I just recently started my journey setting up Plex with *Arr and have had a blast. I have the setup running on a raspberry Pi. Before I start buying a bunch of external hard drives, I went searching for some dedicated server hardware to comparison shop. Am I crazy to consider buying an old tower server for this, or will a raspberry Pi work just fine for this purpose? I don’t have that much experience but I do enjoy a good challenge.
A PI will not be powerful enough to run Plex. For one person with direct play maybe but I’d suggest a lenovo tiny or something like that. Old desktop would be fine too.
If you want to transcode 4k or have a lot of users, a desktop+video card is recommended