Anyone able to help me choose a NAS? (And questions RE its backup)

Soldato
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So at the moment I have a very old (slow Xtreamer) NAS with 3Gig of space. I put my media content on this, and run Plex on a little Dell i5 3010 Optiplex PC which then dishes it out.

I'm looking to replace/improve on this, and I believe leaving my Optiplex PC as the "server" makes sense - It runs plex and Logicech Media Server too (music stored on the Optixplex, but I guess I could put it on the NAS).

The NAS
So I need a nice quiet (as it's in my study) efficient NAS. I'm guessing as I'm happy to run regular backups of its content, it wouldn't have to be RAID, so if I could put say a 4TB drive in it, and later on put another 4tb drive in too? And I'd then want all that storage (eg: all 8TB of it) to be a single seemless blob. Not two locations?! Or as a rule, would different drives be shown as distinct individual storage locations?

It would be lovely run Plex on the NAS, but a couple of smaller TVs around the house are wired via homeplugs and cannot cope with native 1080p footage, so need it transcoded to 720p. I suspect the Intel I5 PC will do that without thinking.

Note 1: I have gigabit lan between the NAS and PC

Note 2: I'd like the NAS to powerdown and powersave when not in use, but boot up quickly when required. My existing NAS with toshiba drives is very slow to start up!

Backing it up
Bit confused what to do here!?

Given I'll then have 4-8tb, what's the best way to back that up. ie: At the moment I have a 3TB drive I put in a caddy and mirror my existing 3TB NAS. And while that would be possible to do with 4TB on the new NAS, when it's 8TB in size, what then?

OR if I have two 4TB drives on the NAS and both these are shown as distinct disks/locations, I guess I could do what I currently do then, and just backup each drive to another 4TB drive in a caddie? I'd just split my media filling up the first drive, and then start filling up the second etc... and point Plex to both sources.

So how do people backup 8 or more TB of data?

USB3
Does it make sense to plug the NAS into the PC also via USB3 to get even better performance? Or are the USB3 ports simply to plug in child devices?
 
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Associate
Joined
12 Feb 2007
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Considering you need trans-coding, I would recommend building a PC, stick some big disks in, high efficiency PSU, and have that as your Plex server. I tried a variety of NAS's and for trans-coding they usually suck apart from the really expensive ones, whereas building a PC with some older components like an I5 CPU will perform faaaaaaaaaaar better, wont cost much and give you a lot more flexibility.

As for backup of 8TB+, you could hire some online storage or get some USB HDDs to backup to.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
15 Nov 2003
Posts
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Location
Marlow
Considering you need trans-coding, I would recommend building a PC, stick some big disks in, high efficiency PSU, and have that as your Plex server. I tried a variety of NAS's and for trans-coding they usually suck apart from the really expensive ones, whereas building a PC with some older components like an I5 CPU will perform faaaaaaaaaaar better, wont cost much and give you a lot more flexibility.

As for backup of 8TB+, you could hire some online storage or get some USB HDDs to backup to.

Well, surely my current Dell (i5) Optiplex is basically this? It's getting its Plex data from my current rubbish NAS, and I'm simply looking at putting a better NAS in there to speed things up (eg: make use of gigabit).

There is of course the option of a curve ball solution of using a USB3 multi-bay device plugged into that Dell PC instead of the NAS? That would be even faster surely than gigabit, but then you lose all other benefits a dedicated NAS might offer.



I think for backup there's two options?
1) Split the NAS up into say folders say never bursting 4tb in size. And then simply robocopy these folders periodically each to a 4tb drive in a cradle on a PC. So if you had three 4tb drives you'd have three root folders on the NAS, and each of which you'd backup to a 4tb drive in a USB cradle.
2) Build a USB3 multi-disc bay that's the same size as the NAS, and simply robocopy the NAS to that periodically. eg: If the NAS has three 4tb drives, the USB multi-bay device would have the same, and just be a mirror.
 
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