10 Ways to Boost Your Plex NAS Performance

[Music] hello and welcome back and today I want to talk about improving Plex performance on your network attached storage device what simply means may be you've owned an hour's drive and you've been using it as a plex media server for a number of years or even a matter of months or days and you've noticed a performance is nowhere near what you expect maybe you've got stuttering maybe you've got no audio no sound in fact I'm going to be using the tablet today because there are so many things I'm going to cover in today's video but some of the most common things that people find as issues with their clicks media server is everything from stuttered playback to 0 or poor buffering and everything media file type not supporting transcoding con transcoding engine unsupported and more and more stuff like that effectively that you just want to watch the media you own on your plex media server but you just come maybe on an iPhone an old Android a Smart TV or a console but one way or another the output of that audio is just not cutting it so today I've got 10 technically 11 tips for you and getting the very best performance from your plex media server a lot of these are free some of them you have to pay a little bit extra for but all of them in one way or another will improve your plex media server performance so let's go straight into number one this is utilizing offline transcoding now this is something not a lot of people know about that gun if they're aware of transcoding and for those that aren't aware transcoding is the ability to take your original media file that might be massive and change it in resolution file type size scale and more and file type to a version more befitting to your device your mobile phone your console may be something that doesn't play that original file type or doesn't support the resolution transcoding will change its shape the problem is transcoding uses a lot of system resources to do that so one of the ways in which you can get around that is doing offline transcoding what that means is is your own ads will then take all the media that you either choose one by one or entire directories and you can tell the NAS in a scale jewel to take all all that media and create smaller better versions of it in real terms sorry Oakley my throat there in real terms what that means is is you might have loads of 4k movies that you're going to be playing on a bunch of devices that support 4k and when trying to transcode in real time that can really tax the NASS system and that could be one of the main ways a lot of people get poor performance so one of the ways around that as I say is to get the Nass to do all of that in advance maybe on a schedule during the night when you're not using the device or maybe when you're at work and then it will create duplicates of these files and put them on the other on another area often as it will duplicate them in a smaller version and when you want to access that file in this different version that now to automatically take the new-and-improved or the newman down scaled version thereby eliminating live transcoding and improving performance on screen throughout this hopefully on that side of the screen should be the pros and cons of each so I could read through them but I'm not going to if you would rather read through this by the way the Nass compare article for parts 1 and part 2 of this should be in the description but moving on tip number 2 second thing to change may be a raid level most of you that utilize an AZ server as a clicks media server have some kind of raid you've got more than one hard drive inside and maybe you've got the tribes will write it together and you've got at least one drive of failure that's what raid is it protects you redundant array of inexpensive discs or redundant array of independent disks I'm going to cater to both of you if you're using started all you've got right whether it's do about your 4 basics play and I pay all bigger now different blade levels give you different amount of performance they give you different areas of safety one two or more drives but different raid levels because of the way the CPU handles the data will actually improve or ruin the read and write speed over time and unless you've got a very good CPU like a good power to Intel or an AMD you may see dips in performance so for a number of you that have got two Bay's chances are that you've got a raid one that's two disks that are you have basically two disks that are being read and written to all times at the same time in that way if one of the discs fails you've still got all of your data but you can actually get better read and write speeds by changing that rate configuration in indeed we've got whole video coming up soon we've read one versus SHR where the kind of pros and cons have been discussed but this isn't really for you for people that have ordered for by NASA's that I've got a raid 5 or a raid 6 that is slower because the CPU has to create something called parity which is kind of like a blueprint that every time there's data written across the drives one drive is then selected and a little blueprint of all the rest of the day that's been running this put there and with every instruction every wipe of data the instruction is moved to a different disk and therefore if you lose one disk the system can rebuild the data when you introduce a new disk but the parity data creation does hit your read and write speeds unless you've got a very powerful CPU so there are advantages to changing and downgrading your raid to get better performance and if you do have a forebay this and fully populated or a forebay that's got four disks and you can you know split them into two raid ones based on the data inside you will see performance benefits now that isn't this isn't us under time you know a small task hopefully the advantages and disadvantages should be there on screen donar the biggest disadvantages of course is one you don't have to move your data racewear elsewhere why are you doing this and two you can't potentially lose a lot of capacity in favor of that speed now next advantage using SSD cache and this is where we enter one of the options where you have to pay a little bit more if you do have an available bag on your nose all you've got a nurse that has dedicated SSD bays you can introduce a solid-state drive to your hard