A little bit of background on my experience with Plex. If not interested skip down to LOOKING FOR ADVICE.
Background
I had an old 2005 DELL XPS 400 desktop computer that several many years ago I decided to try Plex and streaming media to our TV’s. Shockingly this computer was able to handle streaming to 3 and 4 TV’s at a time and allowed us to break ties with TV and cable companies. As with any desktop I am limited on internal bays and the old USB ports couldn’t handle streaming. So over the last couple years I would have to delete content to put on new content. Obviously cleaning house is a good thing but sometimes it’s nice to just leave stuff out there (just in case). Because of house cleaning over the last couple years I have been looking at NAS systems and trying to understand them.
Well, a couple of weeks ago my ole friend XPS finally died. I assumed it was the power supply, ordered a new one, put it in, and found out that parts of the Mother Board were out too. So I finally had to lay it to rest. Obviously, the family is in true mourning as they now have no TV.
LOOKING FOR ADVICE
Monday I ordered the NAS Synology 920+ and it should be here Friday. After viewing many utube videos, the setup seems pretty straight forward and searching through these forums trying to find advice on the configuration I did see I need to add in the i965 patch when it does arrive.
I am far from a hardware guy but I am technical so can follow directions. Watching some of these utube videos several people have said that with the Synology OS you can go further into HDD configuration. I am not certain on what the best way to set these up would be or if that is even needed outside the scope of a standard setup of this NAS system.
I purchased a new 6tb HD. I have an old 2tb HD that currently contains 80% of my media. My thinking was, put all one set of media on one HD (moveis) and put another media set (TV Shows and serries) on a seperate HD. My thinking would be not all four or possibly 5 people would be trying to pull from one HD and in return speed upload and transfer times? Is this a good idea? Is this true?
Any configuration input or ideas would be much appreciated.
The 920+ is a 4-bay NAS. You’re talking about using 1 HD for movies and 1 HD for TV? I suppose you could create 2 Volumes in your NAS (1 & 2) and use those 2 HDs. You might put 2 other HDs in to form a 2 drive RAID for each of those Volumes. In PLEX you’d then have to connect to 1 NAS but 2 different Volumes. That’s not what I would do but I guess that would work.
What I would do is put 4 new HDs in the 920+ and create only 1 Volume in a 4 drive RAID configuration. The drives need to be the same or close to the same size or you’re wasting space. Then copy all of the media into different folders on the NAS (eg, /Movies, /TV_Shows, etc). If for example, you put in 4 6TB HDs and configured as a standard Synology RAID, you would have 18TB of available storage with 1 HD protection. That is if 1 drive failed later then you could just replace it with a new drive and not lose any data. That’s the benefit of a RAID.
I have a 918+. Enjoy your 920+. It looks like a good NAS.
PS - do NOT put your existing HDs in your new 920+. The first thing it will do is reformat your drives and you will lose data. Put new drives in and then copy your data over.
Thanks Tivodad for the information, I will be sure to copy all my existing media over from my old drive first. I only purchased one new drive which was the 6 TB drive then was going to add my old drive (2 TB) into the mix. If I set it up as a RAID, since I only have 2 drives, I would have to set it up as a RAID 0 to utilize the most space. As I purchase additional drives, can I easily change from a RAID 0 configuration to say a RAID 5 configuration?
Thank you all for the links, information, and feedback. I LOVE that RAID calculator. I just decided to take Tivodads advice and just ordered 2 more 6TB HD’s and fill up all bays. Hopefully, once I get this thing setup I don’t’ have to think about it again for many many many years.
I will be reading the link you supplied Chuck and hopefully, it will answer this question.
On the RAID Calculator that Trumpy shared, it compares a RAID 5 with a SHR. In the RAID 5 it lists out “Unused Space” and the SHR it lists it out as “Available Space”. So is unused space not available in a RAID 5?
I see you’re now planning on having 4 drives, and this is good. Files kept on the drives will be spread out over all 4 drives instead of having a complete file on a single drive. This will help the NAS read the file faster as all 4 drives will be sending their information to the CPU instead of only 1. It’s one of the benefits of using a Raid configuration as opposed to just having separate hard drives as you mentioned in your initial post.
Ohh wow! Okay… I had no idea that is how that worked. So… Let me ask this. When I get this all set up this weekend I will be set up with a 2TB, 6TB, 6TB, 6TB NAS. in the next year or so I plan to replace the 2TB drive with another 6TB. Is this a simple process giving little bits of files are spread throughout all 4 drives?
