New NAS setup with 12 or 16TB Synology 1019+

[masscrazy]

So I am looking to do the following things:

• Run Plex Server
  
• Store all digital family photos to show in Plex
• Playing movies/tv shows through Plex with transcoding as an option
  
• Backup photos to remote service periodically i.e Google Drive

I have probably around 5TB of data over several disks I want to consolidate into single array with the option to back that up. And about 5TB of movies and TV Shows to stream to Plex clients on phone, TV.

I was condsidering 4x6TB or 4x4TB to allow for futher expansion, the Seagate IronWolf Pro are about £585 for 4x4TB, 5 year warranty with the Synology 1019+ 8GB RAM 5 bay NAS. With a somewhat powerful CPU to transcode 1080p streams (a few at least).

How does that sound in terms of a setup and what RAID array would you choose? I was considering RAID1 but not ideal for 4 disks. Otherwise RAID 5. Its old school but I dont expect I will be hammering any of the drives with data and mostly reading data.

 

[memyselfandi]

4x4TB will give you approximately 11.4TB usable space using RAID5. If you loose one of the disks it will likely take 7.5-8 hours to rebuild from the time you put in a replacement disk (I had to do this with a 4bay QNAP NAS using WD Reds last night).

For 4x4TB disks i have no issue with using RAID5 just make sure that you also have backups of anything important as RAID isn't backup.

Plex's documentation has an indication on what sort of CPU power is needed per transcode stream. I'd suggest checking the CPU in the NAS's power agaisnt this to see if its likely to be able to transcode as you want.

 

[Firejack]

Personally I wouldn't plan a build around Hardware Transcoding using Intel Quicksync with Plex. Off the top of my head;

• Colours are still washed out transcoding HEVC/H.265 to clients because of the ongoing tone mapping issue with Plex.
  
• Hardware transcoding is frequently broken (1.18.x Plex release recently latest example).
  
• Quicksync has many hardware issues and Intel doesn't maintain support for anything but most recent few generations of Quicksync. (Everything pre-Skylake seems to of been dumped at this stage)
  
• Quicksync encoded files are larger than the same file using Software encoding.
• And.. the picture quality is worse.

The best advice I've seen is to just avoid transcoding and hardware encoding. Software encode all your files ahead of time.

I'm planning to Software Encode my 1080/ 4K video files with HEVC/H.265 to save space and preserve quality. Then keep a 720p copy Software Encoded with H.254 for compatibility on lower end and older devices.