NAS setup

Marshstyles · 8 Sep 2016 at 13:59

Hi, I'm looking to get a NAS purely for watching films and TV series downstairs in the living room and across my home network.

At the moment everything is stored on my PC which is a bit of a ball ache if someone wants to watch something I'm gaming. I have been getting around it by just putting the files on a USB stick but I want a more convenient solution.

The Synology DiskStation DS216j Clicky has caught my attention.

My question is can I run it with 1 hard drive for the time being. Then when I start using it (if ever) to store/backup things that are more personal to me and buy a second hard drive to run in RAID 1? And will the existing drive have to be formatted to set up RAID 1?

Thanks in advance

Rackerz · 8 Sep 2016 at 14:12

You won't need to format the existing drive, when I added one to the configuration it went in fine.

ov_sjo · 8 Sep 2016 at 14:14

When you say NAS, do you also want it to be the media player hooked up to the TV?

Marshstyles · 8 Sep 2016 at 14:26

Rackerz said:
You won't need to format the existing drive, when I added one to the configuration it went in fine.

thanks

ov_sjo said:
When you say NAS, do you also want it to be the media player hooked up to the TV?

Yes, in the spec it says it can do this.

As a DLNA Certified® DMS (Digital Media Server), DS216j can serve as your primary media server, with the capability to host digital multimedia content for local or remote playback.

bledd · 8 Sep 2016 at 16:56

Set up the Volume type as 'SHR' - Synology Hybrid RAID.

When you add the second disk, it will merge your existing disk with the new one, with no data loss (as long as you don't have a power cut!).

The process takes a while..

EYEREX · 9 Sep 2016 at 10:20

I run a Pi with OpenMediaVault with a Seagate 5TB drive plugged into my router which works really well

bledd · 9 Sep 2016 at 10:44

But that's 100Mbit max..

RichL · 9 Sep 2016 at 10:51

I have a DS216j and it does a decent job of running Plex server for 1080p content. It is not capable of transcoding video though so you will have to view at native res and subtitles are a no-go unless you burn them in. Just don't rely on RAID1 as back up and remember it is redundancy only. If content on drive 1 is corrupted/deleted then this will be mirrored onto the 2nd disk...

bledd · 9 Sep 2016 at 11:11

Get a Pi3 or Nvidia Shield etc with Libreelec/Kodi installed, then you can natively play anything, no need for transcoding.

RichL · 9 Sep 2016 at 11:28

Good point, you could transcode at the client end with something like a Shield. FireTV stick etc don't have the grunt though.

bledd · 9 Sep 2016 at 11:48

No need to transcode, most players have hardware decoding. Granted, not many have H265 decoding.

EYEREX · 9 Sep 2016 at 15:23

Not the best quality video but it shows five different videos playing from the same Pi OpenMediaVault setup Blu-ray rips play fine on the PC but my 4th gen iPad is a bit choppy if the bit-rate is to high but DVD's are fine