Yes, just select SHR as your Raid type and the rest is done automagically. Super simple.
I’d HIGHLY recommend that when you do replace the 2TB someday you replace it with a 12 instead of another 6. That way you can just let half of that 12 go unused until you eventually run out of space and want to upgrade again - when you do you’ll enjoy the additional space on that first drive. If you replace it with a 6 first then when you do need to upgrade you’ll have to upgrade TWO drives to see any additional space. Play around with that Raid Calculator to see what I mean.
Thanks so much Mushtang! I did play around with the calculator for a while and did notice that with the 10, 12 or 16TB it only utilized 6TB of the space and the rest is unused. I am so confused as to why it leaves the remaining as unused space. I would have assumed by now they would have figured out a RAID algorithm that would utilize all space for something.
But even at that, I can expand to the DX517 for additional drives. So many options. So much to learn. Love it.
Wow! I’m blown away it is literally that simple. I wish I would have moved to a NAS long ago. Was always too nervous to attempt and fought tooth and nail to keep my old desktop running. lol!!!
As Trumpy mentioned the space goes unused because data there cannot be protected in the Raid. A VERY simplified explanation of the way a Raid works is that a tiny amount of the data on 3 drives is added together and the total is stored on the 4th drive. The total is called Parity. For the next piece of data the parity data is stored on the 1st drive, and then on the 2nd drive, etc. That way if any of your drives fails you can pull it out, replace it with a blank one, and the other drives can rebuild the data that used to be on the drive that failed. It can take hours, or days, depending on how big the drives are, but it’s a way to protect the data from a hard drive failure.
If data is stored in the area of your largest disk that cannot be protected with parity on other drives, that data could be lost in a drive failure. So in a Raid that area goes unused.
Not having a full understanding of a RAID, logically or an educated assumption I can understand why there is unused space. But the technical part of me questions why they can’t partition the unused space, half to use and half to protect. But again, this is me not having a full understanding of a RAID.
If you use half for data and half to protect, what happens if that entire drive fails? Then you’ve lost the data AND the protection.
By the way, you should never consider the Raid as a backup, only as a way to protect against a hard drive failure. If the data is important you should also back it up regularly on another location.
Thank you all. Wonderful information. Most all my family photos and videos I do have on multiple sources one of which will be the NAS so the misses can stream her memories. This was one of the issues my old XPS desktop had that I am hoping this NAS will help solve. The 1080p family videos, my old XPS really struggled transcoding. I am fairly certain with the 920+ being a quad-core I should have no more of those issues.
I do have another question though. My 920+ and one of my 6TB drives will be here Friday. I planned to set it up and start moving over everything to the one 6TB drive. Then Sunday when my other 2 6tb drives come in adding them and thus creating the SHR? Will this be exceptable just so I can get some of the transfer hours and set up out of the way? Or do I have to wait until I have all drives put in?
Get a Plex Pass!! It’s worth it for the hardware transcoding alone, but there are other benefits too. I have a DS 918+ and it struggled with transcoding until I activated the HT option and since then it’s been great. Your 920 has a slightly faster processor than my 918 does so unless you’re planning on transcoding a half dozen 4K movies at a time you’ll be fine doing 1 or 2.
I’ll also add that if you can avoid transcoding 4K movies ever, you’ll be better off. Any transcoding that my 918 is asked to do is so that friends can watch some of my 1080p movies that get transcoded down to whatever their client needs (720p most of the time). If you find yourself transcoding a 4K movie then you’re doing something wrong.
If I have movies that I want to have a 4K version of they get put in a 4K directory that my friends don’t have access too. But I also keep a 1080p or 720p version of all of those so nobody is missing out. The 4K movies are only ever viewed at my house in my basement theater.
Trumpy my old dell XPS 400 was a windows XP system. I don’t even think 1080p video was out when I bought that. I think 720p was as HD as it got. You’re telling me that this DS920+ quadcore at best will struggle like my old PC? That is truly disheartening. I hope this information proves false as now I’m second-guessing my decision of moving to a NAS. The space will be nice, but making the misses happy is the real winner for me.
Y’all are killing me! LOL!!! I have often thought about jumping to plex pass for the parental controls but I have been managing without it. Just not sure other than parental controls I would truly utilize the features.
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