Large Storage NAS Recommendations

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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I currently have a Synology DS918+ with a DX517-1 expansion cabinet filled with 9 10TB Western Digital Red hard drives. I just don’t like the potential for ruining a volume by combining all 9 into one volume. I guess I could if I had to. So, right now, I have two 30TB usable drives with the 5th drive in the expansion cabinet being reserved for a hot spare.

The problem is that I have so much content, I am running low on space. 78% on the first 30TB partition used and 90% on the second. So, it is time to start thinking about expanding.

I could go through and compress all my content but I really do not want to do that because of the amount of loss on a compressed file PLUS the uptick you have in processing and memory usage of clients when you serve up compressed content. So that is out of the question.

Of course I could hot-swap drives one at a time with 18TB or 20TB drives. On their disk operating system, you would have to do at least two per volume to start seeing increases in usable disk space.

Or, I could look at new hardware that holds more than 8 drives. Plus, I have a network switch that can easily accommodate two 10GB copper or fiber connections.

I looked at the recommendation spreadsheet (Plex NAS Compatibility - Google Sheets) and it looks like the newer Synology NAS lines do not support hardware transcoding, which I think almost puts Synology out of the running, which I think is a big shame given it looks like Synology is the most used brand I see from users in this forum.

Then, I see QNAP has multiple options available. Not too familiar with QNAP running Plex but it looks like it does it and does the hardware transcoding I would want. Something I really like on the QNAP side is they do things like deduplicate, which would be ideal for things like where I have several editions of a movie (Director’s Cut, Theatrical Release, Extended Edition) and I think that dedupe would shrink disk usage among the three MKV files.

So, that being said, I am leaning more towards QNAP and was wondering if any of you with larger deployments had any experience with the larger platform QNAPs or recommendations. There is an option to offload transcoding to a GPU with a NVIDIA card. I don’t have a rack so tower is getting more of my attention.

Thank you to all who respond.

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I have Syno (outgrew it within 6 months).
I have QNAP (TVS-1282-i7 and outgrew it just this last year)
I ended up building my own (12x 12TB RAID 6 monster with all the bells & whistles)

QNAP’s RAID it pure versus Syno ‘hybrid raid’ which breaks drives into multiple partitions. There are pros and cons of both

Supporting both here at Plex,

I find the QNAP systems have the muscle (storage, CPU, expansion) many of us need if we’re on the more tech-savvy end of the spectrum.

I find the Synology systems suit those not so savvy.

If I may make an analogy ?

Synology like Apple MacOS at the GUI / friendliness
QNAP like Windows 7 at the GUI / friendliness

(I’ve not used Windows since 7 so can’t speak to it now)

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Yeah, I am thinking I am going to have to go with a TVS-H1688X unless I build my own hardware.

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We have the TVS-H1288X here in the lab. It is a beautiful machine.
If you want bays and brawn, that’s the way to go

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I have a TVS-1282-i7 with 7 x 12TB drives in RAID6 + HotSpare + NVMe drives for my VMs and some cache, and a TS-873 with 8 x 16TB drives in RAID5 for backup purposes.

I was in the same predicament as you and decided to start re-encoding my collection to h265. I am accepting some video compression artifacts but not budging on audio quality for sure. Recently, I also decided to re-format the pool as a RAID5 + HotSpare to allow an extra 10TB.

I am strongly considering a TVS-H1288X with 20TB drives, however, if space is not an option, I would go back to my “older” solution. It was 16 drive Norco case (Rack mountable) with an ARECA controller card + ZFS. I really miss that system. No Syn or QNAP could touch that performance-wise.

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There are two TVS-H1288x and the TVS-H1688x (16 bays).

My choice, due to form factor was to build my own. I can add another 12/24 anytime I want if needed.

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