Off the shelf NAS or build my own?

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

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I'd like to get a NAS sorted out for myself. What I want to be able to do is backup from maybe 2-3 computers on my home network. I also want to be able to serve media with Plex including transcoding. As the machine is going to be on 24/7 I want to keep my power consumption down.

I've been looking at off the shelf NAS options from synology/qnap etc. I've also looked at the idea of building this myself. I want to keep costs down on this as well.

What should I be looking to do?

I did put together a NAS for myself a few years ago using an HP Microserver and xpenology. I have just moved house (and country) and been tied up with things for a while. This means I haven't been on top of developments with OS options. What should I be considering?
 
I thought I'd replied to this but can't have hit the post button. :rolleyes:
If you want low power then you need to look at a commercial NAS and my pick for value/performance is the Asustor Nimbustor 4. Add an extra 4GB RAM and that's it.

Building your own from scratch is probably going to be more expensive due to the scary price/availability of components at the moment. Obviously, you're in a better position if you've got hardware you can re-use as long as you can find a suitable 35W CPU.

UNRAID, XigmaNAS, OpenMediaVault & FreeNAS are just some of the NAS OSs available.
 
spudbynight said:
I also want to be able to serve media with Plex including transcoding.
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spudbynight said:
As the machine is going to be on 24/7 I want to keep my power consumption down.
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spudbynight said:
I want to keep costs down on this as well.
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Off the shelf refurbished HP (Elitedesk/Prodesk) or Dell (Optiplex) office PC with at least a 6th gen Intel Processor is probably the easiest way of meeting all of those requirements. They can be had for £100-£150, will take a couple of 3.5" hard drives, are designed for low power consumption and reliability.
 
Armageus said:
Off the shelf refurbished HP (Elitedesk/Prodesk) or Dell (Optiplex) office PC with at least a 6th gen Intel Processor is probably the easiest way of meeting all of those requirements. They can be had for £100-£150, will take a couple of 3.5" hard drives, are designed for low power consumption and reliability.
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Thanks for that, but I've looked at the media support with the 6th gen and I don't think it will cut the mustard. I might look into what I can find with a more recent generation processor though.
 
Slight hijack regarding running Plex on a NAS 24/7 and having drives power down when not in use. Since Plex is running all the time and part of its function is to monitor for new media added to your media library, does this mean that the hard drives will effectively never power down, since Plex is constantly scanning? I did see in another thread that if you set up your NAS with all your apps on one dedicated storage pool on one separate physical drive in one of the NAS slots, and made the other slots be the main storage pool, that the main pool drives would power down when not in use. But if Plex scanning would prevent this, would this defeat the purpose of having a separate apps drive? This is probably a relevant question for the OP as he seems interested in minimizing power usage. I have a Synology 920+ btw, currently set up with one pool, so drives appear to be on all the time.
 
spudbynight said:
I have media in various formats. Some of it is 4K with HDR which I can direct play on my Nvidia Shield. I also sometimes watch stuff on tablets/phones etc remotely and it is nice to be able to stream directly from my plex server.
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Things may have changed, but previously the advice was it was a bad idea to transcode 4K HDR, and easier/better to store a 2nd copy in a more relevant resolution/format for clients that can't direct play it.

Whilst it can be done (either via newer Intel CPU hardware acceleration = cost, recent NVIDIA GPU = cost, or more powerful CPU and software encoding = power consumption), then it's at odds with your keeping costs and power consumption down arguments
 
Bubo said:
Slight hijack regarding running Plex on a NAS 24/7 and having drives power down when not in use. Since Plex is running all the time and part of its function is to monitor for new media added to your media library, does this mean that the hard drives will effectively never power down, since Plex is constantly scanning? I did see in another thread that if you set up your NAS with all your apps on one dedicated storage pool on one separate physical drive in one of the NAS slots, and made the other slots be the main storage pool, that the main pool drives would power down when not in use. But if Plex scanning would prevent this, would this defeat the purpose of having a separate apps drive? This is probably a relevant question for the OP as he seems interested in minimizing power usage. I have a Synology 920+ btw, currently set up with one pool, so drives appear to be on all the time.
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My DS214se spins down the disks with Plex running. The scans and updates are all scheduled so I assume it just wakes up when it needs to.
 
I've previously used Synology (more than ~5 years ago) and more recently QNAP. I became disillusioned with QNAP's recent, err, poor press so I built a Ryzen 6 core PC and put TrueNAS on it. I've been so impressed with it that I've just installed TrueNAS onto my QNAP.

If you do build you own, do some research into cases and motherboards. Not many mini ITX boards have a huge amount of SATA ports as an example, and the Silverstone DS380B case which I got is quite airflow restricted.
 
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I've recently purchased a Synology DS1821+ that replaced a DS1815+ which replaced a 1512+ and so on, let me tell you in general forget about transcoding with for two reasons. The first being they have very limited transcoding abilities and the second being that with modern devices there really isn't any need.
 
spudbynight said:
I've been looking at off the shelf NAS options from synology/qnap etc. I've also looked at the idea of building this myself. I want to keep costs down on this as well.
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How significant is the Wife Acceptance Factor? If it's high, take a look at QNap's HS-264 and HS-453DX. The latter has the advantage of being expandable: you can put extra RAM and M.2 drives in it.
 
ChrisD. said:
Depends on a lot of factors but to say there isn’t any need is extremely misleading.
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For the majority it really isn't misleading at all, yes you can find some cases where it is useful but that point is moot as well since the majority of consumer NAS just can't do it well.
 
Quartz said:
How significant is the Wife Acceptance Factor? If it's high, take a look at QNap's HS-264 and HS-453DX. The latter has the advantage of being expandable: you can put extra RAM and M.2 drives in it.
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Rarely, this isn't a factor at all. My wife is very keen to have our home server/NAS at home as she doesn't want to rely on cloud storage.

I've been looking at Dell Optiplex desktops with earlier gen processors on EBAY but can't really seem to find anything with more than one drive bay. :(

ChrisD. said:
Depends on a lot of factors but to say there isn’t any need is extremely misleading.
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Yes, certainly I make use of the abilty to transcode for remote playback quite a bit. It is nice to carry on watching something on the move and pick up where you left off at home.
 
spudbynight said:
Yes, certainly I make use of the abilty to transcode for remote playback quite a bit. It is nice to carry on watching something on the move and pick up where you left off at home.
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No need to transcode for that. Multi-device network video resume features are pretty basic and most players have them.
 
HACO said:
No need to transcode for that. Multi-device network video resume features are pretty basic and most players have them.
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You need to be able to transcode for two reasons

1) You want to conserve bandwith
2) If your playback device can't play the media in question

I've got lots of stuff in 4K HDR which won't playback on everything I have and also is far too big a file to want to stream to something like an iPhone while on the train
 
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