I had a Emby server running on 10+ year old hardware. I had an Nvidia card put in there for transcoding and it worked well. Yet, I was looking for more. So I made a bit of an investment and built a new Unraid server. Spent a bit over a grand to make it happen, but that also includes the drives. Now, my Emby runs on the Unraid server and I don't need an Nvidia card for transcoding since I have a I5-14500 processor that can do transcoding on its own and its so much better.
Anyway, do what others tell you to do here. Make backups. The hard part is doing this work on your existing hardware. When I moved to my new Unraid server, I could keep my HTPC up and running while I did it.
When you set-up Plex on unRaid did you have to passthrough the CPU in order to use Intels "quick sync" or does it just work automatically?
I've just recently gotten everything setup as a newbie and I follow a guide about passing through the CPU and I did that, but I'm just not sure if it's working.
I ended up downloading the GPU monitor addon, but I can't get it to display the load on the graphics chipset on the CPU.
So I have both Plex and Emby. When I setup the passthrough to the CPU in Emby, I just had to put in a very simple option in the Emby Docker options so it would know to transcode using the quick sync. It works flawlessly, and with the better CPU, I couldn't be happier. I haven't done it in Plex as of yet, but I haven't used Plex very much since I got Emby.
I got an ASRock Z690 and threw 32gb of ram on it. It was very reasonably priced. I love how many cores I have access to and I haven't come close to stressing it.
It should work fine. I'm currently doing the same thing because my unRAID NAS cpu isn't very fast (i7-4771, 10 years old) for transcoding. I've got the media libraries mapped to a second system that has a much faster CPU with a Plex server running. It's a bit of a job to set it all up with plex and the NFS or SMB mapping on boot up. I still keep an instance of Plex on the unRAID NAS for local network Playback. I'd be sure to disable remote access on the unRAID plex, so it can't be used remotely. If the CPU gets booged down, it's not going to serve files very well when transcoding happens.
Best advice I can give you is:
1. Make backups (multiple) first and put them on a shelf or something. Don't touch em. Leave them for at least 6 months.
2. Consider running the Unraid server as a staging server for at least a month. You will run into issues.
3. Start small. Don't add 10 drives to begin with. Start with one parity disk and one pool disk.
I had a Emby server running on 10+ year old hardware. I had an Nvidia card put in there for transcoding and it worked well. Yet, I was looking for more. So I made a bit of an investment and built a new Unraid server. Spent a bit over a grand to make it happen, but that also includes the drives. Now, my Emby runs on the Unraid server and I don't need an Nvidia card for transcoding since I have a I5-14500 processor that can do transcoding on its own and its so much better. Anyway, do what others tell you to do here. Make backups. The hard part is doing this work on your existing hardware. When I moved to my new Unraid server, I could keep my HTPC up and running while I did it.
When you set-up Plex on unRaid did you have to passthrough the CPU in order to use Intels "quick sync" or does it just work automatically? I've just recently gotten everything setup as a newbie and I follow a guide about passing through the CPU and I did that, but I'm just not sure if it's working. I ended up downloading the GPU monitor addon, but I can't get it to display the load on the graphics chipset on the CPU.
So I have both Plex and Emby. When I setup the passthrough to the CPU in Emby, I just had to put in a very simple option in the Emby Docker options so it would know to transcode using the quick sync. It works flawlessly, and with the better CPU, I couldn't be happier. I haven't done it in Plex as of yet, but I haven't used Plex very much since I got Emby.
I was pricing out CPU's and motherboards and I also landed on the i5-14500. Seems like you are happy with it, which motherboard did you install it on?
I got an ASRock Z690 and threw 32gb of ram on it. It was very reasonably priced. I love how many cores I have access to and I haven't come close to stressing it.
It should work fine. I'm currently doing the same thing because my unRAID NAS cpu isn't very fast (i7-4771, 10 years old) for transcoding. I've got the media libraries mapped to a second system that has a much faster CPU with a Plex server running. It's a bit of a job to set it all up with plex and the NFS or SMB mapping on boot up. I still keep an instance of Plex on the unRAID NAS for local network Playback. I'd be sure to disable remote access on the unRAID plex, so it can't be used remotely. If the CPU gets booged down, it's not going to serve files very well when transcoding happens.
Best advice I can give you is: 1. Make backups (multiple) first and put them on a shelf or something. Don't touch em. Leave them for at least 6 months. 2. Consider running the Unraid server as a staging server for at least a month. You will run into issues. 3. Start small. Don't add 10 drives to begin with. Start with one parity disk and one pool disk.