NAS/server recommendations

mattyc123

mattyc123

mattyc123

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Joined
5 Apr 2010
Posts
299
Location
Thelwall, Warrington
Hi all,

I am looking to build or buy a NAS, my house has a wired gigabit network and I have 4 machines and a TV that would need access to the files on the server.

I currently have about 6TB of storage needs across my machines and I would be looking for the NAS to have 10TB with some decent redundancy. I have an 8 and 2TB external hard drives that would be used for on site backup and my most important files are backed up to google cloud.

There are two use cases for the NAS the first is to act as a central file server so I can keep everything in one place, this is documents films and photos. I will continue to only have games locally on the machines. I would also like to use the NAS to act as a plex server.

can anyone recommend some parts to build this system or a pre-built that might do the job?

Thanks
Matt
 
Depends on your budget, do you want it to work out of the box? or are you happy to install, configure, maintain the OS?

Personally I would go with Synology / QNAP but the initial cost will be higher.
 
You can't go wrong with Synology and QNAP but I'll throw Unraid into the mix.

It's not going to be cheaper than Synology or QNAP but its flexibility, ease of use, docker and app ecosystem makes it a joy to use. However your use case may make it no better than Synology or QNAP

By way of example my Unraid server hosts 21TB of storage with shares for media, photos etc. as you'd expect as well as things like Apple TimeMachine shares. I have Plex running as a Docker container that clients on all my Smart TVs and Fire devices use. Then I have containers that serve as home automation hubs for turning my outside lights on when the sun sets and off again when it rises. Another container, combined with the app on my phone, means every time my phone comes into range of my WiFi any new photos are automatically synced to the server. Another acts as a network wide adblocker using PiHole. Another acts as an externally available 'cloud' storage platform via reverse proxy. And a whole suite of others automate my downloads so I just type the name of a new film or TV series into a nice GUI and as it becomes available on the internet it gets automatically grabbed, renamed, indexed and moved into where Plex sees it available without my intervention. And there's a lot more available than that.

Unraid is best deployed using its system of parity that means you can use any old disks of different sizes as long as you reserve the largest for parity. This protects you against a single drive failure. e.g. Put in a 6TB, 4TB and 3TB disk and you have 7TB available as the 6TB is used for parity. Put in three 8TB disks and you have 16TB available etc.

I should add that while I'm reasonably proficient, I'm no Linux guru and nearly everything is done with a nice GUI and there's lots of helpful videos on youtube to guide through things step-by-step, particularly by this guy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDfnUn74N0WeAPvMqTOrtA/videos
 
I don't have a huge budget maybe up to £700 I am happy to build and maintain it myself. I would like it to be reasonably low power when idle, there will be less usage during the day and over night. I don't think I need something very powerful, it won't be doing things like vm's but it will have to transcode films.

Thanks for your replys
 
£700 is a great budget. You can easily get 8TB of storage on any of the suggested platforms for less than that in my opinion.
 
Off the shelf systems are tied into an ecosystem of planned obsolescence. UnRAID is for life.

With UnRAID you are building a solution that will continually have new features added and evolve over time, it can be scaled up or run on relatively modest hardware, initial outlay can be from zero upwards, but a quite healthy build can easily be done in a very modest budget leaving you more money for storage, it also runs mixed drive sizes as standard which means you can buy what’s best value and use what you already have, rather than trying to match drive sizes, growing or shrinking your storage pool is ridiculously easy.
 
£700 won't be enough for a decent QNAP/Synology with an intel CPU for Plex hardware transcoding and 10TB RAID 1.

A Synology DS218+ with 2 x 10TB drives would be £900.
 
QNAP/Synology NAS with 4 bays would be from £300-500 depending on what features you want in addition to the basic file sharing. Then add say 4 x 4GB WD RED HDDs @ £115.00 for 12TB storage in RAID 5 as you do want space to grow in.

So easily £700-1000 for a well featured NAS. I paid the upper end for a QNAP TS-453B 4 bay with 4 x 4TB WD RED NAS drives. The system has some hardware expansion for 10 gbe and SSD caching and so far the QTS OS has been continually updated with numerous apps to cover many uses.

