ENHANCE!

Good day everyone,

I have both good news and bad news.

First, the good news.

I will be upgrading the server utilized for Plex playback sessions! That’s right, we will be enhancing our dated setup to better serve you.

The upgrade in question comes in the form of one neat package, that being a Dell PowerEdge R730xd (LFF) however there are several sub level upgrades that will bring the service to you faster than ever.

Two Samsung EVO 860 solid state drives will be in a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy which is where the operating systems (virtualized instances) will reside.

To make the most of our fiber connection which is currently converted into multiple 1 gigabit copper links, I have procured an HPE 530SFP+ 10 gigabit fiber channel card which will make use of a virtual Pfsense instance to act as a router and DHCP server. This fiber channel card will have it’s firmware modified to sync at a friendlier 2.5 gigabits per second enabling us to take full advantage of the 1.5 gigabits per second download and 940 megabits per second upload where it matters most.

Plex as well as the download client will reside on a Ubuntu 20 instance to eliminate the need to run fiber to an additional card on another server.

That’s it for operating systems and applications but the ever growing need for additional storage is an ongoing battle which needs addressing.

That being said, this server boasts a fantastic 12Gb/s SAS RAID card and 12 slots for 3.5 inch magnetic hard drives. These slots will be initially unpopulated but over time I intend to add 4 x 10TB Seagate Exos hard drives to get off on the right foot with a RAID 6 array.

So here’s to the future, may it be bold and bright!

Now, the bad news. Naturally, with all these changes, some downtime is in order. Tentatively scheduled to begin tomorrow evening, I will provide regular updates on progress via Twitter @NobreaksPlex.

 

Stay tuned!

 

-LightSpeedTaco