NAS or Mac M1?

[Scott-M]

Completely agree. Again, there is a wide range of knowledge (and ignorance [not directed at you]) in our corner of the tech world. Media is something everyone wants and not everyone knows the best practice.

@skc176

I think people to rely on a NAS is also a big mistake. NAS can fail.

Well to that point, sure, everything can fail. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it and not expect to replace the hardware at some point. It’s separation of concerns, I will use a NAS for what it’s built for, reliable storage management. As long as you know what you have and don’t try to make it do something it wasn’t built for, there shouldn’t be an issue.

For the crowd in the back: RAID/NAS is not a backup by itself. You should have a separate backup of your data. For some, loosing their media library is not a big deal; but for those that store personal documents, family photos, etc. it is a huge deal. Back it up!!

[MAJOR_VALERIAN]

Thank you very much for your answer! I liked how you detailed it.

Indeed, I am also a fan of the Apple ecosystem. Having a lot of their products and having an old MacBook Pro from 2013, I wanted to kill a stone two times, using a new Mac as a PLEX server.

BUT it’s difficult to know if it’s worth the price because according to the opinions on the forums, Apple’s new chips seem to be, for some, overpowered and for others, not so good. So I don’t know who to believe…

Hypothesis 1 - MAC for a PLEX SERVER

Here are the MACs that I would be interested in buying but I don’t know what would be the most interesting product.

The better the ram and CPU, the more the Mac is made to be a PLEX server?

Otherwise, instead of a Synology DS1621+ as external storage (only), I was rather considering a QNAP TR-004, what do you think? For me it’s cheaper…

Hypothesis 2 - NAS for a PLEX SERVER

I’m going to take a look at the Synology DS1520+. I was not interested enough because the reviews were not favorable for the purchase of a DS920+ for transcoding.

Nevertheless, the QNAP TVS h1288X seems to be the NAS to buy for transcoding while it was released a long time ago. Which surprises me a lot. Is this really the case? Should I wait for an improvement on this QNAP NAS ?

In addition, isn’t it more profitable to have a 1080p and 4K file of the same movie to avoid often transcoding and therefore not necessarily have to buy a competition NAS?

[MAJOR_VALERIAN]

Oh okay, if I opt for a configuration with a MAC, it’s more interesting to wait for the feedback of the PLEX version for the new Apple chips. Besides, do you know a little more about these ?

Intel Nuc? I would have to be interested in it but it’s true that I have a preference in addition to Apple’s OS…

[Scott-M]

Unfortunately I do not have any additional info on the state of Plex and Apple Silicon. I am still running Intel Macs, so I do not have much input on using an M1 for Plex other than cost comparison of other options.

@MAJOR_VALERIAN

In addition, isn’t it more profitable to have a 1080p and 4K file of the same movie to avoid often transcoding and therefore not necessarily have to buy a competition NAS?

So glad you mentioned this. While true this will take up more storage, you are absolutely correct. For every Blu-ray/4K rip I have on my server, I used Handbrake to compress down an SD copy of the movie for remote streaming. Personally my Plex server is for me, and while I do care about video quality, when it comes to my remote users I just want a reliable stream without buffering and without throttling my CPU.

How does the media server display two qualities of same film?

To answer your question: In the web interface, Plex will indicate how many versions of a film/episode there are on the poster (this is not visible in most apps) If your remote user just clicks Play, Plex will do it’s best to play the file that is most optimized for that remote session. I have had great success with this. Instead of just clicking Play, you can click Play Version, and you can specifically choose which file to play. [image] I use Handbrake to compress an SD version of each Bl…

@MAJOR_VALERIAN

Otherwise, instead of a Synology DS1621+ as external storage (only), I was rather considering a QNAP TR-004, what do you think? For me it’s cheaper…

Yeah absolutely, again if you just want to use a NAS for storage, use what you prefer and what fits in your budget!

While I am not experienced with QNAP, it is the same tier as (and sometimes a half step above) Synology. My general thought is, QNAP currently has better hardware options, Synology has a better software solution.

I will say, from what I am seeing, the TR-004 is on the cheaper side of the QNAP range. Be careful not to cheap out too much in certain areas. If you can move up to a series or two in their product line (I think that might be the TS?) you might have better longevity and reliability. Do note some of those systems have limitations with how large of a volume they can realistically handle (especially if you are considering 20TB drives). If you are willing to spend the kind of money you listed in your table above, try to find a middle ground where you are not cheating out on any one item just to fit the budget. The last thing you want is to have 80TB of drives bottlenecked by the NAS itself. (Specifically I am referring to any scheduled tasks the NAS would perform for data scrubbing, virus scanning, misc jobs/task that it would run just to keep your data in tact.)

[pshanew]

Plex Media Server builds with native M1 Mac support are currently in preview:

Preview: "Universal" PMS build for macOS (a.k.a. M1 support!)

