Current Best in Class 6-8 bay NAS

General Discussions Hardware
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@ChuckPa and others.
I tried looking through the compatibility guide here but didn’t have a ton of success. I have an ancient home server (10+ year old Asus board running 2019 Windows Server Essentials) and would like to replace it with a beefy NAS. I really only use it for filesharing and as a Plex Server (though I might run a VM or PiHole on it). I have a 4k LG OLED TV running the Plex App (and sometimes Android phones or Windows dekstops ) with some media at 2160p, but most at 1080p. It doesn’t look like there is one NAS that checks most of the boxes. I’m assuming Hardware Accelerated Transcoding is best?

I looked for other threads and they seem to be dated. Could anyone suggest a Synology (1st), QNAP (2nd) or other NAS which would give me the best Plex experience for now? I’m assuming I’ll drop 5-6k for the device and drives. Prefer desktop/tower form factor over rack mount. I’m not looking to build a box. I’d rather get this massive extended ATX tower out from under my desk and have something I can mostly set and ignore.

Thanks in advance.

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@Xenor

I can make suggestions but first there are two questions:

  1. Spouse approval factor? Is this a concern? :slight_smile:
  2. Financial considerations?
    – I can make recommendations for “Best in Class” which are capable of storage, running PMS and other things (a fully fledged appliance)

To set the bar:

  1. Synology has a very nice UI but none of their machines have a lot of CPU / GPU power. They all, unfortunately, fail miserably when subtitles are involved.

  2. QNAP makes big ‘beefy’ machines which will do all you list above – and then some. The UI isn’t as pretty as Synology but once you learn it, you’ll find you can do MORE on a QNAP than you can on a Synology (considerably more)

Which direction would you like to go in and with which constraints?

PS: I have two Synology, two QNAP, with a big tower ‘DIY’ under my desk corner. :slight_smile:

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Just me here. Retired. I probably don’t need nvme or SSD caching, as I don’t transfer that many files, but I’m guessing the better appliances will have upgrades. I do have the UniFi UDM-SE with a SFP+ port. Ideally I could plug into that for 10GB transfer speeds, so I might take advantage of that feature. I’m planning on two RAID5 volumes, with perhaps 6x10TB drives to start. I may upgrade to 20TB drives in another 5 years?

I’ve only dabbled a little in Synology. I’m fine with the jump to QNAP if it provides more.

Thanks!

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Jumping to QNAP, with its expandability , gives you a lot of room for adding storage to your heart’s delight.

I have a EOL’d TVS-1282 i7-7700 w/ 64GB. 2x 10GbE, 6x Seagate EXOS20 20TB drives, two SATA SSD’s on the Mobo where QTS resides.

It looks like this:

  1. CACHEDEV1 (aka: volume1) - 2x Samsung 970 Pro 1TB SSD - RAID 1
  2. CACHEDEV2 (aka: volume2) - 6x 20TB EXOS drives
  3. CACHEDEV3 - 1TB SSD for plex testing

(I can easily have up through CACHEDEV6 in this box without expansion cards)
(I can also add the expansion chassis interface card and add another 16 drives)

Here is one machine to consider. It’s the successor to my TVS-1282-i7-64G

TVS-h1288x-W1250-64GB

TVS-h1288X | Intel® Xeon® W desktop QuTS hero NAS, ideal for high-speed media collaboration over Thunderbolt™ 3 and 10GbE virtual machine applications | QNAP (US)

It comes with 10GbE and 2.5 GbE.

While it’s “NVR”, it makes a serious NAS and Plex server.

I would run QTS on it. QuTS is ZFS based . You have a choice

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Be careful with the UDM-PRO-SE and bandwidth. Although you’ll get to connect via the SFP+ at 10G, every other LAN port on that device shares a single 1G backplane. They are really just routers that they have poorly bolted a switch to the side of - it’s only designed to be fast between the 2 SFP+ ports.

