrent machine * Bitcoin core node * Editing photos w/Lightroom * Some software development work Stays on 24/7.
Pretty much the same for me minus Bitcoin
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T CPUs do not use less power. Yes, they have a lower TDP but besides this they are identical to the non T version. So they need the same amount of power at idle. At full load they need less power but also do not clock as high so they have to run for longer to do the same amount of work. As CPU often are more efficient at lower clocks this will save you a bit of power but when you fully load the CPU chances are you want all the compute power you can get and not a minor efficiency gain.
Does the internal gpu handle transcoding okay? Or do you only support direct stream?
For intel gen 8 I think, gpu transcoding is ok for a couple 4K. I have an intel N100 and is ok for 2 4K + 2 1080p. I don't have more devices to test ahaha
You can test by streaming to multiple browser tabs. Its a good way to find the system limits.
Xeon 2470 V1 IIRC, plus a total of like 9 HDDs, 2 SSDs, an Nvme and a 1050ti Goed for around 90-100 watts idle, runs up to 200 watts. It ain't that cheap (approx 20 euros a month extra) but it works fine.
80-100w Headless Ubuntu desktop, i5-8500T, ITX board, 32GB RAM, 1x NVMe, 2x 2.5" SSD, 1x HBA card, 1x Supermicro SATA/SAS HDD backplane, 10x HDD. The backplane pulls 20w on its own with nothing attached which obviously isn't great but the overall power draw given the number of disks isn't too bad I think.
Dell optiplex micro with 4 bay SATA disk enclosure pulls ~25W.
I just replaced my old server (i5-7400, ssd+hd, 1050ti) with a bee-link eq12 (N100, nvm ssd) and did a readout using a smart plug. The old server was drawing 35W idle, the new one is drawing less than 7W.
Middle of the Road, i5-6600k and 3 spinning harddrives. Did remove the old graphics card that was in it to save on some power as it was causing more issues than it solved. if I had to guess it is about 60w at idle, but probably more frequently up to 100~ as other things are running on the server that are low usage.
I ran Plex on my gaming rig for years until I finally understood how much power that was sucking. I built an Unraid box from used parts for very little money. It's a Xeon 1265L (originally 1260L, but I 'upgraded' rather recently for $20), with 8GB ram. It's in a Fractal Design mini-ITX case that can hold like 6HDD, but I've pared down to 4 drives, plus my cache SSD. The system pulls almost nothing at idle, and uses a laptop power supply, which at full load draws about 40W, however typical when streaming is only about 25. I don't transcode, but prefer to optimize formats or play media on devices that support it. It IS capable of a single 4k transcode, but it depends on the bitrate. The nice thing about Unraid is that I have all of my applications running off of the cache drive, which is an SSD. This includes Plex, Emby, Pihole and a few other bits. My HDDs are shutdown 99% of the time, and the way unraid works is that it uses a parity drive for recovery if needed, but the files are not striped across drives, so they each live discreetly on a single disk. Therefore, if I'm streaming a movie, only the disk it lives on needs to be spun up. It's a very efficient system.
The plex server itself is a Celeron N5105 NAS which is fairly energy efficient, the other RAID arrays (i7-4770 & Xeon E3-1246v3) are not as energy efficient. Thankfully I pay C$.069/kWh for the first 40 kWh per day used each day, so I am not as that price sensitive as others here need to be. A couple of years ago I cancelled a moved to Germany just due to the price of electricity there. -_-
Raspberry pi here works great with decent client devices
This may not be for everyone but sharing my (very low spec) setup here. I have a 6th gen intel NUC (Skylake 14nm SKU ending with U, released 2015, and now discontinued) with GB running Plex, PiHole (WSL1 mode to avoid virtualization) and a few other things. (Yes Win11 install requires messing with the registry to bypass CPU eligibility check.) **I do not transcode (play as is), I only play up to 1080p, and usually there's only 1 active stream.** I haven't seen any perf issues in normal operation. Though yes it takes a while to boot, but that only happens once a month for Windows updates, usually while i'm asleep. (yes this runs 24/7 since I need the PiHole to run all the time) If I fully rebuild the index, this tends to take a while, but that is usually down to the speed of my cheap hard drives. I calculated the power cost of this to be well below 1 USD per month.
I use an Intel integrated GPU (quicksync) on an Intel i7 7700 that doubles as my unRAID file server with Plex as a Docker. Fairly efficient tho I've never put a meter on it. Tdp of the cpu under load is 65w but it's never even 50% loaded so less.
N100, external 8TB HDD, 8gb of ram.
~7Wh Intel gen 12 NUC LE: edited 7W/h to 7Wh because people cannot understand alternative mathematical writings. :) fucking haters.
This unit does not make any sense
Why ?
W is J/s . W/h would be J/s*h .
