I found that Synology DSM is actually pretty awesome to use to control my Synology NAS.
Of course you're not in a great position for this because you're on non-Synology hardware.. but! According to my in-depth research consisting of a single google search, there seems to be a well-maintainer but officially unsupported option for you to run Synology DSM on your own hardware: https://xpenology.org/
YMMV. I would probably not do this as a beginner, but if you do it before you have any important data on there, well, I'd say give it a shot, it's a fun learning experience (as long as you have the ability to invest some learning time into this).
I get not wanting something you’ve previously struggled with, but just FYI re: Linux it should be pretty straightforward:
setup a mount point owned by the plex user via ‘chown’
set your fstab to optionally mount the external drive (if present) at specified mount point (check out the external device section: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fstab)
I use Ubuntu Server for a pretty similar use case. Been working fine for me. If you're installing plex as a snap package, then it can only read/write to home. So you need to mount your hdds under home somewhere. Other than that, I've had no issues with permissions. But I did follow guides online (which are plentiful) so perhaps the permissions issued were dealt with in the procedures I followed
Just because it’s my personal choice and no one has advocated for it yet, I think Unraid is really a very good choice for personal media servers, NAS servers, and homelab setups. Here are the things I think it does very well:
Very easy-to-reason-about and easy-to-use data redundancy. I have one parity drive in my array, and five data drives. If one of these drives fail, I can use the parity drive to recover all of the lost data (with the caveat that if another drive fails during the recovery, I might be borked, which is why I also have offsite backups)! There’s a UI for managing all of this and I think the documentation and forums explain it all quite well, even for someone who’s new to RAID/redundancy setups/etc.
Most or all software is installed via docker containers. Again, there is a nice UI that I think makes this easier to learn about and utilize than just relying on the command line on a standard Windows or Linux server. And that’s coming from someone who uses container tech on a daily basis as part of my job and prefers the command line in literally all other contexts!
Built in Wireguard server, again with a nice little configuration UI. Wireguard is a very fast, very secure VPN tunnel technology, and it’s often recommended as the way (either directly our via a wrapper like Tailscale) to connect to your server from outside of your network. Personally, I’ve found that having Unraid’s UI for Wireguard has meant that I’ve never had the need to set up Tailscale; it’s easy enough to just add new clients with Unraid!
It’s very simple to expand the size of your data array, or replace/upgrade drives. I just upgraded my parity drive, added my old parity drive back as a data drive, and replaced my cache drive with an SSD. I did the mechanics (physically adding the new drives to my server) the day before leaving for vacation, and did all of the actual data transferring and configuration connected over VPN from my phone at the airports while traveling.
If you or anyone else has any thoughts or questions about Unraid, don’t hesitate to ask!
Do some research into running all of your homelab stuff on top of a hypervisor like proxmox and see if it sounds like something that'd interest you. Gives you a lot of options for snapshots, backups, and containerization of services while still being able to spin up windows and linux virtual machines if you have the resources.
Leaves the most room open for expandability (adding another NUC and making a cluster is a fun project down the line) and playing around in my opinion.
I pulled an old Windows box to fill in as my home server after my RPi left my possession and it was a pain. More or less same use case as yours. I couldn't truly run it as headless since every month it would update and boot to the "thanks for updating, click skip to actually use your computer." Not to mention the unnecessary bloat.
So for my (more) proper setup, I started off with Ubuntu (for RPi, use Raspbian) then set up my drive to mount in the home folder on login, something like home\mnt\media. Then just pointed Plex to that folder. Not the most sophisticated solution on its own, but it was quick enough to set up while being a more stable build than Windows, no issues running it headless once it was all set up.
I personally use proxmox and bought an lsi controller in eBay. I use OMV for my nas with a union file system and snapraid. I then use Ubuntu server for my game server and docker apps. Plex/jellyfin are in an LXC container and I pass in the integrated graphics card for transcoding.
I then have other VMs I'll spin up and use when needed. It's all managed via the Web gui. And it fits my needs perfectly.
So I personally use UnRaid and love it. It has a few drawbacks like any other system but it holds its promises in terms of performance and data reliability.
If your use case is really that narrow, I wouldn't worry about much, honestly. Install Ubuntu/Mint XFCE on your Nuc, attach your drives, install Plex and your torrent software.
If you want, you can still install Docker at a later time and use container variants of your software.
Have you installed Plex on Linux, but used your NTFS drives with it? That could explain your pain. I had some odd issues with NTFS and Linux as well.
If you go Linux, use Linux related formats such as ext4, btrfs, xfs and alike.
If you go Windows, use NTFS.
I would use Linux for servers because of raw performance. Windows just eats too much resources on its own.
The package managers make it quicker and simpler to install and update software.
SystemD makes it simpler to manage/autostart services.
However, you are now at a point where a lot of homelab folks were in the beginning.