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To add to Bob,

I have a Netgear XS724EM 10 GbE 24port switch. Everything is there.
Only my external WAN uplink slows down to gigabit.

I tried Unify and found it could not keep up with my media needs.

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At the moment, I don’t have any devices with greater than 1GB interfaces. I figured the SFP+ would be able to route to the 2-3 friends who use my server and/or myself when away from home. Otherwise, I’d only have a single device streaming on the LAN at any point. Should I find myself doing more, I’ll look into the appropriate switching gear as well as NIC for the one desktop that would be connected via Ethernet. Regardless, thanks for the heads up. Always good to know where bottlenecks might be hiding.

I’ve generally had good luck with WD drives personally, but it has been awhile. I know that many folks have anecdotal preference. Looks like I’d drop about $4700 for 6x20TB EXOS and $3700 for 6x10TB EXOS (plus the appliance). Almost linear pricing. My current combined volumes are 20TB, so a quadrupling might make sense. Any issues with the WD Red NAS drives?

I think I have an extra 1TB drive laying around here somewhere that I could pop in since it’s just sitting idle.

Only bummer is the price jumped $700 back in July 2021. I don’t think I’d like to buy it used, but Amazon Warehouse does have one for ~$550 cheaper.

I appreciate the prompt and detailed suggestion!

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If I may add one more thing:

I’m very much a WD guy.

I’ve always used WD drives.
When I built the monster under my desk, I decided to use the Enterprise drives:

HUH721212ALE604 (12x 12TB - RAID 6) – These are now WD Gold drives

In my QNAP, which serves as my mirror image backup NAS, is where I have
6x Seagate EXOS20 20TB drives (RAID 5)… Power on only for backup.

The two reasons I went with the Seagates there are:

  1. WD is putting Flash in certain drives. As is always the case, Flash eventually burns out. If it’s in a HDD, the HDD is useless. NOT a fan of planned obsolescence.

  2. The EXOS20 20TB happened to be on sale from one vendor ay $288 each. Being retired and fixed income, I couldn’t beat that with a stick :slight_smile:

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I have an old Synology and I love it, the software is great. If it died, I would replace it immediately. I’m behind the times and cannot recommend a current model, but here is something to think about no matter what NAS you get…

Consider not running PMS on the NAS. If your budget is $5-6k you should be able to squeeze in a separate modest Intel server box, which will be much much more capable than any NAS. If you have any existing spare hardware like a case, PSU, RAM, SSD, the total cost of setting up something like an i5-10400 should be minimal compared to the cost of the NAS.

This lets you totally decouple all your services like PMS, PiHole, and everything else you will dream up from storage.

The only thing my Syno does besides storage is DNS – it has a nice UI for that and it is low-load even for a crummy CPU.

Anything else I want to do… Like PMS or running a local large language model sandbox… Goes on the modest Linux server that also runs PMS. And I have plenty of power to spare, plus it’s easy to look up how-to guides for any kind of Linux task you want to do.

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Separating Compute from Storage is a great way to manage this as well.

Something like a Intel NUC 9 NUC9i9QNX Ghost Skull Canyon is a great way to go.

  1. You have the outstanding QSV for HW transcoding
  2. The i9 is a lot of CPU power
  3. The GhostCanyon form factor easily fits on the shelf. (I have a i5 version for my pfsense firewall)

Now you can do storage any way you want.

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I moved from Synology 218+ to QNAP TS-664 this past year.

It’s a midrange option from QNAP but I switched to it for the CPU and Network capabilities over similar Synology form factor and I have been very happy with it. The GUI is less intuitive or polished compared to Synology but you get used to it and find it has more functionality via GUI overall… though I still get irritated it won’t remember window sizing for the file browser. :slight_smile:

My media direct plays on Roku and iOS devices mostly but now my TS-664 can handle transcoding 1080p anime with PGS\SSA subs and midlevel bitrate 4k HDR files to 1080p SDR without much initial buffering. The Synology couldn’t do PGS subs at all and only 720p\SSA transcoding for anime (as long as it wasn’t busy trying to do anything else and the subs were still basic).