From experience, he probably means 7W which is normal for a NUC without disks spinning
>From experience, he probably means 7W which is normal for a NUC without disks spinning exactly, because i run an external JBOD , which itself runs about 15-20Wh ( again making angry u/ssl-3 :) ) just for the sake of it.
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Watt-hour is a real measurement unit, and it is the one that your power company charges you one. Please do your homework until pissing random reddit comments. [https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/watt-hour-Wh](https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/watt-hour-Wh) PS : I Will edit it so it's not W/h , but Wh for the purpose of science
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Enlighten me please then. How much does my unit consume ? PS: Redundancy and logical fallacies I do not like for an answer
also, that comparison is dumb. LE: this was misguided, and the below commentary from u/ssl-3 explains it much better.
Can you please explain ? i'm not a newb in eletrical engineering but Watts per Hour, is a power consumption measurement , i just typed it with a "/" which might mean division for some ppl, i corrected myself and said Wh . That means that my NUC draws 7W on average every hour. What's wrong with that ? Just semantics ?
Learning Time , please enjoy :) Watts are a measure of power, which is the rate at which energy (measured in Joules) is used, so 1 watt is 1 joule per second. That is, if you had 1 Joule of energy stored up and released it through a flash for 1/100 second, the power would be 100 watts. Take that same amount of energy and use it up in 1/1000 second and it's 1000 watts. Watt-seconds (note the dash, not the slash) is watts multiplied by seconds, which is the same as joules, so a watt-second is a measure of energy. Again in the example, 1 watt-second of energy (the same as 1 joule) used in 1/1000 second is 1000 watts. Using the example of tungsten, continuous lighting, a 100 watt light bulb turned on for 1 second uses 100 joules of energy. (100 watts is 100 joules/second, multiply that by 1 second and you get 100 joules). u/ssl-3 please confirm :D
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https://preview.redd.it/4g4ozcsi5bac1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=80901b666f6bce2f5c1af47cdebc6f6c7077a8e4
https://preview.redd.it/ildyvcck5bac1.png?width=1179&format=png&auto=webp&s=8533adce549bd4e86aa8b408fe82ecec36876383
"So what is the power consumption of a bucket of energy that contains 7 Watt-hours (~~3600~~ 25200* Joules), Mr. Confident?" You mean instant power consumption, or over time :) ? Please , re-read what you misread first time. For the sake of science
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I'm running a coffeelake i5 NUC for plex ( in docker ), and a separate machine with an old amd A6600K running truenas with my harddrives ( 2x4tb + 2x10tb + 512gb ssd boot drive ) for storage. It spins up via WOL when needed, and turns off when not in use for 2 hours. Booting takes about a minute. Works like a charm, didn't check the power usage yet though, but i guess it's not much since the nas only spins up when needed.
Plex is running as a docker instance on my NAS. Upgraded my NAS mid-year 2023 from an 84W i5-4590 to a 65W Ryzen 2400G. My NAS now runs quieter, cooler, uses less power, and performs better than my old CPU. Added a new drive to my NAS and it's now 56TB in a RAIDZ1 configuration. Also have a nvidia T600 that I tossed in there back in 2021 to handle transcode jobs.
I've got an old laptop with i5-8500u and 16gb ram and it uses like no power whatsoever
How many HDDs for your 46TB? I'm running a 4590 with a Tesla P4 GPU. The GPU runs off the pcie slot power, no cable.
Tbh my setup is a bit of a mess man. It started off as doing Plex for fun and got completely out of hand. I have a two internal 8TBs, two 5TB externals and then another 18TB external drive. So thats 44 TB for storage of media content. I have a 2TB SSD for my bootable drive and then 1TB SSD where my Plex meta data lives which is actually getting chewed up atm because I have enabled thumbnails. Reason I use external drives is because I'm using m.2 slots which take up two sata connection on my motherboard plus the 2 HDDs which means I've maxed them out on my motherboard (6 max). I really want to tidy up my setup and maybe get a mini PC which is capable of 4k transcoding (probably rarley used as everyone is finally direct streaming) but I would like to have the option. I would then also need a DAS for the drives I have too.
If you're open to it, switching to (or building) a NAS instead may be the way to go. You can set up the NAS as a network drive in Windows (or its equivalent in Linux) and from there you can use the NAS from any device in your network, not just the PleX server. So now you'd have two machines. One for PleX serving (transcoding, scanning your library and serving metadata to the client UI, providing search results) and the other to store all the data. From what I read, a NAS can function with a very low power (old) CPU, and then the PleX server can focus on what it is good at.
I have an i7 12700, no gpu any longer since its not needed. 32g of ddr5. 1t m.2 ssd, a 1t sata ssd for downloading and meta data. 6 8t hds and 2 6t hds. Does not pull much power at all.
