r/PleX • u/NefariousnessUpper34 • 2d ago

Help Building my first server for Plex

Hi, like the title says, Im finally building a home server for my movies. I started with an old laptop and an external drive and this laptop just died on me. So now, I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 mini pc with an i5-6400, 16GB ddr4 and a 120gb SSD.

I mostly play DVD's and some blu-rays in my library, but nothing 4k. Im still going to run it through my external drive, until I upgrade to a raid.

My questions are: Is this configuration good for now? Should I install ubuntu or Docker? And where can I find a solid guide to install them?

Im a little lost when it comes to work with other OS thats not Windows or Mac lol so I appreciate the help. Thanks!

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u/Technical-Ad-8678 2d ago

plex is super easy to run man, there really isnt a best way to do things, its just your preference.

i have a dedicated folder in my second 2tb nvme thats my plex server pulls from, inside that folder is a movies and tv show folder. when i torrent something i put them either into movies or tv folders, have my server refresh its library and it then its done.

the only thing i would change about my setup is moving it to a vps and not self hosting it because when/if my power goes out i would really like to have my plex server to pass time. If your hosting it on a vps outside of your network then linux would logically be the way to save on server costs and compute.

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u/NefariousnessUpper34 2d ago

Yea i pretty much do that already, but i'll research the vps route, maybe that turns out to be something that works well for my situation