I’m thinking about moving my Plex server to a NAS box. Not even sure what NAS hardware would even work well for me. I need to figure that out plus the path to migrate all my media over from the windows computer to a NAS that would run Plex and maybe offer a space to back up some documents. I’m just trying to get an idea what equipment and what the process to move everything is like.
What I have now is a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 2700X, 16GB of Ram, a 500GB SSD, a 4TB seagate Ironwolf and a 16TB Ironwolf drive.
Currently I keep most of the files and media on the 16TB drive and use the 4TB to hold recorded TV I’ve not removed commercials from and encoded to h.264 or h.265 and DVD rips that have not been encoded during processing for storage to play later.
With the NAS I’d like some redundancy in case of drive failure. I’d also like to reuse the drives I have or at least the 16TB in the NAS system. I realize I’d probably need to format them again to use then in any NAS system as I probably can’t just plop in an NTFS formatted drive and use it as is. The means I need a more drives or a means to back those files like an external drive or the cloud.
I would still keep my PC for web browsing and ripping discs since it has a UHD drive.
Correct, you cannot plop a NTFS into a NAS (at least from my experience with a synology NAS). Moreover, make sure you understand the risk of running regular SATA drives in a NAS. They may not be super reliable. The cost of twin 16TB NAS rated drives (assuming you want to run it as a RAID) are going to be like $700. Plus the cost of the NAS itself.
If the cost is too spicy, it be better off not running it in RAID mode so you only need one 16TB NAS drive but instead doing nightly backups to your current 16TB on your desktop.
PS, i highly recommend upgrading that CPU. I went from a ryzen 2700x to a 5600 and the difference was very noticable all around…particularly in those encodes.
The good news here is the drives i have been putting in my desktop are NAS drives, Seagate ironwolf. So what i could do is get a 2nd 16 Tb ironwolf and get a used 8tb drive to back up to temporarily to make the move to a set up witj a mirror