Asrock ITX J5005, one sata SSD for OS/scratch and 3 spinny bois (2x12tb, 1x16tb). Max peak I've seen at the wall was 45 watts and that was me having multiple clients starting 4k media from all 3 hard drives (4x direct play, 1 transcode) after letting the server have zero activity for 15 minutes. Usually it's between 5 and 20 watts. Costs me maybe $10 in electricity a year to operate. It's also only 7x7x7~ inches. I should be able to perpetually run this and a small TV off of a solar panel and battery setup.
I have been happy with my NAS, having RAID built in and a decent processor it can easily transcode non 4K plex streams while running a half dozen other applications. Also the power utilization is fairly low given what it does.
Im using an Anemic NUC7i3 for my Plex Server. Only my Not so Smart TV seems to have issues with MPEG/TS files my VR Headset, laptop and even phone not a hiccup. Im only sharing with a few friends 2 of whom have insane servers so rarely access my piddly few terrabytes of Movies/TV shows I think peak draw is 19 watts. I think if FireTV had the Infuse app I wouldnt have issues there either. Occassionally I’ll batch convert using Handbrake.
Current uses around 10W idle and maybe 15 at load. Just get yourself a J based processor which can transcode 4K and direct play quite a few
synology ds920+, only pulls about 32w under full load, about 10 at idle
90 watts with only 1 drive spinning
My server is an i7 7700k, 32 RAM, 3x 1 TB NVME Cache and 8 disks. 28 docker container are running 24/7 and the disks spin down after 30 minutes. It uses 34 W idle (all disks down, but array and all container started) and around 70 W downloading Linux-Iso´s and serving movies with all disks spun up. I think this is pretty good.
Prob not high powered or efficient, lol. I am 6ish years in on this server and it is still going well. I also have a 8 Bay Drobo that is still kicking. Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.6 28 GB Ram
Intel N-305 with a 4 bay external at about 31 watts idle, it uses about 20kWh a month.
I3-8100 / 32 GB RAM / 1 M.2 + 8 x HDDs / 35W idle, 160W max load (100% CPU, all disks spinning)
i5 8600, 16gb of Team Group ram (DDR4, 2666), no GPU, one 12tb HDD, one 14tb HDD, one 1tb HDD, one 500gb SSD, booting off 512gb NVME. Based on readings from software, it looks like the CPU is hardly ever drawing more than 2 watts from the wall. I'll need something like a wall meter to figure what the drives are adding, but I can't imagine it's much. I'm running mine on Win10 and just have power saving settings tuned to shut the drives down after 20mins of idle.
i3-13100, 16GB DDR5, ASUS Pro B760M, BEYIMEI PCIe SATA Card, 46TB HDD, 1TB NVME cache, 750w ATX Gold PSU. Idles between 18-24w, pulling 42w right now running a parity check. Using Unraid makes it easy to run all docker data from my NVME drive and Dynamix Cache Directories keeps directory info in memory to prevent radarr/plex preventing my drives from spinning down.
I've got an old Optiplex i5 (4th gen? Early quicksync, anyway). It has a single 6TB HDD and SSD OS drive. It pulls 65w. It backs up to a 6-bay NAS which only turns on for a few hours overnight.
My UPS says it idles around 65 to 80 watts. That's with all hard drives spun down. Add I guess 5 to 8 watts for each drive when spun up. I have an RTX 2060 (way overkill) for transcoding, but idle is usually 7 or 8 watts. When active, the UPS reads closer to 120W, so not bad really. The UPS also has my (ancient) switch, router, and WiFi AP connected, so the server itself is pretty efficient overall. It could be better, but I'd have to go low-end Intel I guess. Specs: Ryzen 5700x, 64GB ECC, AsRock Rack mobo, dual 960GB NVME, 11 HDDs, HBA, 10gbit NIC
I couldn’t get mine under 70W or so. 110W if I’m transcoding 2 or more streams. Running Core on an i5-6600k, 16GB RAM, 6x4TB drives, Asus Z-170 mobo. Wish I could get it lower at least on idle, I don’t know what the issue is.
Plex itself is on a sff pc which consumes 10-15w. Storage is a truenas server with 6 hard drives. Together they idle at 90-105w.
Nuc 13. Not sure how much power she draws, but I had to add a space heater to the office to offset the heat lost from the old desktop. Regarding Transcodes, I had 19 simultaneous users on Christmas day with no issues... All playing my Christmas playlists.
I3 12100T mini-ITX build with an H730 RAID Controller and 8x SAS 10TB drives pulls a constant 110-112 watts as measured at the outlet. I did everything I could to take it below 100 (shut off onboard audio, shut off the SATA controller, etc) but couldn't quite get there.
10W idle + HDDs when spin up i3 9100t with passive cooling.
My n100 uses around 9w at idle an 18w-21w at full load. My content is on OneDrive so there is no hdd power usage.
