I was thinking about a post to tell you about how the new Atomic Pi Plex server was working out. Splendidly, thanks for asking. But we did have an issue this evening that I was afraid would eventually pop up.
The Atomic Pi has been entirely stable. No issues at all. But, it has one glaring weak point. The onboard storage is only 16GB. Sure, it has the SD-Card slot, but all of my SD-Cards are currently doing other Pi-ish things. Well, when we went to start up S02E01 of “Young Sheldon”, the Plex server complained about not having enough room to transcode the file.
I sprang into action and created a new NFS share on the SSD drive of the Pi1! It isn’t doing much with that 120GB drive, so why not use some of it for transcoding?
The Raspberry Pi is not powerful enough to pass the W/SO Acceptance test as a Plex server, but it operates quite well as as an NFS server. So, the Atomic Pi Plex server is making an initial NFS call to the Raspberry Pi for the video file. It does the compute aspects of transcoding and serving locally, but it offloads the storage space requirements for transcoding back to the Raspberry Pi. It worked perfectly!