I have installed Ubuntu desktop (it runs concurrently with the QTS OS) for a while for adding more functionality but actually found their Hybrid desktop had the TV attached multimedia features I needed with less maintenance required.

That initial cost can be off putting and yeah I may miss HDMI 2.1 features in the next year or too which would need a total replacement. GPU upgrades are possible in some models but I think the 453B just missed the boat for future support as it's PSU is woefully under powered.
 
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ChrisD. said:
What now? :D
Click to expand...

How’s support today for QNAP/Synology products from pre 2010, still getting full current version OS support and new features added with each major version upgrade? My UnRAID boxes from the same vintage do, they also have the option of migrating to inexpensive modern hardware that in the event they fail I could be up and running in the time it takes to swap a board/PSU out - even the Purple Shirted Mafia or Prime Now could have me up and running in less than an hour worst case scenario.
 
labcoattech said:
Is Unraid able to make use of a GPU to help with transcoding?
Click to expand...

UnRAID has supported hardware passthrough and hardware transcoding for a good few years.

ChrisD. said:
I'm not entirely surprised that a vendor is not supporting near 10 year old hardware?
Click to expand...

Using my R210-II as an example the last BIOS update was February of this year, it still runs Win10 if required.

Compare that with Synology’s history. You buy a higher end SoC based SKU, 3 years later the same SoC is now low end, but still being actively sold, you’re looking at looming ‘limited’ DSM support and someone buying the same fundamental hardware has three extra years. After offering various justifications (time, money, hardware certification) they U turned and now generally you have a 10 year lifespan with the last 2 on legacy.
 
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labcoattech said:
nice, might have a look at migrating my xpenology HP N40L to UnRAID
Click to expand...

Oddly one of the 2010 boxes I have is a N36L, they are even now amazingly good basic home NAS devices, the only caveat in your case is finding a Nvidia GPU that’s single slot, low power and runs cool, consumer SKU’s only handle 2 streams without driver patching, but it’s pretty well documented.
 
Thanks again for your replys, does anyone have any hardware recommendations for an unraid setup, I only have a 1tb drive that would be freed up and it is quite old so I probably would buy a set of new drives.
 
Find a CPU that has enough grunt for any Plex duties you need and build it around that, as if anything becomes a bottleneck it will be that. Then ensure your motherboard has lots of SATA ports or you know how you'll add more in the future. I'd also advocate as efficient a power supply as you can stretch to if you're in it for the long haul. A small SSD as a cache drive makes dockers and VMs much better in UnRaid and for storage then pick drives designed to be on all the time like WD Reds. UnRaid I don't think benefits from stuff like ECC Ram and in my experience is reasonably efficient on the RAM front so doesn't need masses of it unless you're going to run dozens of containers and VMs at the same time.

Depending on your level of comfort many folks buy WD desktop or NAS enclosures with drives in. For 8TB+ the hard drives inside these enclosures are designed for 24/7 use and it is cheaper to buy them that way than the raw drive, although forget about warranty doing it that way.
 
Why if anything do you already have from previous builds/upgrades if anything?

Decide on what your Plex requirements actually are - local transcoding of anything but audio shouldn’t generally be a thing, 4K transcoding shouldn’t be a thing ever, that leaves remote users which are usually limited by your uplink before anything else in the UK. Plex’s published CPU metric is 2k of CPU mark per 1080 AV transcode at a reasonable bit-rate, add the overhead for OS and background tasks and then consider if the box will be running things like VPN or processing NZB derived content and doing repairs etc. Personally i’d go with an NVMe SSD for cache/docker/VM use, though AHCI will generally work OK in most scenario’s, but the price difference is minimal and the performance isn’t. Generally intel NIC’s are preferable and if you need to add SATA ports then H200/310’s are circa £30 for an 8 port set-up, just remember it won’t support TRIM so SSD’s on the motherboard controller.
 
I've found a cache drive to be completely unnecessary. It's something I'd look at again if I start running anything more intensive than Plex and hit a problem, but my Unraid box performs just fine without one.
 
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