*** The Official Aoostar WTR Max NAS thread ***

Anyone using TrueNAS and Plex in a Container (they call it apps), and use the AMD GPU for transcoding? I get a green screen sort of overlay on some films and the only way I've figured out how to remove it is by turning off hardware transcoding. I also get a weird purple ish hue on some DV transcodes, but this only happens in some scenes. HDR tone mapping is enabled, and I'd like to keep it enabled if at all possible. Edit - disabling HDR tone mapping does not get rid of the green overlay, but I've not yet tested the purple ish hue.

I ran up Plex Server on my Mac Studio, and when I use that for hw transcoding, I don't get the issue at all.

Honestly thinking about moving my application stack over to the Mac Studio anyway as I really don't like the TrueNAS implementation of Containers.
 
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Bluecube said:
This must be an TrueNAS issue. I’ve been running Plex on Unraid with hardware transcoding and I’ve not had any problems.
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Interesting. I only get it on a very small amount of films - I've noticed it on less than 5 in a library of 651, but then I don't ordinarily watch stuff which is transcoding, it's more family/friends.

I really want to try Unraid, but I've been worried about the performance of it, and there's no simple migration process between the platforms.

Still tempted to use the Mac Studio, it's extremely powerful and is on 24/7, plus there's 10 GbE networking between it and the NAS.
 
Performance in what respect?

UNRAID 7.2 brought adding disks to a ZFS array which was super :) I don't really do anything with VM, Docker stuff seems pretty good as well.
 
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ChrisD. said:
Interesting. I only get it on a very small amount of films - I've noticed it on less than 5 in a library of 651, but then I don't ordinarily watch stuff which is transcoding, it's more family/friends.

I really want to try Unraid, but I've been worried about the performance of it, and there's no simple migration process between the platforms.

Still tempted to use the Mac Studio, it's extremely powerful and is on 24/7, plus there's 10 GbE networking between it and the NAS.
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For someone like yourself Unraid is an easy OS to set up and run. YMMV depending on what you want from it. It's not designed for performance so reading and writing depends on the individual disks and the speed of your SSD/ NVME cache. It is resilient especially with a parity disk. Touch wood, I've not lost any data in ten(ish) years of using it.

Using the Mac would be an interesting project. Have Apple not integrated container use more deeply into the OS now? And transcoding speeds are insane on the M chips though quality is a bit hmmm...
 
HEADRAT said:
Performance in what respect?

UNRAID 7.2 brought adding disks to a ZFS array which was super :) I don't really do anything with VM, Docker stuff seems pretty good as well.
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NFS performance for my VCF homelab, and single disk read/write speed for the larger pool (I have 6x16TB disks).
Bluecube said:
For someone like yourself Unraid is an easy OS to set up and run. YMMV depending on what you want from it. It's not designed for performance so reading and writing depends on the individual disks and the speed of your SSD/ NVME cache. It is resilient especially with a parity disk. Touch wood, I've not lost any data in ten(ish) years of using it.

Using the Mac would be an interesting project. Have Apple not integrated container use more deeply into the OS now? And transcoding speeds are insane on the M chips though quality is a bit hmmm...
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I kinda want easy - I can do all the CLI stuff no problem, but I do deep technical stuff for my day job so it's kind of the last thing I want to faff about with after work. That's why I liked Synology before because as a turnkey solution it's brain dead simple. I then ran a VM on my VMware lab to do all the app stuff. TrueNAS is great, but I admit I do struggle with certain aspects of the UI such as permissions and usually just do it via ssh. There's also other things where there's a lot of polish missing which I think I'd get from Unraid.

Haven't looked at containers much on Mac beyond Podman and Docker being honest, both of which I imagine involve more faff than running it on Unraid. What do you mean about the quality?

Disk setup is 6x16TB drives, then I have 2x 4TB NVMe (990 Pro), and 2x 2TB NVMe (WD Reds IIRC). Then a 128GB boot drive. Ideally I'd like containers to run on NVMe, and then have two NFS shares which are also NVMe based for lab storage. And I'd like faster than single disk speed writes/reads from the large capacity pool.
 
