Installing Plex Media Server

Plex is the heart of your media ecosystem. It scans your library, fetches metadata, organizes everything neatly, and makes your movies and shows available to stream from anywhere. Installing Plex is straightforward, but where you store its configuration and metadata is extremely important.

This guide explains:

What Plex is and how it works
Why it should not run inside Docker in this setup
Why its configuration directory must be placed on your external HDD
What gets stored there and how large it can grow
The installation script used to set everything up

🎬 What Is Plex?

Plex Media Server is an application that:

Indexes your media library
Fetches rich metadata (posters, backgrounds, cast info, themes)
Streams your content to TVs, phones, tablets, and browsers
Transcodes media when needed
Manages user accounts, watch history, and recommendations

Plex is extremely powerful — but with that power comes heavy disk usage.

🧱 Why Plex Runs Outside Docker

Although Docker is fantastic for the ARR stack, Plex is more demanding and behaves better on the host system.

Running Plex in Docker often introduces problems:

Issue	Why It Happens in Docker
Hardware transcoding failures	Containerization interferes with VAAPI/V4L2/QuickSync
Slow scanning of large libraries	Docker's overlay filesystem slows metadata I/O
Network discovery issues	Plex requires multicast/IGMP, blocked by Docker networks
Large metadata directory	Containers struggle with millions of tiny files

Real-world experience proves Plex performs best when installed directly on the OS.

🗃️ Why Move Plex Metadata to an External HDD?

Plex stores a massive amount of metadata — often tens or hundreds of gigabytes depending on library size.

Here’s what Plex stores inside its config directory:

Posters & artwork
Backdrops
Theme music
Subtitles
Optimization cache
Transcoding cache
Databases for:
- Libraries
- Watch history
- Video analysis
- Intro detection

These files grow quickly.

📌 Example Metadata Sizes

Small library (500 files): 5–10 GB
Medium library (2,000 files): 20–50 GB
Large library (10,000+ files): 100 GB+

If you keep this in /var/lib/plexmediaserver on the SD card or system SSD:

The OS disk will fill up
SD cards will wear out quickly
Plex performance will suffer severely

✔ Placing metadata on your external HDD solves everything

Massive storage availability
Higher endurance than SD cards
Faster scanning and caching
No risk of filling the root filesystem

This is why we relocate Plex config to:

/mnt/omnissiah-vault/configs/plex

⚙️ Installation Script

Below is the installation script used for this tutorial. It:

Installs Plex Media Server from the official repository
Stops the service
Moves its entire metadata/config directory to your mounted HDD
Creates a symlink so Plex still sees the expected path
Ensures correct ownership for the plex user
Restarts and enables the service
📥 Download Script
👉 install-docker.sh

🚀 After Installation

Once Plex is installed and its metadata moved to your external drive, you can:

Open the Web UI
Sign in with your Plex account
Add your libraries from /mnt/omnissiah-vault/media
Run a full scan

Everything moving forward — including posters, metadata, intro detection, and caching — will stay safely on the external HDD.

➡️ Next Step

Proceed to Install qBittorrent to complete the host-based components.

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