It’s got 4x10TB WD Red drives in RAID5 for storage and used 2x1TB NVMe drives in RAID1 for the System. No SSD with cache acceleration but likely will once I update my network to 2.5G+.

There’s more I can do with it I couldn’t really do with the Synology and it has expandability options to keep it relevant for quite some time so I think it worked pretty well for my situation. It’s just me and my wife and occasional remote viewers and it’s handled everything well for us.

The Synology interface is easier to manage but if you’re comfortable with digging around OS options and settings and such the QNAP is fine.

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Here’s a used NUC9i9. I’ve not done a deep-dive of the seller

As you can see,

This puzzle can be sliced a whole bunch of different ways.

It all depends on what works best with how you think / want to do it.

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Not familiar with QSV. Is that an Intel specific thing with their GPU?

How does one go about attaching HDD to the NUC box? I have a MediaSonic ProBox that is basically a USB3.1 JBOD that I use for external backup. Transfer speeds max out at 100MB/sec.
Not terrible, but not great compared to RAID. My current beast of a tower has a mid-range RAID card in it, and I do like how crazy fast internal swaps are from one volume to the next (500-600 MB/sec). I feel like if I buy an external BOX with HW RAID capabilities, I’m almost buying a NAS.

I don’t tinker as much as I used to. I think that’s why I’m leaning towards a set it and forget it type appliance. But who knows, maybe once I get started I’ll want to do more things. I am more comfortable in GUI management, but I can do a few things via command line. I suppose that’s why a linux setup isn’t as appealing. I recognize that folks who run systems daily find it more powerful and easier to work with than Windows/Mac/proprietary GUI but I mostly am looking for a dependable appliance to serve my media and backup files from my desktop. I don’t run cameras, home automation, dev VMs, etc. I appreciate the appeal, but in my retirement I’ve leaned more on physical activities, like riding the motorcycle, woodworking, etc.

I do appreciate all the feedback and options. Once I understand the NUC expansion, I may consider that instead of a QNAP

Edit: Correction to my internal RAID transfer rates. I’m getting 200-270 MB/sec

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I thought I would share my current setup for reference. I haven’t been disappointed with performance per-se, but it is just getting old.

Intel i7 960, 24GB RAM running Windows Server Essentials on Samsung 960 Pro
Asus P6T Deluxe with 2010 AMI Bios
Avago MegaRAID 9260-8i (3x8TB Hitachi Enterprise, 3x3TB WD Black, 1xWD 500GB Raptor for Temp/swap
AMD Radeon HD5450

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Yep, it stands for QuickSync Video. It’s a hardware accelerated decoder/encoder.

Quick Sync means that even a crummy old Celeron can do a few simultaneous 4k HDR → 1080p SDR streams. It is extremely useful.

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HDR to SDR tone mapping using QuickSync is only possible running Linux. In Windows that happens in software which can murder your CPU.

You need a Nvidia GPU for this to work in Windows, which isn’t really an option using a NUC

I know you don’t want to build a box, but I would consider Unraid. It’s Linux, but a very Windows-like GUI

In most cases you’ll get twice the performance (or more) at half the cost

Reuse the parts you can from your current rig and save your money for hard drives

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Good point, thanks for adding.

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Well for the NUC I’m going to need an external box for the HDD. I think I saw someone with an external GPU on the NUC as well. Yeah, connecting all these external boxes sounds like a headache.

