The Plex database will update automatically once the drive is seen by the system. There are all kinds of drive types and operating systems, and all other info you might need about that is right here in our previous article about making a NAS with a Raspberry Pi.Īlso, you can hot-swap drives on the system if, for example, you wanted to add files to them, but you have to make sure they are mounted again for the server to access them.

This goes double if you are using an external USB hard drive you will have to format it and mount it on the system. Better yet, edit the “/etc/fstab” file to mount them automatically. Be warned if you have a lite version of the OS (like I did), you may have to manually mount the USB drives. If your movie and TV files are on a USB stick and the USB ports are mounted, then you should be good to go. That’s not true go with the default settings.

USB C power supply (official power supply preferred)Ī few things to note: I’ve seen some tutorials on this subject which state that you need to change the name of your user to Plex in order for this to work.

A Raspberry Pi 4 (in a case with heat sink or fan cooling preferred).

So to build this server you need the following items: The only bottleneck then is the speed between the router and the client, and that doesn’t matter quite so much. Not only does the video fly off the drive, but it flies down the pipe via the router to your client, too, be that on a wired connection or Wi-Fi. You can run external drives on a USB 2.0, but they drag a little, and you don’t want that while streaming HD or UHD video.Īnother thing in the Pi 4’s favor is its Gigabit ethernet.

With transfer rates like that, it’s totally feasible to run external drives from the USB at something approaching normal computer speeds.

Previous Pi USB 2.0 sockets run at 30-35MBps, whereas the new USB 3.0 runs at 320-360MBps, which is like a ten-fold speed hike.

Although it’s possible to use previous revisions of the Raspberry Pi for this build, the Pi 4’s USB 3.0 ports really pay off. The USB 3 sockets on a RasPi 4 are more than fast enough to shoot the data from the disk into the server brain and out to the waiting clients.

Plex raspberry pi