I have an old Netgear NAS which has had a drive fail and am taking the opportunity to upgrade to a NAS that will run as a PLEX server, and a small section of the NAS for family/business file server.
My thoughts are the QNAP with 4 x Seagate Ironwolf 4TB drives. (have 8TB in existing NAS)
I was planning RAID - but which version?
Also old NAS is connected to a APC UPS, do modern NAS’s power down gracefully, there is a comms cable in the old setup to tell the NAS to power down.
I have both Synology and QNAP NAS’. I’ve owned several Synology’s over the years and one QNAP; presently a DS916+ and a DS1819+ and a QNAP TVS-1282 for my PMS.
I purchased the QNAP specifically to run as a PMS as they are available with a lot more processing power than the Synology’s. My experience with the QNAP is less than favorable as their OS (QTS) is incredibly buggy and requires frequent restarts for no reason. It also can only run traditional RAID types as opposed to the SHR @Trumpy81 referenced.
I have NEVER had a problem with Synology’s OS (DSM) or their SHR RAID and I’ve mixed and matched HDD brands, sizes and speeds with absolutely no problem whatsoever.
Sometimes on the QNAP PMS just stops working right or not working at all. When this happens a restart of PMS rarely solves the problem but a restart of the QNAP does solve it. QNAP’s Container Station for running Linux apps as Docker does on Synology also blows and often needs manual intervention. When I ran PMS on the Synology it just worked. Always.
I’ve run WD RED HDD’s in my Synology’s for YEARS without any problems. I also have a couple Seagate Ironwolf 10TB’s in the Synology’s that have never had a problem. In my QNAP I have Seagate 16TB HDD’s running RAID 5 of which which are all less than 2 years old. I had the first HDD failure after only one year. Less than a year later had a second failure (different drive in a different bay). Weeks after the second failure I had a third failure except this failure was the brand new drive that was the replacement on warranty from the very first failure (it didn’t last a year). I will say Seagate’s warranty process was usually great as they offer an advance replacement for $15 where they send you the replacement 2-day and you have 30 days to send the failed drive back. The most recent failure however they were out of replacements and I had to wait 2-1/2 weeks.
I went with the QNAP strictly for the processing power to be able to handle multiple streams and transcodes for the entire family. That is my ONLY complaint about Synology–they don’t have very powerful processors. If I were to do this over I would use a Synology NAS (or multiple NAS’) networked with an Intel NUC running PMS over a 10Gbe capable router or switch. The Synology would DEFINITELY have WD RED HDD’s ONLY. I don’t know if Seagates are just cheaper drives or if it’s just the 16TB models that have issues but the issues continue so it was not just one drive.
As it is right now I’m thinking of investing in a new Synology with WD RED’s to create a backup of my media as I fear some day more than one drive will fail at the same time and I am only running RAID 5. If I do that I may as well buy the Intel NUC and have a second PMS. But I cringe at the investment…
Also, to drive @Trumpy81’s point home re: SHR… As drives fail or need replacement you can upgrade just a couple drives to a larger size to gain space whereas with traditional RAID 5 or 6 you’d have to replace ALL the drives in order to utilize the added space of a larger HDD. When my warranty on the Seagate Ironwolf’s is over and the failures continue, I will replace them with WD RED’s. On other forums I have read posts where people will bash Synology and their proprietary SHR citing data on a traditional RAID system can be recovered by any system that can read the RAID array. I’m not sure if this is true or not but I can tell you I’ve replaced HDD’s in my SHR Synology’s with absolutely no problem whatsoever. Synology just works… novel concept.
Good to know. I don’t know I’d ever need that as I’ve become pretty loyal to Synology after my experiences with QNAP. I’ve considered trying to install Xpenology on my QNAP but quickly came to the realization that was way beyond my level of understanding and skill.
So going with the Synology 920+ then. Looked at compat list and they say WD RED Plus 4TB the model should be : WD40EFZX, they only have the REDs from 8TB up on the list.
Will a WD RED 4TB (WD40EFAX) work ok?
So all the hardware has arrived. First issue - the WD RED 4TB are not in the up to date compatibility list, as I thought, it lets me continue, but gives an additional warning that the drives are not confirmed as compatible. A bit annoying but not an impasse.
The next question however, is in the guide Trumpy pointed to it says
“We therefor decided to make a Shared Folder to hold all your metadata so it survives the removal/reinstallation process. The Plex share solves this problem and a few more.”
Now I have set up my pool and currently created 2 volumes:
Media (films, tv, music, pics)
Filestore (back up and shared drive for home computers)
Do I need to create another Volume for Plex (the share mentioned above) or is it just a separate shared folder in say the Media Volume?
My Media volume will have the following folders:
