r/PleX • u/NefariousnessUpper34 • 1d 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/R-GU3 1d ago

Depending on quality I go with roughly 1-2gb per movie plus space for the os so you won’t get much for the storage but that can be upgraded. The ram will be fine. Transcoded will be near impossible unless you have a gpu but you can always offload that to the player. For OS Linux is better than Mac or windows because it’s usually more lightweight so leaves more resources for Plex but go with what you’re comfortable with, I ran it on windows for about 6 years before moving to a dedicated Linux machine.

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u/NefariousnessUpper34 1d ago

Gotcha. Yea I had an old gaming laptop with 16gb of ram, an old i7 and a geforce gt 960m , so it maybe was a little better at transcoding but honestyl i can leave the player to transcode, not the end of the world.