Hello Plexians, Since the introduction of the Apple M1 chip for macOS, users have asked for Plex Media Server to natively support “Apple Silicon”. The existing Mac server versions run just fine under Rosetta2, but native is always better, right? Well, here it is!!! We present, the Plex Media Server “Universal” build for macOS. This new package includes Plex Media Server for both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, so you don’t have to worry about what you are installing. If you would like…

[nibbles]

@MAJOR_VALERIAN

Should I wait for an improvement on this QNAP NAS ?

The TVS-h1288x comes with a Intel® Xeon® W-1250 cpu.
It has the basic 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.

A newer processor would support PCIe Gen 4, and like 64 lanes directly to the CPU.
So yes it’s worth considering.

When it comes to a Mac Studio, the performance on an M1 Max is stunning, even using the Intel version of PMS. The reason it’s so fast is that Plex uses Apple’s codec’s to encode/decode, and those are all native. And the power draw is like 10 W, lol.

[daorriss]

@Scott-M

Are you sure about that? If you are only seeing 90 Megabit/sec (which is only 11.25 Megabytes/sec) then you have some serious issues in your network or SMB configuration that should be fixable.

I used a different test and changed my methodology… it’s 150 Megabytes/sec… not Mbit…

Also it’s on par with drives hooked up locally on my Mac Pro machine… in side by side comparison… So I’d say overall the performance is decent… I think the only way it could be faster is if I hooked up an SSD PCI-E cache drive into the QNAP (which… could be fun but probably not worth it).

[MAJOR_VALERIAN]

Ok thank you for the news !

[MAJOR_VALERIAN]

Do you know when this improvement will be made or not at all?

Regarding Mac Studio, there was no problem precisely because of the Apple codecs that meant that we could not do more than 1 transcoding at a time?

What would you advise me between an Apple or NAS setup?

[MAJOR_VALERIAN]

Thank you very much for this info! I think it will be my solution to have a 1080p copy of the 4K movies I have available. So I’m thinking of going on a setup that would allow me to do a maximum of 4 transcodings (4K > 1080p) at the same time, one locally and 3 remotely. And, a dozen people can be connected remotely to watch content in 1080p without transcoding.

**Is it possible with my setup ideas (Mac mini / studio or NAS)? **

In addition, you talk about paying attention to buying the NAS because I don’t have to buy something of poor quality. But when it comes to buying a NAS only for a storage extension for a Mac, it’s not just the quality of the disks that matters? Because if I configure the Mac to a PLEX server, the ram and/or CPU of the NAS is not an important parameter, isn’t it?

[nibbles]

Yes that would be easy, especially having 1080p versions at 4K versions to reduce transcodes.
The 1080p ones would be about 20 Mbps max.
That’s about 400 Mbps to remotes max with 15 users.
If your WAN network can handle that, a Mac certainly would.

I’d get a Studio if you have the budget. It leaves headroom.
But I’d test a Mac Mini while waiting for the Studio to ship.
The wait is a couple of months.

A NAS with 16 GB RAM has all you would need to serve files over SMB,
but I would only trust someone who’s done that load for the answer.
That’s gonna be ChuckPA if he stops bye. He’s the QNAP expert around here.

[RockStar]

Id just get a cheap nas and turn transcoding off all together. Pretty much all clients can direct play 4K media now, providing you have availiable bandwith ofcourse.

If your friends have outdated clients, have them update their equipment for a fraction of the cost it is to upgrade the server.

[Scott-M]

@MAJOR_VALERIAN

But when it comes to buying a NAS only for a storage extension for a Mac, it’s not just the quality of the disks that matters?

Not if you are targeting larger size drives (10TB or greater)

It can be easy to generalize a NAS as just a box of hard drives where the only thing that matters are the hard drives themselves. However, as your storage size increases, the system they are hosted in needs to have the compute to handle it. A lot of NAS devices can only handle up to a certain size drive (an arm cpu can only do so much once your data size gets so large) If you were only going to have 4-6TB drives in your system then sure, you could probably get away with a cheaper NAS. But I am also not advocating for you to get the largest NAS out there, just something middle of the road.

I would argue, it’s not just the drives that matter, but the data that is on them. Put them in a system that you trust will be reliable and maintain your data well. As the saying goes a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. If you load up the largest drives that exist on a cheap NAS, the risk of data integrity can increase if the NAS is not powerful enough to maintain the array (data scrubbing, virus scanning, RAID rebuild [because it’s a question of if not when a drive will fail])

Again, if you’re discussing Mac Studio kind of money, a couple hundred more for a NAS in a better tier will be worth it in the long run (again I am not talking about a NAS with a Xeon if you are only using it for storage, that would be overkill)

[marcelhehle]

My 2 cents … use the NAS as a NAS (= serving ONLY files and not doing any other thing) and spend about 1k€ on a dedicated server machine.

I’m just doing a new build as my server is now approaching 6 years of age. A new, Alder Lake based build (12500T, 16GB mem, 1TB SSD, Linux) comes with a 1k € price tag. For this you get more than enough power and hw-acceerated transcoding for several parallel streams. Plus: if something breaks you have files and server nicly seperated so that there is no risk to your files.