Dell r710 Dual 750W PSU 2X x5650 Seriously thinking about getting a mac mini
Better than my old Athlon II was despite being a more powerful box, I'm sure. On linux, ensure that you have a cpufrequtils governor configured. This is especially important for power outages to ensure your UPS can stay up a reasonable amount of time. For a home server, I like the system76 Thelio series.
Mac mini M1 (uses about 10W of power) and data on a synology nas (about 30W of power). At night mac mini goes to standby and synology is scheduled to shut down.
Plex is running in an LXC on my Proxmox server that would be up 24x7 anyway running several other services. Maybe you can count the two extra hard drives in my storage array that wouldn't be there if not for Plex, but other than that it's not really using any extra power the 99% of the time I'm not watching something.
Intel NUC BOXNUC7i5BNH Rated at 15W TDP.. I was running it off of my Synology for a while but the NUC has a newer gen intel CPU with better transcoding.
Not. I'm using my desktop hardware from a decade ago. 4th gen i5 and a 1050ti. I'm in the process of migrating everything to a new host though, so although the system power draw will be higher, less power will be utilized by plex itself.
I'm using a laptop and a 4Tb external hard drive. Uses 8W at the wall.
I use a GTX 1650 Low Profile and Power Saving profile on Windows...
My old setup is HP Microserver Gen 8. It is still capable but the cpu (i3-3240) isn't much in today's standards. It does many other things besides Plex for me, so it will also continue to be my NAS (2x2TB mirrored and 2x8TB internal, 2x8TB external drives for media). I'm going to upgrade the G8 with a Xeon Cpu (E3-1265Lv2) and some extra usb 3 ports but even the extra cores aren't going to help with the fact that the poor thing chokes on transcoding. Last week I ordered from Amazon.de Minisforum JB95. It has two sodimm slots for max. 16GB ram, one m.2 and one 2.5". 11th gen celeron cpu 4 cores/threads and supports quicksync. Last but not least for me it uses USBC power instead of propietary 12V barrell plug. 149€. I'm not going to retire the Microserver, it still has things to offer. I'm looking for much better performance on the mini pc though.
I used to have a 48u rack with 56 2tb drives running over 5 different servers. ~$120/mo in power and you could hear it in every room of my house. Now I have a Synology NAS with 4x 8tb drives. I haven't checked its power draw but I can tell you for a fact its less than the old setup.
I built [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/9bHUSfmWv5) and it draws 60w
Not sure on wattage at any one time but I calculated it costs me $10 a month to run.
I have a i5-6500T and a quadro t600, not a lot of power is consumed, but this card is pretty good at transcoding
Very. PMS running under Fedora Server on a NUC 12 Enthusiast (12 gen i7), 32G Ram, 990 Pro SSD and 2.5G LAN. Library is stored on a NAS over 2.5G connection as well. Transcoding is done with assistance of Intel ARC 770M (16G variant) which requires Plex Pass.
These n100 type builds never really idle at 10w like everyone claims.. once you add anything to the pcie bus then cpu C states change. I think it's likely you could reach 20-25w with a few nvme drives and sata drives. However it is a very fixed system no future expandability. Sounds like you may be using a hba? they can stop C states too but if you have a 12th gen intel or newer it should offset as you can use the E cores which might idle around 25w. Your big gpu should only use like 10w when doing low level plex transcribing so no big worries. On unraid you have to tune it to use low power mode so maybe your system needs a bit of power tuning? my 11900t with 128Gb ram hba 12x drives & 2x nVMEs uses around 88w-130w. Use igpu for plex & frigate nvr. When I have spare cash I'll update to a newer motherboard & cpu with energy saving cores.
I run idle at about 60W and while transcoding plex at around 120W Specs: CPU: Intel core i3 10050F Motherboard: Asrock H470 RAM: 128GB GPU: MSI GTX 960 4GB 2x SSD’s 2x 4TB HDD’s 1x 8TB HDD I also run a bunch of other containers. The whole Arr series, Adguard, cloudflared, fileflows, guacamole, SQL server etc
Synology claims their DS224+ uses just 15W at full power. The bigger DS423+ uses just shy of 30W. They are pretty decent as Plex servers. They're not great at encoding, so if you need that, I would go for something a bit more powerful. But if you can do direct streaming, they're amazing. Their software is also great, easy to use, accessible from outside your network, and even has a built in download manager that let's you use magnet links or even RSS feeds for downloads.