drive array that will boost the overall performance so hard drives are typically because they're mechanical they have a limitation of speed and they have limitations over all of the way they run because of their spinning heads and arms and stuff like that where as SSD because their chip read will end up being much much faster so you you know it'd be great if you could have a now filled with SSDs you'd have loads of performance but that's really really and also SSDs give you less space so the result is if you get a bunch of hard drives and you've got space for one or two SSDs you can create an area of caching read and write caching but in the sense of Plex read caching or read-only cache will do with that you end up with the ability to completely improve your read and write speeds and it will buffer the system to improve your performance in the plex media server but you will have to spend a little bit more and I would recommend matching the SSD to your hard drives around 10% what that means is if you've got 10 terabytes of hard drive space get one terabyte of SSD and scale that accordingly 10% should be a magical number there pros and cons on the screen next we can move on to my next tip tip number four tip enough for increasing the memory now anyone that's ever built a PC or use the PC or heard of a PC well know about improving memory it's one of the easiest ways to improve performance in anything memory is kind of like this is kind of you know random access memory or the RAM what that does is it's basically for handling jobs right now on every job that you do every app you run it will take that app on board and run partially depending on the application and the ways are its architecture is in that memory the more people accessing an ass the more memory has to be allocated and that's when you get in memory limits and this memory just not being enough so increasing the memory on your nares if it's a if it lets you he's advanced ages but you do hit a limit really of when that becomes in any way beneficial I'd say between 8 and 16 gig is normally enough you can increase the memory if you've got loads of people accessing 4k media but to be honest 8 to 16 max should be more than enough for your plex media server to work fluidly if you've got less then 8 and you're living somewhere at 2 to 4 gig that might be one of the reasons you're having issues but again this is of one of those ones that requires spending a little bit more and of course some nas's do not let you upgrade memory maybe they're using some of those real tech CPUs and they're using memory that quite literally been soldered onto the motherboard inside that controller board so double check you can upgrade and whether it's worth upgrading at all moving on to chapter 5 this is another software one and luckily one that won't cost you were being and it's very easy to check it out indeed you could probably check it in a quicker time than it's taking you to watch this video so for more for you check the resource monitor on your nose now Nazz systems are 24/7 devices they are designed to be on for very huge amount of time months on end indeed a lot of the updates and stuff to arrive for the applications and indeed the entire firmware of your nas some of them won't even require your ass to be powered down they're designed around that architecture it's one of the reasons why nas is use a power efficient components use power efficient built and are designed to be offered greater lengths of time is why you might look at the hardware in an hour sometimes and go what that's that's a Celaya ROM how are they charging so much for a syllable that's another video now when it comes down to it if you're utilizing a nose for 24/7 and using different applications all then as itself has scheduled tasks and scheduled things it needs to do it will have loads of many applications what you see as the graphical user interface of its own ology dsm is if it's qnap qts if it's a cyst or ATM it's a tera master TOS whichever one you're using you're looking at a graphical user interface you are looking at something that the system is generated to make it user-friendly to you behind that are hundreds maybe even thousands of individual processes and if you open up a resource monitor in the same way you Control Alt Delete on a modern Windows 10 PC a task manager will appear and list every single background operation not the programs too might show you only two or three you want the background operation you want the tasks the one that lists every one of those you know hundreds if not thousands of applications and what you can find out with some simple googling is a lot of the things your nose might be doing aren't necessary it's a task that should have gone to idle a process that is completed but still sitting there in the memory and the all these things can add up substantially to using your system resources and use a lot of that live caching and memory that you should be using for other things so I strongly recommend you go to the resource ammonia and see what is using your CPU and memory what is the usage we're did which are the ones that are using a percent or more and it is loads of them using less than a percent maybe looking in look into those two there's some of the great ways in which you can utilize that resource monitor to see where the issues are quite plex media video with or without transcoding that you're having issues with and see what's happening in the back end of that knows what the resource monitor is doing and are there things to do with scanning stuff or antivirus or anti-malware or some poor background operation that's just eating up all those resources but let's move on to number six tip number six Hardware transcoding is Plex utilizing your transcoding engine now a number of you have bought NASA's in the past because it said it featured transcoding now transcoding is a subject we are going to keep touching on in this video I know I've already touched on it like eight times but the reason is because Plex as good as place is it only is produced in software and the result is that all the hardware that we buy over the years chops and changes and the media files we buy though compatible then might not be compatible now and vice versa that's why transcoding is so important and why it's a heavy heavy recommendation for the best plex media server NAT now Hardware transcoding in