Couple Beginner Questions about NAS and DS918+

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

I am completely new to NAS, but I’ve been running Plex for years, so sorry if these are dumb questions.
I am looking into getting a NAS to run my Plex Media Server full time, to replace a laptop that recently kicked the bucket. I have a good amount of content between film, tv, and music, so I want about 40TB of storage to account for a couple years of content growth, and as of right now my plan is to back up elsewhere (currently all content is on various WD My Book drives). My content is many different formats and codecs, and transcoding is a necessity as I use it primarily remotely through the Xbox One and Fire Stick Plex apps.

Basically I want a server that can handle transcoding 4K content and likely at a high end 2-3 concurrent streams at once (not likely to be 4K), but generally it will be a single 1080p stream. From my understanding, the Synology DS918+ seems like it is capable of doing the job for the right cost. I plan on using WD Red 10TB drives for the drive and continuing to use the WD My Books as backups for the time being. And I also plan on working on getting the Live TV functionality through the NAS as well after getting the rest up and running, haven’t done much research into how exactly t manage that yet.

First off, am I correct in the assumption that it will work for me? I have checked the Plex compatibility, and it seems to.

Second, if I purchase the expansion unit (DX517) to run as a raid back up in the future, will that work and will it affect performance at all?

Does the DS918+ need anything other than drives to work, or is it perfectly stand alone as purchased when new?

What should the drives be formatted as? Currently I run all in NTFS.

Will I need to expand the memory to 8GB or will the 4GB it comes with be good enough?

Can something like PlexPy, or an equivalent, run on this for personal logging?

And then is there a proper Guide to ensure that I setup my Plex server correctly? Or is it straight forward enough for somebody familiar with Plex and Windows but not the NAS UI.

2

I use a DS916+ for Plex, but I have Nvidia shields as clients so the load on the server is minimal.

It can transcode 1080p no problem though, I’ve tried it with 3+ streams and it worked fine. With regards to 4K, although the 918+ can transcode 4K, HDR files won’t look right and as there’s currently no tone mapping support it’s not clear at the moment whether this would produce any extra overhead.

I can tell you that image based subtitles are a no go even with hardware decode+transcode, the CPU just can’t do it.

All drives that go internally in a symbology get formatted to a RAID system regardless of whether you use raid, so don’t expect to be able to insert a disk full of media into a bay and expect to use it, doesn’t work like that.

Never expand the array across an expansion box, if the cable comes out you could destroy the integrity of your raid array.

I use 8GB of RAM in mine and it seems to hover at about 4GB used, I run Plex, sonarr, UniFi, sabnzbd and a load of other things in docker containers.

3

Ok so expansion unit is a bad idea, that’s good to know. Perhaps I’ll just run a second 918 if I run out of space at some point. And guess I’ll expand to 8GB then just to be safe. Really just wanted to be sure I was interpreting things correctly. And with subtitles not an issue for me, sounds like the 918+ should work then at least for most circumstances for me.

4

I’m happy with my DS916+, if I were looking to pull the trigger again I’d happily pull the trigger on the 918.

The expansion boxes are expensive for what they are, I have one bay left so I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, whether it’s to buy another NAS unit or do the expansion unit.

All my stuff (including the Plex server) runs in docker containers.

6

Great thanks for the tip.

7

@trumpy81 yeah, I know that is the official line (which differs from the post where they previewed transcoding where the advice was “get to docker asap”)

Been running it for a couple of years in docket without issue, I have rolling backups of the configuration as well, so if the worst came to the worst I could restore a corrupt config.

8

If I may share my thoughts?

I setup PMS on Synology such that it has maximum portability to other systems.

I verified this by porting from Synology -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> QNAP -> Synology. without loss and all with ease. A tar or zip along with 2 settings changes and it was good to go.

I attempted the same with Docker. I could not import the Docker container into Fedora, Ubuntu, or QNAP. resulting in a total failure.

9

I should also add the caveat that I don’t use the Synology provided docker, I use my own docker package from the official binaries. The Synology docker has some very weird behaviours.

10

That is pretty steep caveat. Not everyone will be able to build their own docker package to manage the containers. most will use COTS packages.

1 Like
11

Total newbie question but what is a docker and what is it used for?

13

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.