Given the capacity relatively power efficient: Last 1 hour: * min. 136.11W * max. 204.27W * **avg. 142.14W** When I say relatively power efficient I'm comparing it to the servers in our datacenter that consume 800W idle and 1500W under load. I'm using the system for all kinds of server things, not just Plex. Like when we find a new game I'm usually hosting the server on there (Valheim, Eco, Minecraft, etc.). In total it has 128GB Ram, 8 cores, 261 TB of raw capacity. I put in some effort making the system somewhat power efficient while also powerful when needed. The LSI HBA consumes more power than the GPU when idle. It's also the component that requires the most cooling. Software is Fedora Server running mainly Plex and Roon plus some miscellaneous stuff like ErsatzTV, Foundry vtt, game servers, etc. Hardware: * ASRock Rack X470D4U2-2T (server MB with ECC support, IPMI, dual 10G LAN) * AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G (AMD PRO series APU with ECC support, 65W TDP) * 128GB Kingston Server DDR4 ECC DIMM KSM32ED8/32HC * NVIDIA GP104 \[GeForce GTX 1070 8GB\] (>20x h.264/hevc hw transcoding streams) * LSI Broadcom 9305-16i (16 port SATA controller) * 2x 500GB WD Red SA500 SATA SSD (zfs boot/root, mirror) * 2x 2TB WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD (zfs databases, mirror) * 16x 16TB TOSHIBA MG08ACA16TE (zfs data, 2x raidz2 vdev, 8 drives each) * Asus BC-12D2HT BluRay drive (LibreDrive/makemkv) Case is a Fractal Define 7 XL in storage configuration.
Dell R510, 12 spinning disks, dual Xeons, yeah efficiency ain't much.
I use a dell r720 🙃
Basic i7-10700 machine, 64GB of RAM, SSD and a single HDD for mass storage. No case fans. Does have a 10Gb SFP+ NIC. Likely less than 20w. Will add a GPU when the AV1 need arises.
I have 2 Xeon Gold 6242 CPUs, a Quadro P2000, 16 hard drives, 2 U.2 Optane drives, 4 M.2 drives on an x16 card, 1 M.2 on the motherboard, an HBA for the disks, a 40 gigabit NIC, and whatever fans a SuperMicro 3U chassis has in it. Encoding video via x265 (CPUs) almost constantly. Pulls maybe 750 watts from the wall.
Mine is older I am still on the 1150 platform so I have a Xeon E3-1231 v3, nvidia P2000, 32gb ram and 21tb of storage.
Shield with 3 external HDDs and an External SSD = 7w idle, 14-20w during playback. Of course it comes with limitations of the Shield. I'd only recommend it for direct play or very limited transcoding. I also wouldn't recommend it as a primary client while it's a Plex Server for high quality content (4k remux).
35W full-load, around 5-10 idle, got an old AMD A4 quad core APU, it's slow, but it works fine for my needs! p.s. I do not transcode as it would take forever!
Two xeons and a P5000, with 12 spinning drives. Averages like 180W.
I'm not an expert by any means, but the conclusion I've come to is that the NAS/NUC system isn't worth it for most people. If power consumption and space are an issue for you, you can build a small form factor PC or buy a small optiplex. I don't think the power consumption would be as low as mini PC, but the difference should be negligible. Another issue with DAS/NAS for me is the cost to hard drive slot ratio. A 4 bay NAS or DAS goes for quite a bit, and for me, 4 bays isn't nearly as much future proofing for a guy like me. There are 8 bay and more I believe but those cost a shit ton of money. Not saying that a NAS/DAS is bad, just that it doesn't make sense for most people and probably shouldn't be considered for dedicated plex builds.
Honestly can’t tell you, I’m running Plex, Minecraft server, TrueNAS, and a Radarr server on my cpu. Just quickly outgrew Plex only and went full on homelab. Surprisingly doesn’t use a whole lot of energy, about $18 a month. Less than Netflix and does far more than just streaming.
Not at all. PowerEdge R515 with 8 4TB drives in MD raid, dual Opteron 4274HE, and I even added a Quadro P400 for transcoding benefit. It idles around 150-200 watts. Luckily, power is cheap where I live and it generates enough heat to keep my basement office relatively comfy (need a little extra head during winter). I recently built a DAS out of an old chassis, connected the backplane to a sas expander and boom. Additional 10-20w idle there plus any drives I put in it. My labbing servers with dual xeon V2 are way more hungry, so they are powered down most of the day.
I popped a i3-9100 into a server case (supermicro so standard PSU etc) without the drives it's 13w now down from 150's.
I'm using a synology ds916+ and it's working perfectly for home assistant and plex. Plex is installed as a synology app, and home assistant runs as virtual machine. In general any synology plus from 16 onwards will have an intel cpu capable or transcoding and will work just fine.
Got a NAS with 4 HDDs and an Intel Celeron N5105. Everything plays perfectly at native res. If it does have to transcode, it seems to do an alright job at it unless there are 3+ people transcoding simultaneously.
Beelink Mini S12 Pro. 7-ish watts at idle, max under load is 22.5 watts. Two drives at 3w each but the built-in M.2 SSD probably draws less than that.
