Cheap NAS for hosting Plex content

pioneer2000

pioneer2000

pioneer2000

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Thinking at least 5/6 bays as I have a multitude of older hard drives I would prefer to reuse rather than buying new.

Is something like a Synology the best bet? Don't want much faffing about.

Thanks
 
Google drive for business.
Less than £9 a month.
Nominal 1Tb limit but it isn't enforced.
No power or backup considerations.
I definitely don't have approx 20Tb in an encrypted folder.
All the cool kids are doing it.
:p
 
Synology DS918+ is a good mid-range NAS and retails for ~£500, I'm looking at purchasing this soon. If your PMS is hosted elsewhere and you are simply serving files from the NAS to PMS you could potentially go for a lower model. However even the DS918+ will struggle with more than 2x concurrent 4K streams and other playback streams may be limited if transcoding is involved. PMS playback has many variables, client device and whether it is transcoding or direct play etc so some will depends on your specific use case. The Synology UI is a very well built piece of software as well, easy to configure and use and packed with functionality. I can't wait to get mine!

If you're on a tight budget then maybe as someone above said, freenas on a self build.

Edit: Forgot to add, one feature with Synology (possibly others, I don't know) is that you can insert different capacity hard drives and it will intelligently make use of them, something which is handy if you are looking to re-use existing drives already owned.
 
While the options mentioned above are possible, if you want local storage, a self build will work out a lot cheaper than an OTS solution, its not like most people here are afraid of spending 30 mins building a PC.

Synology and QNap generally make (over priced) off the shelf NAS/server boxes, you are tied to the for support lifecycles and sooner or later will find you either have a very expensive upgrade path or have to sell it and start again. Think carefully before going this route.

UnRAID - Cheap software that runs on your hardware, makes upgrades/using mixed drive sizes easy and you can build way, way better for a lot less than the equivalent multi drive Synology box will cost you and support is for life. You can mount could storage.

FreeNAS and its various derivatives - Free as the name suggests, similar to unraid but embraces ZFS which brings with it a few considerations in terms of hardware/drives, again you can mount cloud storage.

As has been suggested, depending on your ability and speed of connection, Gsuite Business does provide decent storage options, you can always combine it with a cheap linux VPS for a remote server/storage solution, run Plex on that and £700 buys you a lot of years of not worrying about power/heat/noise, drive failure etc.

As pointed out though, playback isn't straight forward, client choice, content type and connectivity need careful consideration along with server hardware. Give us the other parts of the puzzle and you'll get better advice (connection speed, technical ability, willingness to learn, need for local storage).
 
If you have decent internet and are only serving content to yourself so can control the media to be suitable for your client devices then I'd echo the Gsuite business route. While it's taken me a few months to upload my old media to it, now it is all settled my Unraid box continues as it always did with Sonarr/Radarr/Sab and the plethora of Dockers connected to cloud storage. Disks spin up less, power consumption is down and all for <£10 a month. If I was starting from scratch and didn't want to keep some services/dockers/backups local on my NAS, I'd go the VPS route too for Plex only.
 
So, being doing some research and seems like I could custom build for similar price to the Synology offerings?

As an example, would this spec running Unraid not be far more bang for the buck than something like a DS918+?

Intel Core i3 10100 (Comet lake, quad-core 3.6Ghz 65w)
MSI MAG B460M Mortar Wifi (Intel B460, 2.5GbE, 6 SATA-III ports)
Sabrent Rocket 512GB NVME
Corsair 16GB DDR4 3200Mhz
Fractal Design Node 804 case
Corsair CV 450W PSU

Total: £530 , so same price as a 918+, yet significantly more powerful and able to have up to 6 drives vs 4 of the Synology.
 
As I said in March, you get way more value and performance building, not to mention long term support and easy replacement parts as they’re standard. Personally I would consider an 8th gen onwards set-up comparable to your suggestion, not a lot has changed for this usage case since then, and realistically the 6th/7th gen i5’s are generally comparable to the 8th onwards i3’s.
 
A lot of people like self-build or whatever and that's fine, but I really appreciate my Synology for it's ease of use and lack of hassle. It will also use less power than a self-built PC more than likely.

It's not as powerful as an 8th gen Intel processor, but proper media setup locally doesn't require it to be, as Plex will use Direct Play as long as the client supports it.

Running a DS1815+ which is getting on a bit, but still works well. Using 4 x 10TB Red's so I actually have 4 empty bays, but I got the drives for a good price (£150~ each) and they are easily large enough to hold everything.

If you go self-built then you'll need to handle O/S, updates, apps, RAID config (assuming you're wanting some RAID config for the hard drives).

For me it was worth paying a bit extra to get rid of some of those headaches, and to also give me a box with a smaller footprint.
 
The 5-10 minutes it takes to configure UnRAID wasn't quite the traumatic experience you seem to think, even in the early days :D Power wise the difference is likely minimal unless you’re doing something CPU intensive, in which case it’s likely a self build for Synology money will significantly outperform a Synology, power gating being what it is, it’s back to idle and saving power. Offset it against the massive savings if you spec’d like for like? Not sure I follow the updates/management point, last time I fired up DSM I’m pretty sure I needed to manage updates/drives in a very similar way to UnRAID (eg click update), perhaps not so much in FreeNAS, but that would be down to my chosen file system set-up.
 
Ok so having done some more reading:

1) QSV can’t be used without Plex pass subscription? I wouldn’t want to pay the £100 for that. Would I be better off with a Ryzen cpu then?

2) A lot of people suggest that a NVME is somewhat redundant in a server due to the limitation being the gigabit Ethernet?

3) Is there no way to get Unraid for free anymore?
 
pioneer2000 said:
1) QSV can’t be used without Plex pass subscription? I wouldn’t want to pay the £100 for that. Would I be better off with a Ryzen cpu then?
Click to expand...
You don't have to get a lifetime subscription - either pay monthly or annually?

Better yet, make sure the media you have is in a format that your clients can direct play, and then you don't need to transcode at all. (and so wouldn't need QS)

pioneer2000 said:
2) A lot of people suggest that a NVME is somewhat redundant in a server due to the limitation being the gigabit Ethernet?
Click to expand...
Depends what else you are doing with the server - if running multiple VMs or Dockers then it's more useful. It's also ideal for storing Plex (or Emby in my case) metadata which makes the UI faster

pioneer2000 said:
3) Is there no way to get Unraid for free anymore?
Click to expand...
It's free for 30 days - after that $59 for 6 storage devices. For what it offers it's a small price to pay. If money's that tight then get a smaller NVME
 
Why not an Nvidia Shield with external storage plugged in, probably the cheapest option I can think of, you can run PLEX Server on the Shield.

Also the Nvidia Shield is one of the best clients for playback as well.
 
HEADRAT said:
Why not an Nvidia Shield with external storage plugged in, probably the cheapest option I can think of, you can run PLEX Server on the Shield.

Also the Nvidia Shield is one of the best clients for playback as well.
Click to expand...

While that will work, it’s really not comparable to a complete automated set-up like any of the other solutions being discussed. I really like my Shield as a client, but as a server it’s not ideal at all.
 
Avalon said:
While that will work, it’s really not comparable to a complete automated set-up like any of the other solutions being discussed. I really like my Shield as a client, but as a server it’s not ideal at all.
Click to expand...

I agree it was a”left field” but could be a cheap option.
 
I'm using the Synology DS218+ with 8TB Ironwolf drives, runs plex perfectly, i have both my TV's connecting to plex as well as different users setup for friends and family.

Hasn't missed a beat yet and i'm streaming 4K movies.
 
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