BUILD Plex on SSD advise

[HippoBaro]

I'm currently building my first FreeNas box based on all the advises that I found on this forum.
So first of all, thanks all of you for being this great community!

My current build is as follow :

CPU : Xeon E5 2670
RAM : M393B2G70QH0-YK0 (16GB DDR3 1600 ECC x 1)
MOTHERBOARD : Supermicro X9SRL-F
CASE : Fractal Design R5

I went for the E5 2670 because the main purpose of this box will be Plex, and because there're so cheap right now.
I have been benchmarking and torturing the CPU/RAM for about a week now, to a point where I am pretty confident with the stability of the system and my cooling strategy (10 memtest pass and about 24h of burning with stress -c 16).

I am now ready to buy all the storage for my new FreeNas and I am considering buying a single SSD for storing my jails. Here are my main assumptions about this :

• It would make navigation through my Plex collection very zippy (loading artwork on my Synology can take up to 10 seconds when scroling fast)
• I would make concurrent transcoding performance much better (as far as I have heard)
• Since Plex is storing data to an SQLite db under the hood, it would make it perform better overall.

I am wrong ?

For the SSD I was considering buying a Samsung SSD SM951-NVMe 128 GB with a M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter. Is this a good idea ? This SSD is powered with the NVMe protocol. I have seen on this forum that FreeNas support it, but could anyone confirm that I'm not doing things wrong ?

Because my Plex collection is generated data, I was thinking enabling replication from the SSD stripe pool to the main pool (RAIDZ2) would be enough redundancy.

Is this something that you guys would recommend doing ? Have you got any advises regarding the best way of doing this ?

 

[kjnicoletti]

I am considering buying a single SSD for storing my jails

Here's my thoughts on your idea: overkill performance and no redundancy.

Some people find satisfaction in the stats of their hardware and others want the final product to work for the intended purpose. If you identify with the later group, then use multiple spinning drives in a single vdev - performance will be more than adequate for Plex to feel snappy. Comparing to a Synology is apples to oranges - the Synology is probably an Atom processor which is very under-powered for Plex. Just switching to a real CPU (as you've already done) will fix this problem.

All drives will fail at some point - if you care about reliability you need multiple drives in an array. Having your entire system fail and need to be rebuilt from the ground up 2 years from now because of a single drive failure doesn't sound like a good server design to me. Replication will not solve this limitation - your Plex server will be offline and need to be completely rebuilt (even if that's from a local "backup" on a different pool).

 

[nightshade00013]

Agreed, the spinning drives in a ZFS raid will be quite fast. I was running a single 3TB WD green drive until I could get all the drives for my array which is now a 7 drive raidZ3 comprised of HGST 4TB NAS drives and plex artwork load times are very fast. I can scroll through on a local device and everything will load in less than a second easily no matter how fast I jump down. Even though plex will officially live on the spinning drives FreeNAS will pre load a lot of the information into ARC that is needed to make it work and multiple spindles is faster than a single one. Yes a SSD will be faster but it will be underutilized at a much greater cost. You would be better off getting a pair of SSD's and using them as your mirrored boot devices. Transcoding will also not likely benefit from the SSD either since you will be reading the movies from spinning drives and it is largely CPU dependant.

https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html

Digital Black 2TB (WD2001FYYG) 7200 rpm SAS drives
1x 2TB a single drive 1.8 terabytes ( w=131MB/s , rw= 66MB/s , r=150MB/s )

6x 2TB raid6, raidz2 7.1 terabytes ( w=425MB/s , rw=171MB/s , r=424MB/s )

7x 2TB raid7, raidz3 7.1 terabytes ( w=393MB/s , rw=169MB/s , r=423MB/s )

Samsung 840 256GB SSD (MZ-7PD256BW) drives
1x 256GB a single drive 232 gigabytes ( w= 441MB/s , rw=224MB/s , r= 506MB/s )

As you can see honestly not much of a gain over the raidZ2 in their charts and while your proposed setup will be slightly faster it will also add a lot of complexity to the build with multiple parts that could be a potential point of failure. The spinning drive array speed will vary with multiple factors including spindle speed, size and number of drives but this should remove any fears you may have about it being fast enough to handle plex. You could also do more drives to get more speed or use multiple vDev's.