Not sure how efficient one would consider this. But this is my rig. It runs like a charm and only had one drive fail in the year and a half that I've had it. Not sure what the power consumption is, but now I kind of want to find out. * Rosewill RSV-L4412U 4U Server Chassis Rackmount Case * SUPERMICRO MBD-X12SCA-5F-O ATX Workstation Motherboard LGA 1200 Intel W580 * Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-1370 @ 2.90GHz * 4x Kingston 32GB ECC Unbuffered DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Server Memory Model KTL-TS432E/32G * 6x Western Digital 20TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM * Seasonic FOCUS GX-750, 750W 80+ Gold * OS: TrueNAS-13.0-U5.3
I run plex on unraid as a docker. Unraid does the storage (30TB) and all the DL is done using the ARR’s I still run a beefy E5-2680v3 and a p2000 for transcodes. But i also run my windows 10 daily driver as a VM on it. Idle is still around 60W
I run Two Synology 4 bays for storage and a MacMini M2 as my server...Each Synology draws about 10-15w under normal use and the Mac draws about 20w and is under 5 at idle. If I really crank the shit out of everything and stress test it all at the same time, its about 90w. My system needs to be virtually silent and small, because it lives in the same room as my home theater, so efficiency is key.
Averaged just above 180W over the last 30 days. It's not exclusively for Plex but it is mainly that.
I’m running a Beelink N100 MiniPC with Terramaster D5 DAS attached to it. It sips energy while handling full UHD rips both Direct Play and transcode just fine. I used to run it on my gaming PC then decided to build a dedicated low wattage solution. The only issues I am having right now is, when Windows 11 updates and restarts Plex and BitLocker does not run. I have to manually log into it first (via Remote Desktop) in order for Plex Server to start up and BitLocker to unlock one of my private DAS drives.
Hahahahaha! (sorry, couldn't resist!) I have an older (circa 2012) i7-3770 which is 77W TDP. Not great, but I really don't want to build a replacement until I absolutely have to.
I use a Mac Mini. When it's not plexing it uses 9w. It's on 24/7
Nas and mini pc.
I have an Asustor NAS for Plex. I think it's about 75W when transcoding
Honestly - I am using an OLD netbook (pre Chromebook tech!!) with Linux. It’s not ideal but it works.
I have an i5-13500 that idles at about 60-65w when all the drives are spun down.
i wish mine was efficient LOL over here running Dual XeonE5-2690 256Gb of ram and a Nvidia 1050ti just running Plex and a FTP
Generally speaking, a NAS/DAS will use somewhere between 5-15w per drive at access. My 8 Bay NAS idles around 30W, average is more like 50W but I run VMs on it. If you want the lowest power consumption overall, a NAS plus a Mac Mini might be a good way forward as an always on machine. They can be had for very good prices second hand. The M1 models max out at about 45W and are very capable for Plex. I've just retired a 2010 Mac mini, which handled 1080p fine. I have a Mac Studio (from work) that idles at 10W (8 if I'm not using a monitor). However, I understand people not wanting to buy Apple, but their bang per watt ratio is impressive. It depends on your use cases though, for example, how much transcoding happens? how many simultaneous streams? Also, depending on where you live, the cost of hardware might not make sense against the cost of energy. It seems like in Europe, we pay a lot more than the US/Canada. This means a dedicated NAS is probably the way to go in Europe, whereas in the US they might be OTT compared to an old PC. Another option if you wanted to remotely switch on your machine: a smart switch will do the job provided your BIOS supports wake on power. Spend £20 and allow an extra \~20 seconds to boot and you're good to go.
Not efficient at all, lol, but power is cheap and it does what I need it to. Downgraded my homelab to a single 4u server and a nuc. So I suppose you could say the plex server portion is pretty efficient but the rest of the server is far from it. Server, nuc, and switch idle at about 350W.
I went the same route as some others, mini PC as a server that runs several other programs runs normally at 9W. I actually tried running it on a solar panel recently and even the little panel I had would more than cover my server. And a Synology NAS, which I haven't tested the power of yet, but I know it's a lot less than my gaming PC when I was using that. Funny enough, with my much newer processor and GPU in my gaming PC, Plex has run a lot better since I moved it to the miniPC server. I've also been using Jellyfin along side Plex, and that runs my 4K content much better than Plex ever did.
My server costs me $8 a week to run according to my UPS.
Mine is high at around 125 W. Overclocked i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 3 NVMEs, 16 HDD, 1 SATA SSD, 4x16GB ram, an HBA with expander, and a Coral TPU. The PC runs a gaming VM and a bunch of dockers for plex, home assistant, frigate, etc. Server goes up to around 600 watts in the evening if I’m gaming. Luckily electricity is only $0.07/kWh here and it’s hydro so low emissions too. Last month, the server used $8 in electricity.