its simplest form is when I CPU inside an ass or whatever you're using as your plex media server is graphically enabled it has embedded graphics or has a transcoding engine depending on which specifications you read what that means your real terms is the CPU has got all that power on that clock speed and stuff but it also has an extra component built into it that's specialized for handling graphics now in terms of transcoding this is very very important because the raw power of a CPU to chop and change a file is not going to be a specialized at all as I graphically embedded or graphically enable part of that CPU the result is that it requires way more power from a CPU doing it raw to change than a small amount of graphic graphical embedding or transcoding engine to do the same job these more specialized towards it now that is the advertised I've got transcoding engines of which I would say more than half of them advertise that fact or embedded graphics in one form or another all of these companies advertise this but trikes doesn't necessarily have access to that engine and it only in some cases and particularly only with Intel NASA's Intel CPU Basin as is that I've got graphical embedding have we seen Plex be able to take advantage of that component take advantage to look at that and go oh we need this file transcoded we're gonna ask the NASS can be used to transcoding engine and NASA has gone knock yourself out that's not always the case and in a number of cases such as the real tech IRM by CPUs some of the older Braswell CPUs we have seen that Plex even if you have a Plex pass and click that little option that says video encoding or transcoding enabled make my CPU hurt even though you've enabled that option it doesn't have access to the transcoding engine and instead it will Astin as the natural goat nope I'm not gonna let you use the transcoding engine or the graphics but I'm going to let you use raw clock speed and CPU power to convert that file and just unfortunately that is not efficient and will make the CPU on that and has worked really really hard consequently you will get those performance issues if the file is just too big so double-check that the CPU in your Nan's got transcoding it enabled and that place is able to take advantage of and not just that Plex has a graphical embedding support and that it can enable transcoding with the Flex pass but it genuinely has access to that engine moving on to number seven we can talk about the uploads beta now this is hugely overlooked I blame companies in America maybe Comcast the weather in the UK definitely blame companies like Virgin for this people get their internets packaged they go to their internet service provider and you know they advertise all these big things I will give you a fifty mega hundred made two million Meg download speeds it's gonna be mad fast but they don't talk about upload speed anywhere near as not as much upload is incredibly important when it comes to a plex media server because although when you're in the home you're watching files on the network which is you know the way all the devices all share and same wife I'm gonna caveman it down to that when you're accessing the plex media server from outside your home then as has to upload this file via the Internet to you it doesn't so much go to you plex servers are involved in a degree to a degree but the fact still remains that Plex needs to rely on upload speeds the result is that when you upload that file if you've got a poor upload connection so that's the data going up not down that one that they talk about on all the adverts if your gosh crap upload nearly said a bad word if you've got a bad upload speed it immediately becomes a bottleneck and that means that your nose is trying desperately to send this file by this time bandwidth to you which immediately affects performance because you're going on the other end on your phone or ever your client device go come on watch this movie come on come on and you're desperate for it but the nurse just can't deliver it the nurse is working fine it's the funnel the upload in between and if you enable transcoding you might be able to avoid that but transcoding engines a lot of them a bit ugly masses that you know need to be more optimizable recent versions of place aren't smart enough to identify the upload issue and will not enable transcoding by default it will basically ask you to make the decision which just isn't right so double check your upload speeds and again I know this isn't something you can immediately change because let's face it you might be signed into a six 12-month contract but maybe tried to bait with your internet service provider to upgrade to another deal because upload can be a tremendous bottleneck if you're worried about your upload speed or you don't know your upload speeds seriously Google speed test or internet speed test bang it into Google right now olltii open another tab after this video finished to the end so there are other tips and then look up just put speed tests or internet speed test into google there's an automated one bill in there click run and your upload and download speed will be measured and then you know so next after upload and download speeds and there are lots of information there number nine checking your codec now this is an odd one because not all nails brands go about this the same way if you've owned a WD or a net gear knows sorry this isn't for you because they still haven't implemented this in the way that they should an ass comes out at a certain time with the software that it arrives with even have a CPU cover certain codecs and file formats a codec is paternity is basically just I mean a you know a transcription if you will of what's been used to create this video this enormous video that's now been compressed into a video format that you can play WMV avi MKV MOV all these different codecs but you need to make sure your NAS supports all of these codecs supports all these file formats because even if you can transcode it heavily relies on them as being able to see and interact with the file to start with otherwise you end up with a kind of double transcoding situation which is terrible which again caveman way to put it there are better ways to put that sentence but the result is if you don't have the latest codecs or you don't have the codecs even simple ones that are quite prevalent but