Media Server with Plex

[tabun]

Hey guys!
I am revisiting this topic after a year because my storage needs have grown and I want to use Plex as the backend with a Kodi interface on my Firestick 4k’s throughout the house.

First, my library consists mainly of 1080p movies with a few 4k and some older 480p TV shows. I have two 4k TV’s and three 1080p TV’s and I only plan on watching my movies in their native resolution on my TV’s via Kodi on Firestick 4k’s.

I currently have an older Dell 1700 Workstation with a 10TB HDD that has my movies on it and an external 10TB that does a nightly backup of my library.

I have two additional new 10TB HDD’s and my goal is to set up a new server that will run Plex and decode everything before it is sent to my Firesticks on a RAID 0 array of two 10TB drives with a second RAID 0 array that does nightly backups. (Redundancy isn’t needed-just a backup)

My questions are: 1. Is using a second, separate RAID 0 array for backup going to work for me? 2. What CPU and/or Graphics card would I need to do 1-3 decodes at a time on Plex? The Firestick does a pretty good job doing all of the work right now except on some of the 10bit, 480p movies , where there is some stuttering on one of my 1080p TV’s and occasional hiccups/brief pauses on movies from time to time. I figured the Firesticks are struggling to keep up at times and it would just be better to decode at the server and stream in the native resolution. I bought a Plex Pass to accomplish this and am willing to purchase an unRAID license if that’s what I need to do.

I really like the simplicity of the Amazon Firestick remote and Kodi interface so I want to keep using them. I realize I might not even be asking the right questions here so can someone steer me in the right direction? I would like to accomplish this as cheaply as possible. I saw some builds with a Ryzen 5 2600 and Quado P2000 but I’m not sure I even need that much power tbh.

[2FA]

2. What CPU and/or Graphics card would I need to do 1-3 decodes at a time on Plex? The Firestick does a pretty good job doing all of the work right now except on some of the 10bit, 480p movies , where there is some stuttering on one of my 1080p TV’s and occasional hiccups/brief pauses on movies from time to time. I figured the Firesticks are struggling to keep up at times and it would just be better to decode at the server and stream in the native resolution. I bought a Plex Pass to accomplish this and am willing to purchase an unRAID license if that’s what I need to do.

If all your media is in common codecs, then all of it should be directly played and not transcoded (transcoding is slow). Additionally, the type of client used also dictates which codecs can be directly played or transcoded. I personally don’t transcode anything since I use the Plex Media Player PC app which has the best codec support.

[tabun]

OK, that’s what I was thinking.

As far as the RAID setup goes…Is this something I can accomplish with unRAID? (or even try?) In my mind, it would make perfect sense to have a RAID 0 array for my content, and a second RAID 0 array that possibly doesn’t even spin up until scheduled for a nightly backup. I DID think of using RAID 10, but that offers redundancy without a backup, which isn’t my goal.
Alternately, I could have a separate, cheap 218j NAS to do the backups if that’s the only way I can accomplish my goal, but it seems a bit of a waste to have to do it that way.