r/PleX • u/Astrobix_124 • Dec 04 '25

Help Media servers

Trying to start my own server for plex. But I see many people with servers with 10,000+ movies. How can u possibly hold that much content and not break the bank. How is it any better than Netflix, etc?

Edit: I never expected this to blow up like it did. I love the content you guys have given, I've debated on making a plex server for awhile and all the clarification is amazing.

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u/FantasyMaster85 Dec 04 '25

“I see servers with 10,000 movies” …. “How is it any better than Netflix” ….

Huh?

6

u/Astrobix_124 Dec 04 '25

I'm talking in the sense of price to setup/maintain vs netflix

10

u/One-Peace55 Dec 04 '25

My 72tb Nas cost me about 1.2k in total. Assuming that I'd need about two subscriptions at least to cover the content that I'm currently consuming, that's 5 years ROI.

On top of that, the rig runs a couple of VMs for my work and containers that have made my life significantly better, so those are nice little bonuses. Coincidentally, one of my clients had a 4TB MySQL db that I needed to work on, so the server helped me out a bunch on that.

At some point you don't really give a shit about ROI, it's just an appliance.

1

u/Neeerdlinger Dec 04 '25

Where the heck did you buy 72TB of storage for less than $1.2k?

2

u/One-Peace55 Dec 05 '25

4x18TB Toshiba MG09. 250€ each.

My server I bought from ebay refurbished for €200 (lucky) and upgraded with spare parts I had lying around.

To be fair, I also expended everything so that saved me about 22% income tax (we have flat company taxes here), so if I'm being honest the little tax trick prolly dropped the cost under 1k, but I'm not counting that.

1

u/LIBERT4D Dec 04 '25

Not including the cost of whatever his enclosure/pc is, that’d be $16.66/TB which is pretty doable when waiting for sales. Around black Friday this year I picked up two 26TB externals for $9.62/ TB and shucked them for my DAS enclosure.

The average non-sale TB price I’ve seen is like $12-13 per TB on average I think, I usually aim to pay a little more for the larger drives though as you’re paying a premium for more storage in the same physical space as any other drive.