The AAOSTAR WTR MAX isn't going to be great for those NVMEs due to them being:

3x PCIe 4.0 x2 Max Speed (Read/Write) 2.9 GB/s
2x PCIe 4.0 x1 Max Speed (Read/Write) 1.6 GB/s
 
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HEADRAT said:
The AAOSTAR WTR MAX isn't going to be great for those NVMEs due to them being:

3x PCIe 4.0 x2 Max Speed (Read/Write) 2.9 GB/s
2x PCIe 4.0 x1 Max Speed (Read/Write) 1.6 GB/s
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I 'only' have 10 Gbps network, so those speeds are perfectly fine. I only got the 990 Pro's because they were absurdly cheap at the time. Link aggregation does its thing for the other pool/NFS share and punts traffic to the other interface when the homelab is busy. Having the apps run on NVMe is a huge bonus mainly due to latency and unpacking etc.
 
ChrisD. said:
Haven't looked at containers much on Mac beyond Podman and Docker being honest, both of which I imagine involve more faff than running it on Unraid. What do you mean about the quality?
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I tried transcoding a few large 4k video files in Handbrake and my M1 Mac Studio steamed through them in literally seconds. However there were noticeable quality issues if you looked. Having said that, I don’t know if there’s a hardware pass through using Plex in a container.

Containers are easy to run on a fast cache disk. It’s just a drop down selection. Setting up NVMe based shares is straight forward. The only thing you won’t like is that files aren’t striped so read speeds are limited to that of a single disk. I think it can be done with a ZFS pool but I’m not in firm ground here.

A big caveat is that Unraid will wipe your disks during the initial set up
 
Bluecube said:
I tried transcoding a few large 4k video files in Handbrake and my M1 Mac Studio steamed through them in literally seconds. However there were noticeable quality issues if you looked. Having said that, I don’t know if there’s a hardware pass through using Plex in a container.

Containers are easy to run on a fast cache disk. It’s just a drop down selection. Setting up NVMe based shares is straight forward. The only thing you won’t like is that files aren’t striped so read speeds are limited to that of a single disk. I think it can be done with a ZFS pool but I’m not in firm ground here.

A big caveat is that Unraid will wipe your disks during the initial set up
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I don't use handbrake, so couldn't comment on that. I don't think macOS allows GPU passthru to Containers, so it needs to be the actual Plex app itself. I haven't tried properly via a Container install to test that theory. Using the native app last night I had 6 or 7 simultaneous 4k transcodes to 1080p on the go all while Plex was intro/credit etc scanning my 30TB library and my Mac Studio just smashed it all into the park without making any fuss or noise.

I have four spare 14TB drives and two other NAS's so if I did move, I could stipe 2x14x2, copy the library over, set up Unraid as a fresh install, then copy back. The other NAS's have 2.5 GbE so it shouldn't be too bad.

How is Unraid for NFS? Does it support it out of the box? I'm tempted to try it, but I do think it might be a little limited for my use case.
 
ChrisD. said:
How is Unraid for NFS? Does it support it out of the box? I'm tempted to try it, but I do think it might be a little limited for my use case.
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NFS supported out of the box. Last I looked it was free to try for a month so no harm in checking it out. My use case is quite different from yours but I’ve never run into any limitations that weren’t down to hardware.
 
Demon said:
Anyone have power consumption figures for this NAS idling with all mechanical drives spun down?

My current Terramaster F6-424 Max (i5 - 1235U with 64GB DDR5) draws 24W on idle.
5 x 14TB HDDs
1 x 4TB SSD
2 x 1TB NVME
1 x USB Zigbee Interface

I fancy one a WTR Max, mainly to add some more NVME's and have some NPU hardware for LLMs, but people are suggesting almost double the idle power..
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Idle power is irrelevant outside of pure occasional backup storage only Nas. Any media server, cloud hosting etc will keep your box out of idle.
Besides, the isles reported here for wtr max are with spinning HDDs (4-5W each).
Spinning them down on anything other than pure storage is most likely going to kill HDDs in 2-3 years. Seen that so many times with Synology nases when they run docker. Worst was HDD spin down after 10 minutes and home assistant docker waking them every 15 minutes to save logs....2 years old wWD red pros failed, both, one didn't spin up one day, other failed during mirror rebuilding....
 
