When your imager is finished writing to your sdcard take it our of you card reader and insert it again. Next choose your sdcard and finally click the Write button. We do not need the visual GUI desktop interface, in fact we don't want to waste CPU and RAM on running that, instead we want all the resources to be dedicated to PMS (Plex Media Sever) for best performance.ĭownload Raspberry Pi Imager from the official raspberry pi website Ĭhoose OS -> Rasbperry Pi OS (other) -> Raspberry Pi OS Lite Raspberry Pi OS since we are building a server and not a player.

We want to install the headless version of raspbian aka.

Prepare sdcard with headless Raspberry Pi OS (raspbian)

micro sdcard min 8GB - preferably class 10 ( like this one).

Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4 (better performance).

It wouldn’t surprise me that in a year or so, ARM SBCs get so powerful and cheap that they’ll outperform the same priced ex-lease/used x86 boxes whilst using way less electricity. For that price you can get all manner of SFF and Mini PCs with way more powerful CPUs and are still pretty damn quiet and power efficient. They’re not cheap though - about ~$150 for the board with 4GB with a decent USB power supply and cable. There’s a few Rockchip RK3399 based units with PCIe NVMe M.2 slots that I reckon would handle usenet downloading very nicely. I would like to try a faster ARM-based SBC however. Maybe BitTorrent is different, but I couldn’t be fucked trying as I rarely use BitTorrent. The Pi’s CPU and I/O can’t really keep up with the downloading and unpacking for usenet. Get a fast microSD card for your root filesystem and whatever size external HDD you like and you’re good to go.ĤK enthusiasts with really fast internet connections should probably stick with their x86 boxes. 4GB would be plenty even if you ran a few extra services. Running Plex, Sabnzbd & Radarr, RAM usage never cracked 1.5GB. If all you do is watch 1080p media on your local LAN and have a normal internet connection (sub-250mbit), the Raspberry Pi 4 will do a pretty good job. Plex will try convert incompatible media, but it is a fruitless endeavour, as the Pi just doesn’t have the grunt and lacks any sort of hardware video encoding acceleration. Of course, the catch here is that you can’t transcode anything.

Raspberry pi plex server