First build, and debating swapping already

[Kazuma]

I have a lot of questions but I feel this is the best place to start as I'm someone who usually learns best by doing, breaking, then doing again until right.

I've spend the last 40/48hrs working on building my FreeNAS plex with W10 vm all on my old system and I'll be building a desktop using my decent laptop.

The old desktop is:

i7-990x
asus rampage iii formula
24Gb Ram Corsair Vengeance
4x4tb seagate barricuda
1050gtx
560 twinfrozr ti
rosewill 1300w PSU Gold
B-2 Spirit case (massive 10+ drive bays)
(I think that is all that matters)

I'm looking at getting because it is newer and might do better for multiple offsite users in plex, but would take some capitol to upgrade memory.

https://raleigh.craigslist.org/sys/d/raleigh-dell-optiplex-computer-9020-igb/6764071012.html

What are your thoughts as to my best option? I'd rather not spend it but if it is a substantial upgrade I will.

Thanks,
Kazuma

 

[SweetAndLow]

Don't run plex in a vm. Use a jail it will be much better performance and much better experience. VM's on freebsd are a "fun" feature but not really the best solution. Plex on freebsd is missing the groove music feature but I think that is all.

Performance wise for the CPU these two boxes are going to be very similar when it comes to plex. Both are not great for freenas since they are missing ecc memory support. Your asus Rampage motherboard has lots of extra stuff that is not needed for freenas and has a intel nic that i have not seen before, so that is strange. I would say both systems are pretty equal from what I can tell.
Something like the Dell T30 is a good choice if it has enough drive locations for you. Cpu might not be powerfull enough depending on the number of plex streams you are interested in.

 

[Kazuma]

I'm going to be running plex in a Jail, but I'm having issues with getting permissions right or something. The VM is for some other software that I don't know the rules about mentioning directly.

I'm only expect 3-4 people at once right now and I'm probably capping it at 1080 for now too.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Your isp upload will probably be the bottleneck in that case. Not really any rules about talking about software stuff. Almost everything can run in a jail. Check out https://www.freshports.org for a repo of all the software available on freebsd. I run sonarr, radarr, transmission, plex, unifi5 and tautulli in jails.

 

[Kazuma]

Well for my VPN I have a sub to PIA for torrenting so I was going to map the download folder to the plex jail so I only need windows for qbit with PIA since I already paid for it. But if there is a better option, I'm open for that.

I've been debating getting a pcie nic anyways.

 

[SweetAndLow]

There are people who have setup vpn's in jails using openvpn. I'm not an expert in that area but if you search the forums I bet there are walkthroughs. If you use a jail you would have to share a dataset via smb and map that to a drive in windows. Then mount that same dataset in the jail. It's a little bit of a complicated setup but not supper complicated.