I had a friend build me a freenas server. But it just failed and doesn’t work and its time to upgrade.
I wanted to upgrade but with so many choices its hard to know what to go with.
I have about 4TB of movies avi and m4vs. But I know with 4K and bigger files I just don’t know which way to go now. I want to plan for the future which is always hard to do in this growing world. I want to make sure that the server I get will also be able to play these newer 4K files that I will be converting from my library of movies. I was thinking of Synology DS918+ but I figure I get all the info to point me in the right direction…
I would like a 4 bay, and think that would work for me. I have all my movies double backed up so having 4 x 4tb = 16tb is ok with me. I learned my lesson of drives going bad on me so I set up a good system.
I am in the process of building a movie room and have a few rooms with Plex. The most I would have are 2 to 3 devices playing off the server for the family of 5 in my house.
Any suggestions will be appreciated
Thanks in advance.
To answer your question directly, I think Synology is a good company with good products. I would specifically stay away from all Drobo products. I have had first hand horror stories with them, and when I went looking for help in reddit communities, found that Drobo is universally hated.
Now for my unsolicited 2 cents: I would go a PC/Mac with a DAS software raid. The reasons is that if any hardware fails, you can simply repair/replace the hardware and you are back up. The biggest problem with a NAS is that of the NAS hardware fails in any way, you need to find that exact enclosure to get up and running again.
I have two ThunderBay Raid enclosures (a 4 bay and a 6 bay) and I love them. The drives are in RAID 5 config, and if anything goes wrong with the enclosures, I can simply plop the drives in IDE docks or any type of USB HD enclosures, and I’m back up and running. Also since it’s software raid, the processor being used is the PC (mac in my case) Intel processor. Way faster than the embedded processors used in NAS enclosures. I’m getting 500-600MB/sec read and writes which is perfect since I often have multiple family members pulling movies from my Plex server.