Digital Black 2TB (WD2001FYYG) 7200 rpm SAS drives
12x 2TB raid6, raidz2 17 terabytes ( w=507MB/s , rw=256MB/s , r=660MB/s )

 

[HippoBaro]

Thanks both of you for your opinions.

Some people find satisfaction in the stats of their hardware and others want the final product to work for the intended purpose. If you identify with the later group, then use multiple spinning drives in a single vdev - performance will be more than adequate for Plex to feel snappy.

If you think it's overkill, then it probably is.
The plan was to go with 5 x 4TB WD Red in RaidZ2 + 1 SSD for the jails, but I probably won't do that.

The reason behind my initial thinking this is that on my last NAS (the Synology), the artworks would take ages to show up, but htop did't show me any major CPU activity, so I thought it could be the drive acces time wich sucks to get tons of little files, hence the idea for the SSD.
And also the fact that I am spending big money on this (compared to a Synology), so I thought : if a 100 $ makes it much better, then it's worth the cost.

 

[mjt5282]

I am running PMS on SSD-pair of mirrored Intel S3700 100Gb SSD's, 563 movies, 75 TV shows. PMS loads artwork quickly, my SSD run both my jails, including the aforementioned jail and a MRTG jail i setup to track bandwidth consumption on my routers and servers. Happy with the design, the S3700 is pricey but so far rock solid. i symlinked the PMS data directory into a separate dataset. My main film/tv data is on a raidz2 pool.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I would love to see someone measure the performance difference. I suspect the plex client and network will be the bottleneck when it comes to loading content. I don't think a ssd will make a difference for most use cases.

 

[icsy7867]

I am running a raidz1 on my build (4x 1.5TB WD Green drives) and I have about 6 total jails, one of which is Plex via the plugin.

I am currently experiencing 0 studdering or buffering loading times, internally or externally (unless my network connection is weak), on multiple devices. Including a FireTV, FireTV Stick, web brower, and my cellphone using 4G (For testing, I dont make a habbit of watching entire movies over my 4G connection!).

I like my jails living on the ZFS raiding storage, and I am currently getting 100+ MB/s over my gigabit lan, and art work and info seems to load fairly instantaneously. Storing the files on an SSD drive seems like overkill to me. But if you have the money and you want it go for it. Creating a crontask or rsync to copy the data to your raid nightly, or weekly would be quite easy to do.

I have considered a synology or qnap in the past in my search for a reliable NAS, and I remember running into this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit#gid=314388488

I am not sure what device you are using, but most of them seem to have limitations:

May transcode some low bitrate 720p media
Will install but well below minimum Plex Spec
CPU Below Minimum Recomended Spec, Transcoding Not supported
Transcoding is not supported in ARM NAS units
etc...

I would be willing to bet the Synology CPU has issues keeping up, and not an issue with the raided drives.

 

[toadman]

I too agree with the advice above. There are two parts to the Plex experience. (1) Interaction with the client (which if course is talking to the server), and (2) playback (direct or transcoding).

For (2) while transcoding you will need a lot of CPU, esp if you have multiple transcode sessions going on simultaneously. So your 8 core selection is fine. It may still be overkill depending on how many transcode sessions you'll have. But I'd go quad core at a minimum.

For (1) spinning disks will be more than adequate. I run a plex server in a VM that sits on the same pool as the media library and the Freenas VM. So plex is going over the network to get it's media files, either in it's .vmdk for the library, or for the media file itself. It works flawlessly. The only issue can be the client itself. I tend to use Roku boxes. Something like the Roku 3 is extremely snappy. The Roku 2 is noticably slower, but no so much so that it's unusable, esp when scrolling through the library. (If you try something like searching on a youtube channel, then yes, it's too slow.)

SSD would be overkill for you I think. Won't hurt obviously. :)

 

[HippoBaro]

Thanks all of you !

SSD would be overkill for you I think. Won't hurt obviously. :)

I won't run my jails on an ssd, based on your advises. I don't want to pay for something that going to be underutilized, so hhds will do just fine.

I am not sure what device you are using, but most of them seem to have limitations:

The box was a DS212+ if I remember (it died months ago)
I have no idea why the artworks took so long time on my previous NAS (I used it only with Plex Theater, so DirectPlay all the time). The library was not so big, about 400 movies.

But your experience reassured me that it'll be just fine with my new rig :)

For the record there will be about 10 users on my plex server, but obviously it'll be very rare that the 10 all connect at the same time.
In such case, I hope my box will keep up anyway !