Cheap NAS for hosting Plex content

pioneer2000 · 22 Mar 2020 at 10:29

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

pioneer2000 · 4 Jun 2020 at 14:21

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.

pioneer2000 · 5 Jun 2020 at 13:12

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 · 5 Jun 2020 at 13:33

Thanks, I believe the vast majority of my content should be fine to direct play, so with this being the case would you go Intel or AMD?

pioneer2000 · 8 Jun 2020 at 10:59

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.

I have around 15TB of films, so I don't think it would be practical to use external hard drives directly with the Shield?

pioneer2000 · 8 Jun 2020 at 18:00

I'm a little taken aback by this talk of uploading numerous TB's of MKV files to google drive! Especially considering the actual limit is supposed to be 1TB.

Do many people REALLY do this?! Also, with a lot of content being 4K / HDR / Atmos now, is it really feasible to stream these via plex over the internet?