I currently have a Western Digital EX2100 NAS and I am considering upgrading to a more powerful unit. I currently have 4 TB of storage.
Any recommendations?
What are your requirements? Do you need 2 bays, 4, 6, 8, 10? Are you going to run PMS on the NAS? Will some of your clients need transcoding any of your media? Are you planning to jump into the 4K pool soon? What does your budget look like? ($500, $1000, $2500?)
You leave a lot unanswered here, so someone can tell you something that fits their needs, but is over-kill for your needs. Or might not be sufficient to do what you need to have done.
I run PMS on an Asustor AS-7004T NAS with 4 bays filled with 6TB drives. 1 is the main volume and other three are in a Raid. I also have an external 5-bay raid enclosure hanging off of it via USB 3.0 with 5x3TB in Raid 5. I also run more externals off of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. The main NAS ran about $1300 without drives. (Over 30TB of storage now.)
This system is stable and has as many as 7 streams running at one time. (5 Direct Play and 2 Transcoded due to bandwidth requirements.) Without the external drives on it, it’s about the size of a bagel toaster.
This may seem like over-kill for some people. For me it’s just the start. If I had anything to do over again it would have been to get the 7010T model with 10 internal bays instead of the 4 I have in the unit now. And I would likely have some externals hanging off of it now, too.
Simple really - Buy (at very least a 4 bay) the biggest you can afford with an intel processor.
@spikemixture said:
Simple really - Buy (at very least a 4 bay) the biggest you can afford with an intel processor.
I would say an Intel i3, i5 or i7, not any of the lesser chips…
@MikeG6.5 said:
I would say an Intel i3, i5 or i7, not any of the lesser chips…
I actually have each of those in NUC form.
All do/did the job but it depends on how many clients you want to keep happy!!
And of course your media format!!
Wow you all jumped right on this and I really appreciate all the advice so far. At this time, I am only serving one client at a time, but as the kids get older, I’m sure that will change. I really like all the functionality of PMS, I only wish it had gapless playback.
So to answer some questions.
4 bay should be fine
Yes I will be running PMS on the NAS. While my WDC is stable now, it took a lot of time to get it that way. I do find myself having to reboot the NAS or restart PMS if I have an issue. Not often but it does happen.
Yes I would like to be able to handle 4K content.
Any favorite sites for shopping for a new NAS? Typically I’m a Dell guy
Thanks again for all the advice!!!
I have a lot of tips on making PMS stable on Asustor NASes in my signature. Some of them link to Plex forums, some to Asustor forums. Most of the tips can also be used on QNAP or Synology models as well. You just need to do the conversion from one OS to the other. That’s usually pretty simple.
As far as where to buy? Amazon or EBay are great places to start shopping. Search other online places as well, though. Sometimes you can get a great deal from little shops. My best advice after you decide you want a NAS to do the job, is buy more bays than you think you will ever use.
Don’t expect to take the drives out of your existing NAS and plug it into most other brands. Each have their own setup routine and that usually involves formatting the drives. So any data on them is gone. Buy new drives to fill it, then move the data. THEN you can take the older drives out and put them in to use on the new machine, or connect to the old via the network.
Always wire your NAS to a switch or router. Don’t rely on wireless from the NAS to your streaming devices. Wireless has issues with interference and you don’t get those with wired connections. Plan accordingly.
I decided to go with the QNAP TVS-471 with 4 - 4tb drives. What RAID level do you all recommend? In the past I have used 0 and 1 but this can handle 10 which sounds very interesting. I am also giving consideration to RAID 5.
Don’t go RAID5. If you do anything without at least 2-drives’-worth of redundancy these days with modern drive capacities, you’re playing with fire.
The reasons for this are technical and explained in-depth many times elsewhere, so this is the short version.
Upon further research, I agree 100% the RAID 5 is a bad idea. While the cost per TB is quite high, I think I’m going to go with RAID 10.
@Jasper67 said:
Upon further research, I agree 100% the RAID 5 is a bad idea. While the cost per TB is quite high, I think I’m going to go with RAID 10.
Hey are you happy with the qnap? Looking to upgrade from a mycloud mirror.