Sasquatch_ said:
Idle power is irrelevant outside of pure occasional backup storage only Nas. Any media server, cloud hosting etc will keep your box out of idle.
Besides, the isles reported here for wtr max are with spinning HDDs (4-5W each).
Spinning them down on anything other than pure storage is most likely going to kill HDDs in 2-3 years. Seen that so many times with Synology nases when they run docker. Worst was HDD spin down after 10 minutes and home assistant docker waking them every 15 minutes to save logs....2 years old wWD red pros failed, both, one didn't spin up one day, other failed during mirror rebuilding....
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I don't necessarily agree..

I have spinning rust for slow bulk storage, but NVME cache (mirrored) for app data and as a file cache and an SSD for temporary working data (e.g. logs, download client use, scratch pad for many apps etc).

New files are cached and then moved to the main bulk storage overnight in one hit and daily backups of some of the working data on the SSD are also taken overnight.

So the HDDs are idle a fair bit, and spun down responsibly IMO, The only drive I've had fail was a 10+ year old 4TB drive that was well past it's best.

That's with 30+ containers and a Home Assistant VM running, and as mentioned, when idle I'm around 25w for a quite a bit of the day.

I'd love someone with one to just see what the 'idle power' is with no spinning rust spun up and the CPU ticking over, at least I can work backwards from there!
 
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ChrisD. said:
I don't use handbrake, so couldn't comment on that. I don't think macOS allows GPU passthru to Containers, so it needs to be the actual Plex app itself. I haven't tried properly via a Container install to test that theory. Using the native app last night I had 6 or 7 simultaneous 4k transcodes to 1080p on the go all while Plex was intro/credit etc scanning my 30TB library and my Mac Studio just smashed it all into the park without making any fuss or noise.
Click to expand...

Haven't used it myself as not doing anything on my Mac for containers apart from playing with the relatively new native container implementration, but I know Podman has some GPU passthrough capabilities.

podman-desktop.io

GPU container access | Podman Desktop

GPU passthrough utilization within Windows, macOS and Linux
podman-desktop.io podman-desktop.io

Can't confirm if it's of any use though as don't use Plex.
 
Throrik said:
Haven't used it myself as not doing anything on my Mac for containers apart from playing with the relatively new native container implementration, but I know Podman has some GPU passthrough capabilities.

podman-desktop.io

GPU container access | Podman Desktop

GPU passthrough utilization within Windows, macOS and Linux
podman-desktop.io podman-desktop.io

Can't confirm if it's of any use though as don't use Plex.
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To be honest I’m happy with Plex running as an app, it’s just now figuring out how to container the rest of the stack or leave it on the NAS.
 
I've started moving my home media container stack from TrueNAS over to my Mac Studio. The performance is ridiculous. I'm getting Linux downloads via Usenet well over 100 MB/s - through a VPN container (Gluetin). Things like library scans etc are on steroids, not that it was slow before. More tweaks but very happy I decided to shift it all over rather than running in the borked TrueNAS apps stack.
 
ChrisD. said:
I've started moving my home media container stack from TrueNAS over to my Mac Studio. The performance is ridiculous. I'm getting Linux downloads via Usenet well over 100 MB/s - through a VPN container (Gluetin). Things like library scans etc are on steroids, not that it was slow before. More tweaks but very happy I decided to shift it all over rather than running in the borked TrueNAS apps stack.
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TrueNAS must have serious issues as I’ve always been able to download from Usenet on my SabNzbd container at 100MB/s.
 
Bluecube said:
TrueNAS must have serious issues as I’ve always been able to download from Usenet on my SabNzbd container at 100MB/s.
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Over a VPN? I can download at 1.6 Gbps all day long on a clear line, it's putting the download traffic via a VPN which introduces overheads.
 
Bluecube said:
Yes, over a VPN. I only have a 1Gbps line so can’t say if I can go faster
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TBH I never tried using a VPN container on TrueNAS, I just had my router do it via a policy based route. I used to get 80-90 MB/s. Now depending on where Nord puts me I get over 100 MB/s. Need to try some other providers to see if they offer increased speed.
 
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