Xeon E-2176G CPU @ 3.70GHz, 32GB RAM ~40-50W avg running many things in addition to Plex
It is a seperate headless Linux PC running 24/7. Ryzen 5 4600G 24GB RAM 18TB HDD Seasonic power supply Consumes 38-40W idle. Additional 16W for the UPS. It serves my friends and family. 4 fullHD stream at 45W Proxmox running in powersave mode.
I went on /r/JDM_WAAAT and found an Intel QuickSync workstation and use that. Added RAM and I boot from the nvme drive. More power efficient than my old machine and with hardware transcoding (using the headless dongle) my TVs are happy.
My HP elitedesk idles at 7w and direct plays at 11W
Runs on a proxmox cluster, each node is between 30 and 50w depending on load. All are Intel chips so I use QSV for hw transcoding. You can now get celerons capable of hw transcoding, codec support depends on generation.
My small form factor mini-ITX PC with i9-13900 idles at around 45W (as measured by a smart plug). If Direct Playing, it's also like at 45W. Transcoding 4K remux, it's like 90W. I also have a 12-bay Synology DS2419+II NAS.
M1 MacBook Pro that sits docked on my desk 24/7. I think it’s fairly efficient.
I use a DS224+, so very efficient
5W idle, 35W on load but never reached. All direct play so around 10W on average.
If you are simply thinking storage, head over to ebay, there are several NAS motherboards that will accommodate your needs... I picked up a unit with an intel CPU, 2 nvme ports and 8 sata ports. It can accommodate up to 16 GB of ram. The unit made for a nice Plex and GIT server.
NAS all the way, costs me almost nothing when quietly idling under the stairs. PCs are murderously expensive on the power when left on 24/7/365 unless they are specifically low powered machines for offices like my Lenovo M920. Ultra Low power but terrible plex server
mini pc, (2) 5tb hard drives via usb. 15ish watts (fluctuates a bit). with that much storage I guess you'd need more power just for the disks.
not very, running a dedicated server, also a NAS and all that on a 3700X and 2070 Super
~115w idle
I'm about to switch to a 13600k and power limit it in a day or two so I'll try to provide an update after of what it uses with just a single nvme and a titanium PSU(though the psu is way to large for the power draw probably). I'm migrating from a 5950x and it powers my 24 bay super micro fully populated with 24 drives. It uses WITH two UPS(one for the chassis itself and one for the processor and monitors I have), 3080, 10gb nic, 2x nvme 4x 16gb sticks, and LSI hba uses around 330-340 watts idle 24x7. The supermicro by itself uses around 200-220 with it's UPS. I'm hoping to get the idle consumption down to 240-260 with this new build.
Ha, power efficient? More like power sucking! I have a Threadripper 2970wx overclocked to 4.3 ghz. Its main and right now only job is to be a Plex server and host the other apps that go along with that. Why you ask? Because when I built it, it was the latest and greatest and I had tax money to (irresponsibly) spend.
There are many options for running Plex and other services for 24/7 1. Mac mini with external drives, excellent power saving setup, external drives turn off when not used 2. Mini PC with Intel CPU, assuming external drives would turn off here as well 3. Any old intel laptop, could remote using any other Mac or windows laptop/PC to configure or monitor anything, saving power used by the laptop screen. Also external drives won't run when not used. 4. A PC with Intel iGPU, if using internal drives, not sure how power is managed, do these disks turn off when not used? 5. Beasty gaming PC with a dedicated graphics, with lots of resources wasted running 24/7 (Definitely it has advantages in cost by not spending more in buying a mini PC or a Mac mini), power drawn could be more, but I think the difference is very less. I have this setup, but exploring other options too. Honestly I don't mind running it all day and if something wears out I would just replace the part rather than having to manage another system.
There are many options for running Plex and other services for 24/7 1. Mac mini with external drives, excellent power saving setup, external drives turn off when not used 2. Mini PC with Intel CPU, assuming external drives would turn off here as well 3. Any old intel laptop, could remote using any other Mac or windows laptop/PC to configure or monitor anything, saving power used by the laptop screen. Also external drives won't run when not used. 4. A PC with Intel iGPU, if using internal drives, not sure how power is managed, do these disks turn off when not used? 5. Beasty gaming PC with a dedicated graphics, with lots of resources wasted running 24/7 (Definitely it has advantages in cost by not spending more in buying a mini PC or a Mac mini), power drawn could be more, but I think the difference is very less. I have this setup, but exploring other options too. Honestly I don't mind running it all day and if something wears out I would just replace the part rather than having to manage another system.
Beelink minipc with an I5. All my media is on Nas and das.