The QNAP is 14.59 x 12.59 x 9.24 inches
My current case is 9x20x22. So the QNAP is a little larger than I thought, but still a bit less than the current beast. I could probably reuse the PSU and SSD, but everything else needs to be replaced. So i9 CPU (with QVC?), and motherboard. If I use an onboard GPU and a linux based OS that can utilize the QVC, I won’t need a discreet GPU (correct?). I forgot I had a box of HyperX Predator RAM (HX430C15PB3K4/64) which I may be able to find a compatible MB for. (Latest gen is DDR5, correct, so a slightly older MB and CPU?) and a newer RAID card which can handle 10-20TB drives and give me better throughput.

I don’t pretend to know how to run a VM on linux, and if I did it would be Windows for the guest OS so…

I’m sure pi-hole runs on linux but I’ve only ever run it on an individual raspberry pi or Windows container.

I get that these NAS are dedicated to file storage and not really designed to be a media streaming appliance, but I would be so happy if someone made a retail box with warranty support rather than playing Dr. Frankenstein. Nothing against those who do, just more effort than I was planning. I really miss my HP Windows Home Server. Back when media topped out at 480p, it was a nice little box…

Edit: Looks like a barebones NUC 13 Extreme i9 is under 2k over on eBay or Amazon.

So I can probably build out my box for about the same with a decent RAID card. (Or some kind of external HDD box with built in hardware raid that can transfer via Thunderbolt 4?)

The QNAP solution is running about $4700k (2k for HDD). It’s obvious I could build for about 1k less. I just won’t have a single place to go for warranty & support. If things are still built as reliable as this Asus MB that’s ticking after 13 years…

I’m guessing that not all hardware transcoding is built equal?

Now, whether to teach myself how to use Linux & UnRaid plus find reliable drivers for the various hardware over a weekend…

Edit 2: I do appreciate the feedback. Looks like there are several more recent posts for DiY builds that I can gather info from. Wonder if the Covid supply chain/Corp greed have driven up the prices of all-in-one hardware and more folks are looking to build themselves? Or maybe it’s my original premise that they are building mostly fileserver boxes and not media server boxes…

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Whether for a NAS or a Plex server, that may be overkill. I’ve never had a computer that fast for games or work, much less Plex!

My NAS is so old I can’t even remember what Celeron CPU it has and it still works fine – because all I ask it to do is storage. My Plex Linux server is an i5-10400 and it can support more simultaneous users than I will ever need. (I’d still be using my first i3-7100 Plex server if the motherboard had not failed.)

People talk about visible differences between Intel and Nvidia but I have never seen a good summary.

Nvidia locks down the number of simultaneous transcodes you can do unless you use a patched driver.

Remember than tone mapping (HDR to SDR) will not run with hardware acceleration if PMS is on Windows.

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You don’t need to fill all the bays right away. That can save some money upfront. My QNAP setup ran less than $1000.

Synology and QNAP with Plex is pretty much set and forget in most ways. You can do everything via GUI and for things you don’t you’ve got articles and helpers in these forums and other areas.

For things not Plex there is a lot for QNAP and Synology both to help folks get it sorted out and most of the time you do it all via GUI.

If your clients - your playback devices - can playback without transcoding then the CPU doesn’t really matter. My old Synology 218+ was handling multiple large 4k bluray rips just fine as long as transcoding wasn’t kicking in… if you’re doing mostly 1080p X264\X265 based video files I doubt you’ll have much if any transcoding requirements.

If doing 4k you’d only need transcoding for any TV\devices that don’t support 4k and there are options for that as well. You can prompt Plex to optimize ahead of time for compatible versions to skip on-the-fly trancoding or just keep a 1080p\720p rip to go with it. I do the latter and Plex client automatically picks the right one to playback on the non-4K tvs.

QNAP can process HDR->SDR tonemapping.

If you don’t want to tinker QNAP and Synology are both excellent options that can be as little or as much tinker as you want to do. Both also have GUI docker managers with access to prebuilt docker setups if that’s an area you’d be interested (like for your pihole). I tend to go with “pretty good for the money” and can tinker and handle more advanced stuff but don’t always want to at home so just offering that perspective here.