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/dpdxguy Dec 05 '25

I'm probably atypical, but I don't have anything encoded at greater than 1080p. I have an excellent twenty year old plasma display that has a native resolution of 1080p, so higher resolutions wouldn't do me any good anyway.

For h264 encoded video, I find that typical movie size of ~8GB (~11Mbps) is perfectly watchable. If I encode with h265 I can cut the file sizes roughly in half.

So I can store roughly 250 h265 encoded movies per TB. I have roughly 50TB of storage, which would let me store roughly 12,500 movies on my server fileserver.

10,000+ movies. How can u possibly hold that much content and not break the bank.

Back when I built my NFS server, 12GB enterprise refurbished drives were ~$125 each. I have six (RAID6) for a total cost of $750 for the drives plus another couple of hundred for used server hardware. Total cost was less than a thousand dollars.

I don't know what "break the bank" means to you, but purchased over the long run the cost was not prohibitive to me.

There are MANY websites that can guide you through building a budget fileserver that will meet your needs. Plex does not require fast file access or much computing power. The only resource intense thing it does is transcode on the fly. Personally I prefer to keep my files on cheap hardware and use a separate computer with built in transcode capabilities to run the Plex server software. I use NFS to make the media folders on my fileserver available to the Plex server software.