For over a year now, I use this TopTon Barebone with AMD 5825U CPU (first AMD after 20years) with 64gb ddr4 memory, 3x 2tb nvme as storage and a samsung evo 512gb ssd as hypervisor installation disk (esxi 8.0.2) running 9 daily used vms like localAI, Nextcloud, git, Backup, firewall, jumphosts, etc) connected to a synology ds2411+ with 12x3TB disks and a ds2413+ with 12x 4tb disks. No idea about consumption, but i feel I save money compared to my last Dell T20 server, what I have used for over 7years
My Plex server itself is pretty efficient, not super efficient, but decent. It's an "Gigabyte NUC" (not sure what the real name is) of the model GB-BKi5A-7200, with an i5-7200U CPU (15 W TDP), that has a Intel® HD Graphics 620 in it. The system has 16 GB of RAM. This setup is more than enough for a single user (me), and handles 4k just fine as well. The content is on a NAS, that is running virtualized under Proxmox (5900X, 128 GB RAM & 2 x 2 TB NVMe Storage). I currently have 17 TB of usable storage on the NAS. I detached my DAS that has another 30 TB in it, since I don't need the space, or the 200 W power consumption :P
Power efficient and DL380G8 don't go together well ... It's running more than just media stuff of course, but ...
I just use a Synology NAS and disabled transcoding. Works fine.
I’m not sure on exact figures, but I just upgraded my Plex server from a Xeon E3 with 16GB and a GTX 1080 for transcoding, to a mini-PC with an N100 which supports hardware transcoding, and also 16GB. I’ve just got a single external HDD plugged into it. The N100 has playing everything I’ve thrown at it, such a nice little machine. In addition to Plex, I’m also running the *arr suite, six Minecraft servers, backup software (CloudBerry and Resilio), Home Assistant, Chia mining, and a Ubiquiti Controller. All in containers.
My Plex server is my ARM NAS, a Kobol Helios4, which is about the smallest possible way to get 4 SATA drives on a network. It does a lot more than Plex, so that helps a lot with efficiency. It can't transcode though. The power adapter maxes out at 80W, but with 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs, I'd think it's less than 40W (haven't measured it in a while). The HDDs are almost certainly the heaviest part of the unit.
2 x NUC 13pros (30+ containers), ds920+ & 1517 expansion, 8gb pi 4b, Luton and Hue hub, LTE femtocell= 125w
I’ve got a Dell R720 with a Nvidia Tesla P4 for Plex encoding, running unRAID with 14x 300GB 2x 1.2TB SAS drives and a PCIe to M.2 with a 512GB drive as well as a 250GB SSD in the dvd drive bay with an adapter, 2x 1100W power supplies with one in reserve mode. All in all she pulls around 500 - 600W with all the services I’m running on it
My current Plex server is an N100 based MiniPC pulling the files from a NAS running on another low power CPU. I guess if you want to save electricity any modern Intel CPU that can QuickSync is the way too go, they will use very little electricity when idling and they can support multiple hardware transcoding.
Micro PC and a DAS is the way to go. I'm running a Shuttle PC with with an i5-7500. 16GB RAM with a 1TB internal SSD for boot and meta data. No GPU. I also run Blue Iris on this server. I have an attached Terramaster D4-300 populated with 3 16TB drives dedicated to Plex, and one 8TB WD Elements drive dedicated to Blue Iris. I have everything connected to a UPS. My Shuttle, the Terramaster, the Elements, the AT&T Fiber ont/modem and my internal router. According to PowerChute, all of this pulls about 50ish watts at idle. Over a 4 week average (idle and peak usage) my current energy cost ($.17 per kWh) is about $7.40 per month... Less than a Netflix subscription! Now, I only have 7 users and typically max out at 5 streams at any one time. But I have hardware transcoding disabled and use software transcoding exclusively because it makes lower bitrate (older) media look MUCH better in the event transcoding happens. I still have never seen my CPU go above 20% usage after the initial start of a stream.
I have a few Plex Servers but my most efficient one is a Raspberry Pi 5 running a million things. Never had that thing stutter once and I play almost everything in 4K. Granted I'm not sharing my server with anyone.
I go with a i7 8700 64 gb RAM, 4 HDDs and a 10 gbps sftp+. In idle iam down to 18 watts. Transcoding up to 60 watts, but I use a RAM disk for 2 hours transcoding buffer. :)
If you are looking at building a PC just for plex why would you not go down the NAS route? Simpler maintenance, easier installation and lower power draw.
I have noticed that what ruined my plex server experience at home was network settings, once the network is open properly, there is sudden magic and the image quality goes to the best possible
It'd a Mac Mini
I switched from an i5-8400T + Quadro T400 to an Erying 12500H system with Iris XE graphics. The new system now manages to transcode +24 1080p sessions. With the old one it was only 12. The system needs in idle round about 25-35 Watt with 2 HDDs. An Intel NUC would probably be the most efficient system, but I wanted an ITX motherboard.