Jonsbo N6

[Enquiries]

I bought the Jonsbo N6 case from Ali Express got delivered yesterday, am planning for Home Storage for media server using Plex . I don't know were to strat

I had a Plex server Life time , looking to operate the NAS with unraid also will buy the life time plan

[ed]

irst, choose your hardware platform. For an Unraid based media server with Plex, you want a CPU with strong single core speed and integrated graphics if you want hardware transcoding. Intel Core twelfth or thirteenth gen chips are ideal because they have Quick Sync for Plex. A Core i5 12500 or 13500 is often enough, but you can go i7 if you want more overhead. Pair that with a board that has at least one full length PCIe slot for ten gig networking and one slot for a large NVMe expansion card if you plan to grow beyond the onboard M2 slots.

Second, decide on your drive layout. The N6 can take a very large number of drives, so reaching two hundred terabytes is easy. Something like eight to twelve drives in the fourteen to twenty two terabyte range works well. Unraid does not need matching sizes, so you can scale slowly. Start with a few large drives for parity plus data, then expand over time.

Third, pick your boot and cache devices. Unraid boots from a USB drive, but you will want two NVMe SSDs for fast app data and Plex metadata. Even a pair of two terabyte SSDs is more than enough.

Fourth, add a ten gig network card if your motherboard does not have it built in. QNAP, Intel, or Asus ten gig cards all perform well and the N6 has plenty of space for airflow.

Once the hardware is ready, the setup order is simple.
Install Unraid on a USB drive.
Assign one or two large drives as parity.
Assign the rest as data drives.
Create a cache pool with your NVMe SSDs.
Install Plex through the Community Apps plugin.
Point your media shares to the HDD array and Plex metadata to the SSD pool.

From here Plex will run smoothly and Unraid will manage the storage with very little maintenance.