still quite rare and difficult such as mp4 a MKV indefinitely MOV and some of those higher dense files then you are not going to be able to play those files period and if you do have them they're not supported very well or not the most recent revisions of them then again you're gonna have poor performance or what I recommend is see if the App Center on your nads on our no silence you can have got this I think Isis thought to check if they have updated codec packs updated video format packs that allow you to download periodically and update all of your media types you should even have an option to make that an auto download and if you do so so that means you never have to check it check it once and it's free and look at that fine pad off the wall number 10 probably the second most expensive recommendation on this list install a graphics card now when I say install the graphics card in your nouns I am talking about every single nails brand out there in fact to my knowledge there is only one now and that actually lets you do this in a workable fashion and that is cue nap in the moment now if you own a cue nap now it's a PCIe slot that doesn't have HDMI on it chances are it's a newer generation it does give you the ability to install a graphics card inside and with things like a GPU pass through and increase support of different graphics cards the result is that you are able to install a graphics card and utilize those graphical assets just like we talked about earlier on inside your plex media server so instead of using embedded graphics on the CPU you're now using an enormous graphics card that will power your system and do all of the transcoding and the performance work in the video work for you now of course this is expensive not just because of graphics cards it's also expensive because of things like cryptocurrency and data mining and all of these people that have basically pushed up the price of graphics card for everyone else that even relatively basic graphics card can be very very expensive you don't need an incredibly powerful one of those some nas's will have five six seven hundred watt PS use so you can use the real monster in video cards and stuff like that but you can get away with quite modest GPU cards to introduce 512 one gig to Gig of video memory to your nas and that will allow it to utilize those assets and it's worth mentioning however that there are only certain graphics cards that are supported by different qnet nazis and if you get the wrong one it can be problematic later on so what I recommend is do check out the articles as I've mentioned before below there is also a link to supported graphics cards with internet net that's focused from them seems to largely be to do with virtualization but I do know you can utilize the system properties and a number of plex media server application to to you not be any only ones that have got this it makes it a kind of half-half tip but said as it's my last tip of the ten that I have seen moves by other Nash brands to move into this area one of which of course is Synology who have released the DVD three two one nine there Synology surveillance application NASA also s DSM that has an Nvidia graphics card built into it in the PCIe slot if they see success for that I can definitely see them rolling out that same kind of logic into other NASA devices bigger maybe smaller because it is on your for base or who knows but I will be very interested to see how Synology utilize this technology into DSM and other applications too now I do have one more tip tip 11 because now I said this is tip 1 to 10 which I will highlight but I didn't really think it's a real tip that's why I'm chucking it here at the end and it's not a great one you won't like it buy a new nose if you've been using the same that for a number of years or you're using a nouns that just doesn't have graphical embedding you are gonna have a bad time and it might be time to bite the bullet and buy a new nose now that said because of the evolution of this technology and the whitey systems work you don't need to spend crazy you just need to spend smart and that's what I want to talk about because not only are there links in the description to the top tips for improving close performance but on top of that I should have or they should have been published by now we've got best Plex now's for 500 1000 and 2000 now the reason I'm not saying a currency really is because I'm trying to get one that is 500 dollars pounds euro or whatever and same goes for 1000 dollars pound zero two thousand dollars pounds euro and that's got to include storage and that and these are Nazis that aren't tipped to be the most powerful incredible wah-wah-wah-wah incredible Nazis but these are ones that I'm telling you within that budget will give you the best for Plex now don't get me wrong I'm not saying you can get 500 quid knows including tanks and storage and it's going to be as good as a two and a half three grand now I'm not saying that I'm saying this is the very best you can do in that budget and that's why taking the time to go through those I'll hopefully produce those on videos too but in the meantime do check out and asking power items and of course if you are looking at nurse do go to the guys at span common as experts 25 years in the biz I wouldn't just bang on about them if I didn't believe in it cuz you know Here I am a few years down the line it must be working and quite frankly so must die thank you so much watching I hope you've enjoyed this little loads of videos coming out on the new Sun ologies the new kynapse then hue sisters the new all of them but of course also about everything to do with Nas and more so do subscribe and click the bell to be more notified about these videos as and when they happen but thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 32,065

Keywords: Best NAS for Plex, best QNAP for plex, best synology for plex, plex buffering, PLEX client, PLEX iphone, PLEX lg tv, plex media server, Plex NAS, plex no video, plex pass transcoding, Plex Performance issue, PLEX problem, plex qnap, PLEX samsung tv, PLEX smart tv, plex solution, plex stuttered playback, plex synology, plex tips, plex transcoding, plex transcoding enable, plex transcoding issue, plex transcoding problem, plex unsupported, plex fix, plexnas, plex audio

Id: 6YlLbgA9wd0

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019