Just want to setup a small system to host movies (either via Plex, Jellyfin or simple SMB) on a nuc/RPi
It would be nice if I could store all my important personal documents (contracts, bank statements, etc) on a file share at home
Get paranoid about the hoarded data
Install Unraid/TrueNas on used pc hardware anyway eventually
Suddenly 40 active docker containers
I should buy a small server rack
(I'm trying to talk myself out of stage 6 :D)
It might be worth to plan ahead a bit if you see yourself reaching stage 2-3.
For example rather investing in used PC hardware, a small PC case and a RAID card than to buy a USB Raid solution for a lot of money to extend the NUC.
My Plex server is running win 10 ltsb and has only seen downtime when I added drives to it. My personal advice is stick with what you know unless you are looking to do this as a project and not as an excuse to fiddle with stuff. If you don't know linux well and you are looking for a trouble free experience then win 10 will do you fine. If on the other hand you want to use this as an opportunity to learn a different OS then by all means give it a go on linux. Ubuntu is probably one of the easier distros for newbies.
I found that Synology DSM is actually pretty awesome to use to control my Synology NAS.
Of course you're not in a great position for this because you're on non-Synology hardware.. but! According to my in-depth research consisting of a single google search, there seems to be a well-maintainer but officially unsupported option for you to run Synology DSM on your own hardware: https://xpenology.org/
YMMV. I would probably not do this as a beginner, but if you do it before you have any important data on there, well, I'd say give it a shot, it's a fun learning experience (as long as you have the ability to invest some learning time into this).
I get not wanting something you’ve previously struggled with, but just FYI re: Linux it should be pretty straightforward:
I would recommend you do one of those virtualization systems and then install each program you want on a different VM.
I use Ubuntu Server for a pretty similar use case. Been working fine for me. If you're installing plex as a snap package, then it can only read/write to home. So you need to mount your hdds under home somewhere. Other than that, I've had no issues with permissions. But I did follow guides online (which are plentiful) so perhaps the permissions issued were dealt with in the procedures I followed
Just because it’s my personal choice and no one has advocated for it yet, I think Unraid is really a very good choice for personal media servers, NAS servers, and homelab setups. Here are the things I think it does very well:
If you or anyone else has any thoughts or questions about Unraid, don’t hesitate to ask!
Do some research into running all of your homelab stuff on top of a hypervisor like proxmox and see if it sounds like something that'd interest you. Gives you a lot of options for snapshots, backups, and containerization of services while still being able to spin up windows and linux virtual machines if you have the resources.
Leaves the most room open for expandability (adding another NUC and making a cluster is a fun project down the line) and playing around in my opinion.
Ubuntu/Linux server and setup an entire Plex stack with docker
I pulled an old Windows box to fill in as my home server after my RPi left my possession and it was a pain. More or less same use case as yours. I couldn't truly run it as headless since every month it would update and boot to the "thanks for updating, click skip to actually use your computer." Not to mention the unnecessary bloat.
So for my (more) proper setup, I started off with Ubuntu (for RPi, use Raspbian) then set up my drive to mount in the home folder on login, something like home\mnt\media. Then just pointed Plex to that folder. Not the most sophisticated solution on its own, but it was quick enough to set up while being a more stable build than Windows, no issues running it headless once it was all set up.
I personally use proxmox and bought an lsi controller in eBay. I use OMV for my nas with a union file system and snapraid. I then use Ubuntu server for my game server and docker apps. Plex/jellyfin are in an LXC container and I pass in the integrated graphics card for transcoding.
I then have other VMs I'll spin up and use when needed. It's all managed via the Web gui. And it fits my needs perfectly.
So I personally use UnRaid and love it. It has a few drawbacks like any other system but it holds its promises in terms of performance and data reliability.
If your use case is really that narrow, I wouldn't worry about much, honestly. Install Ubuntu/Mint XFCE on your Nuc, attach your drives, install Plex and your torrent software.
If you want, you can still install Docker at a later time and use container variants of your software.
Have you installed Plex on Linux, but used your NTFS drives with it? That could explain your pain. I had some odd issues with NTFS and Linux as well.
If you go Linux, use Linux related formats such as ext4, btrfs, xfs and alike.
If you go Windows, use NTFS.
I would use Linux for servers because of raw performance. Windows just eats too much resources on its own.
The package managers make it quicker and simpler to install and update software.
SystemD makes it simpler to manage/autostart services.
However, you are now at a point where a lot of homelab folks were in the beginning.
(I'm trying to talk myself out of stage 6 :D)
It might be worth to plan ahead a bit if you see yourself reaching stage 2-3.
For example rather investing in used PC hardware, a small PC case and a RAID card than to buy a USB Raid solution for a lot of money to extend the NUC.
My Plex server is running win 10 ltsb and has only seen downtime when I added drives to it. My personal advice is stick with what you know unless you are looking to do this as a project and not as an excuse to fiddle with stuff. If you don't know linux well and you are looking for a trouble free experience then win 10 will do you fine. If on the other hand you want to use this as an opportunity to learn a different OS then by all means give it a go on linux. Ubuntu is probably one of the easier distros for newbies.
here is a good guide
https://tomthegreat.com/blog/installing-plex-on-ubuntu-22-04-using-docker/