NAS, Plex Server

[Crispin]

Hi all,

I've been imagining all the areas I might be able to put a PINE64 to good use around the home, and so far I'm predicting I'm going to need at least half a dozen of them! Sounds like a few fun weekends ahead...

Does anyone know if there is the ability/opportunity to use a PINE64 to run a small NAS operating system (and connect it up to a few USB hard drives)? Or is this not a good use-case, perhaps because a SATA connection is needed?

The other idea I had was to run Plex Server on a PINE64 as a back-end (and of course use another PINE64 for a front-end) - does anyone know if that would be possible? Or would it suffer from the same lack of SATA speed for media retrieval? I was hoping it might be fine for 1-2 simultaneous streams?

[MasterC]

As far as the front-end, purely from a speed POV and not hardware/driver capabilities POV - Your network speed will likely be your bottleneck. Depending on which software you use to render your streaming media, it may not even use the local storage to "cache" the streamed data. It might stream to an area in RAM and then be retrieved from there. You can also do things like NFS mounting, in which case it will render directly from your NAS drive(s). Would USB be too slow on the backend... probably? Again, depends on how you've encoded, bitrates, what else will be using the drives at the same time, etc. USB drives make for nice, cheap, decent backup (but not mission critical data - RAID does that) on a NAS setup, because they're big and cheap and nobody cares that they're relatively slow. Could you possibly stream a 1-1 file (just basic streaming over NFS), yeah if it was a low enough bitrate file.

I hope that helps!
-Chad

[Lost13]

I hope that the pine will have enough power to run a plex server, but I would not be surprised if it couldn't.  I know that comparing the pine to a pi is not really a good comparison but the pi did not run rasplex very well without overclocking the processor.    I am not really sure how the network port is hooked up on the pine, but on the pi it would bottleneck arround 77 mb/s and slow down further if writing to the sd card. 

The interesting thing to try would be to cluster a pine's together to allow to transcode either more streams or at a higher bitrate.  You might want to check this out:

https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/178320...lex#latest