Four Bay NAS Configuration

General Discussions Hardware
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I am pulling my hair out trying to decide on a NAS for my Plex media server. I am looking for a four bay capable of supporting 20TB drives. I also have a Plex Pass lifetime subscription that supports hardware decoding. This will be used an NVIDIA Shield (not Pro). My current TV is a 65" LG C1 OLED with Dolby Vision & Atmos paired with an LG Atmos 2.1 sound bar. I have upgraded a lot of my movies to 2160p BD rips with 10 bit HDR and Dolby Atmos, with some recent release webrips as placeholders until the Blu-Ray release. There are several TV series I have that are also 2160p webrips.

This will be my first NAS media server. I have used a Windows based PC media server in the past. I know enough to be dangerous, but have not ever dealt with any other OS (including MAC). I had my sights set on the Synology DS923+, but it does not support hardware acceleration. Been looking at QNAP models since they seem to have resolved their security vulnerabilities. The Plex NAS compatibility chart has too many models that have been discontinued but not marked as such on the spreadsheet. I’ve spent hours going back and forth searching for particular models that come to dead ends.

I would like to keep the total under $1K and preferably around the $500-$700 range. Don’t know if that’s doable or not. If I need to upgrade my NVIDIA Shield to a Pro model, I’m OK with that. I realize that there are a lot of differing opinions about what one would consider optimal or “best”. I would appreciate a sanity check on what I want to do and how much I want to spend. I certainly can’t afford to spend $1K or more but if a few hundred more will get me where I want to go, I’m open to that. I would also be open if anyone would like to sell their used diskless NAS that would fit my needs as well, as long as a 20TB HDD will reliably work with it.

Thanks in advance for your consideration, and I will look forward to your replies and dialog.

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First requirement check: Do you want HW transcoding capability?
Ryzen V1500b CPUs do not have such a capability. They have up to 4 display monitor capability but that’s the limit.

Intel 64 bit CPUs are your best choice (such as the DS920+; available at Amazon)

If performing HW transcoding, you’ll want the NAS to have 8GB of RAM.
(if using the DS920+ as example, you’ll want to add a 4GB, same clock spec, DIMM - or replace the factory with a match-set 2x4GB of same spec to gain “dual channel” memory boost)

The next important step is HDDs.
Regular desktop drives won’t last in a NAS. (Vibration and extra activity of being in a NAS)

If you’re looking at Seagate IronWolf (many do), You want IronWolf Pro (NAS) drives.
You’ll need to confirm compatibility on the Synology web site but I believe those will work. This is probably what will blow your budget. HDDs aren’t cheap at 20TB

Personal experience with Synology machines – 4 HDDs, SHR RAID volume, EXT4 filesystem formatting (not BTRFS; too error/failure prone). SHR RAID will give you a 1-drive failure protection without loss of data (RAID 5 style). EXT4 is faster and less overhead than BTRFS. BTRFS is a RAID formatting which makes no sense when you have a RAID volume underneath it. (BTRFS does make sense for single-drive configurations)

The NAS Compatibility guide isn’t meant to be a ‘new user buyer’s guide’. It takes time from when new models come out until I can test them and, should they pass the tests, be vetted then added to the Compatibility Guide.

It was primarily created to show which NAS systems PMS will run on and what can be expected if PMS is installed on the specific model.

Doing some pencil path:

  1. DS920+ (Amazon USD price) = $800
  2. 4x HDDs @ $300 each (low price) = $1200
  3. 8 GB memory kit = $60

Hate to say it but “Cheap” isn’t in the vocabulary when playing this game.

Personally, I spent $4800 for HDDs (enterprise rated 12TB - 110TB total usable RAID 6)

Hope that gives you an idea what you’re up against.

There are many other ways to “Skin the cat”. I am one who rips the disk and keeps ALL the bits. I want quality for my TV over quantity. :slight_smile:

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@ChuckPa, thanks a lot for your response. I already have an external WD 20TB HDD that has my content on it. I am only planning to purchase another drive to start with the NAS for a Raid 1 array. I am curious about the memory you quoted in your breakdown. Synology 8GB RAM on Amazon is currently $179. What brand and type of memory did you reference here?

You raised an important question, do I REALLY need hardware transcoding? Since I have that capability in my Plex Pass membership I thought it was important. Now I am wondering if I am barking up the wrong tree with this.

If anyone has an opinion for this question, please reply.

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The Plex pass allows your server to use hardware to transcode instead of software (pure CPU). So yeah, you will need a device capable of hardware transcoding.

And you will likely want to focus on a device that does this. 4K video, especially HDR, can really thrash a CPU if you use software to do it. I haven’t dipped my toe into 4K yet, as I have no desire for it yet (and no 4K-capable devices or TVs).

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@Divideby0, thanks for your response. As I stated in my OP, I have a lot of content in 4K, & 4K UHD/Atmos. and an OLED TV that is capable of displaying it at its best.

