To SSD or not to SSD that is the question

My current daily driver desktop is becoming my new Plex server as the laptop I have Plex installed on is slowly failing.

The desktop specs are as follows:
i3570K
16 Gigs of Ram
HD7950 (Might remove as its really not needed)
500 Gig Samsung 850 Evo
2x 1TB Seagate HDD
MSI Motherboard

I know two of the storage drives are being removed and repurposed. I just need to know which one. My Plex server will be storing media on my NAS. The reason I choose a seperate box for Plex is purly for transcoding. I find with Live TV recording it requires a bit of transcoding. Also at least one of the TV serries I have is not in the correct format for Roku’s. So I see transcoding when thats being played. So any who, should I keep the SSD in the machine or should I just install on a standard mechanical disk? I know Linux installs diffrently than Windows, at least from expirence back in the day. Seperate SWAP partition and all. I dont want to have excessive writes on the SSD to kill it faster. I have read some posts that suggested SSD’s and Linux are still a bit more involved.

There is an option in the PLEX to increase transcode buffer.

If your machine is only going to trancode, there is no reason for the use of any SSD.

Well I figured it out. Did some research and it seems it’s easy to get the SSD to work. Might as well use the SSD I have since i have no other use for it. At least I know it will boot quickly.

SSD’s are cheap and much faster. I don’t forsee issues with linux support by using a regular commodity ssd.

I would SSD, and ask question “why would you not ssd?” :wink:

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Modern SSDs are fine for a transcoding box. Even QLC would be OK, assuming your Plex isn’t streaming a ton at once. I wouldn’t use SSDs to store media as they’re still much more expensive.

Regarding transcoding, if you have plex pass it can hardware offload transcodes too.

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No more than 3 streams at a time. I didn’t do hardware transcoding because A) it said in the option it could reduce quality, B) was told it might not work well in my i5 3570K. Was told intel didn’t really work on transcoding until Haswell.

like @Ruffalo said, SSD’s would work, the nature of media drives is more akin to Write Once, Read Many, which doesn;t thrash the drive write cycles, but Flash is still like 10x to 20x more expensive than rust, and the actual read speed of flash would be wasted unless you seek / skip in movies a lot. Like a LOT.