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I’ve got a DS920+ NAS. It used to be my Plex server, and could transcode (1080p) fine if I used hardware, but it could only do one transcode at a time in software. That’s not much of an issue as it almost never falls back to software, but it tells you just how weak these CPUs are in Synology NASs.

I’ve since offloaded the Plex server itself to a standalone Linux box with Plex in a docker, leaving my media on the NAS. I feel much more comfortable with Plex in a beast of a machine. I plan to expand the box with other docker services (Bit Guard, PiHole, etc), but that’s not much relevant.

Anywho, I’m not sure how much help my situation is. As I said, I am inexperienced with 4K video content, so I don’t know how well - even with hardware - a Synology NAS can handle it. But here’s my info, do with it as you can.

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@Divideby0 Thanks for the follow up.

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@Wildwest

When you set up a RAID set on Synology,

With SHR RAID, you’ll need two HDDs.
You can’t use the one which holds your data now. (It will get erased)

AFTER you’ve created the basic SHR RAID volume
AND copied all your media to it.
THEN you can stick that drive into the NAS and
ADD it to the volume.

Because of how it works, 3x 20TB HDDs → ~40TB of usable storage with 1 drive failure parity protection.

All said & done, you’ll have a 60TB storage capacity on the main (internal) volume.

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@ChuckPa thanks for your response, good advice for when I get the NAS and start to configure it. Can I start with just two drives, then add a third one later?

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You need TWO drives in the SHR to create it.

My recommendation is:

  1. Buy two drives

  2. Buy the matching 4GB RAM module

  3. When it arrives, Install the RAM (Syno has great docs but you’ll see where to inside the drive bay for Drive 1. (it’s pretty cool)

  4. Plug in both new drives (keep your external media drive safe)

  5. Build the 2-drive SHR (you’ll have 20TB of storage)

  6. When it’s complete, COPY the media onto the new volume.

  7. When all data copied , and you’ve had chance to verify it’s all there.

  8. Plug in the 3rd drive and have DSM 7 add it to SHR

  9. When complete, you’ll have a 3 drive SHR volume and about 40 TB

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@ChuckPa Thanks for the advice, I now know I will need to get TWO drives, then follow your prior instructions to copy the data from my external drive then add it to the volume.

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@ChuckPa Well, I wanted to follow up with you as I bought an Asustor AS6704T NAS. It is a new model that was recently released and was about $600 on Amazon. I also bought an 8GB memory upgrade and a 1TB M2 SSD for cache memory. I also bought three WD Ultrastar 16TB drives to populate it the drive bays. I watched some Asustor and YouTube videos and was able to initialize the drives and transfer all my media files to it from my external drive. I was able to map the network drive and changed my Plex media folder pointers to it. The one thing that continued to be a problem was getting the Plex remote access to work. I was able to change some settings and it connected for a short while, then disconnected. I went through both the Asustor ADM OS settings and the Plex settings trying to fix it. The more I tried the more it broke the connection from the NAS to Plex. I deleted the network mapped drive in Windows 11 file manager from my desktop, but now it doesn’t even see the NAS to re-map it again. I know this may be asking a lot but if you could please help mentor me so I can get my Plex Media Server working the the way it should, I would greatly appreciate it. BTW, I have a lifetime Plex Pass subscription so it should support hardware transcoding on the NAS.

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If you haven’t already I suggest you download the Asustor Control center for Windows
https://www.asustor.com/service/download_acc

Remote access is another issue which you’ll have to configure in your router
Try and get your server running and in a stable condition before you focus on that

Chuck is on a limited schedule right now so I’m not sure how much time he’ll have to help

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which modem / router (make and model) is being used ?
Is the ASUSTOR firewall active?

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@JaysPlex thanks for responding. I have the Asustor Control Center installed on my desktop PC.

@ChuckPa I have a TP link Archer AX90 as the router connected to the ATT BGW210 modem.

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@Wildwest

You ever setup manual port forwarding?

This the right firmware?

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Opening a port, without directing it to a corresponding port (ready to receive it) at a specific IP does create a vulnerability.

When you port-forward an external port to a specific IP:port inside your network, you’re extending that single port, and only that port, to be accessible from outside.

This is how Plex Remote Access works.

A single port is opened to the internet.
That port is locked to always forward to your Plex server machine where only PMS waits for it.

To create a port forward,

  1. Pick some random port number ( greater than 10240 and less than 65536 )
  2. For sake of discussion, let’s use Pi. (31415)
  3. Create a forwarding rule to connect (forward) port 31415 to the LAN IP of your server port 32400.
  4. In your Settings - Server - Remote Access
    – Manually specify port
    – Give it the port number ‘31415’
    – Hit “Retry”
    – It will turn Green (opportunistically) then either turn back to red or stay green after Plex.tv tests to see if the connection can be made.
    – If it remains green, port 31415 , and only 31415, is open for inbound Plex requests.

Make sense?

You’ll still need to perform any additional steps on the ASUSTOR for port 31415 (TCP protocol)

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@ChuckPa could you please PM me so we can continue our discussion more privately?

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