NAS vs Computer Hard Drives

General Discussions
1

So my birthday gift cards have shown up and I have decided that for my birthday I am going to start working on a proper network… I have a nice router and all the needed extenders and whatnot so I don’t need to worry about that…

Instead I want to say goodbye to hooking my external hard drives into my router… 90% of the time they work great but 10% of the time they drive me absolutely insane.

So that is where I keep my movies and network storage, its scary since all I use are 2 external hard drives I have no data backup, least not the typical kind… I do have like 50 blurays I keep of backups for my ripped/shrunk movies so if any of those hard drives suffer irreparable damage I can salvage them.

I run plex on an few year old laptop and overall I have no complaints there save that sometimes it seems to have issues seeing some of my tv shows that are on one of my hard drives… but I blame that more on the hard drive than the computer or plex.

Now for the question… while I wont have enough money to do everything I want right away and will probably need to live with the current setup awhile longer I can at least get a proper start.

What would you guys recommend, a NAS drive then have my computer run plex similar to what I do now or would it be better to get a computer with enough internal memory to just do it all at once.

My eventual plan is definitely to replace that laptop no matter which way I choose, I want to have a computer that can run plex as well as have a few tv tuners in there so I can tivo a show, then if possible I would then have that file ready for viewing throughout the network.

I had originally planned on getting a large computer case that has space for a lot of hard drives that also preferably has 2 network jacks so I can hook it into the network, as well as link a NAS drive to it directly or even give that computer to links into the network doubling its bandwidth.

Anyway I digress… in your experience which is the best solution, NAS drive to have the storage or internal drives? either way I want it expandable to a bunch of storage, I don’t like some of the nas drives I see with room for only 2 drives.

Thanks for any advice you can provide… I should have enough money for a case and possibly the motherboard, or I dont know on NAS setups since I dont know which brands are reliable so I would need some research first before I decided what I should buy or if I can afford it at this time.

2

Drives directly connected to your server is the most reliable setup but that does not necessarily mean internal. You can get a good reliable USB enclosure and connect that to your server via USB 3.0 and you have solid reliable storage that can expand as needed and does not rely on the reliabilities/unreliabilities of network connections. You can even use something like DrivePool to merge the encased drives into one volume. I have done exactly that except I just have 10 or 11 external USB drives connected through a couple of USB 3.0 hubs directly to my server.

I ran for a couple of years with separate file server and Plex server on my network and it worked well but it would occasionally give me some problems. Since I switched to drives directly connected to my Plex server I have had zero connection related problems.

I also strongly recommend that your Plex server have no other regular duties. That is your computer for daily use should not do double duty as a Plex server. Plex is a processor intensive application and really does not work and play well with others.

3

so dont even try to set up a tivo like system on the plex computer? I had figured that wouldn’t be too much of a problem since I didn’t see that really being resource intensive, and that is not something I would want on my regular computer that I program on and such since I reboot that computer more, and use most of its resources at times so recording tv shows on it may prove problematic… would mean I would have to more or less leave my main computer alone during those hours which defeats the purpose of my recording the show

4

Most video recording systems will comfortably coexist with Plex as will most drive combining programs like DrivePool.

What I was primarily warning against was the daily use programs and things like gaming apps. I also keep my little used PlayOn server on my daily use computer but I think it would also co-exist with Plex.

Also my Plex server has an Apache server running alongside Plex.

Just keep your Plex server stable and do not add a bunch of load to it all at once. Add things one at a time and watch for issues and slowdowns for a while before adding more.

As a point of info: When I check processor use on my Plex server the only heavy use comes from Plex and I think I want to keep it that way.

BTW: I have found that, in my case, Plex does NOT like to run with Stablebit’s scanner program. It works well with DirvePool but not with the Scanner.

5

now thats cool, I had never heard of playon, now I’ll probably want that too lol

Thanks for the help :slight_smile:

6

@wilsontray said:
now thats cool, I had never heard of playon, now I’ll probably want that too lol

Thanks for the help :slight_smile:

7

For most users: NAS appliance (with 4+ bays running RAID6 or equivalent) + separate PMS computer. 2 devices but easier to set up
For geeks: home-built NAS with sufficient CPU for PMS transcoding and 6 or 8+ drive bays). 1 device but you need to learn something like FreeNAS and some command line stuff.

I went with option #2. :slight_smile:

8

The simplest setup is a single device with PMS running on the NAS. You won’t want to do any transcoding so you need to select video file formats & Plex clients appropriately. I am just in the process of setting up a single ‘black box’ PMS solution for a family member with a Seagate Personal Cloud 4TB NAS plus an Apple Fire TV 4K connected to the TV plus a web interface when watching on desktop computer (Mac Pro) & iOS client on iPhone 6 while travelling. This setup works brilliantly & is really cheap. The NAS is barely more expensive than a regular external disk & while it’s performance is poor compared to a decent Sinology NAS it’s quite sufficient to serve up decent high bit rate video files to a couple of clients simultaneously. I had intended to use the NAS just as a file server to a hold media files & run PMS on a Mac but after I discovered that PMS ran really well on the NAS I decided that the simplicity of the single box solution outweighed the lack of transcoding.

9

Something you could also consider would be a NAS with a Shield TV console. The Plex team announced it will have server functionality in the next release next month. It will have hardware teanscoding if needed. It can also be used with a hd homerun Turner for TV recording.

The question allot of people forget is concern about power consumption. Most Nas Appliances do a decent job of minimizing it. A shield TV could provide the best low power transcode server if it lives up to the hype. It should be able to handle 2-3 transcodess at a time.

For a power user nothing will beat a huge case with plenty of drive bays and a powerful multi core processor. Just remember the bigger the system the more power it will consume constantly. My server with a core i5 2400, 8gb of ram,10 drives with 5 populated uses between 80 to about 130 watts. A NAS can push this down to 2-10 watts and the shield maxes out around 15 watts I believe. That means a huge power savings.

10

@nigelpb said:
The simplest setup is a single device with PMS running on the NAS. You won’t want to do any transcoding so you need to select video file formats & Plex clients appropriately.

I would argue that the work involved to re-transcode files to the lowest-common-denominator supported across all your clients (degrading quality), combined with the inability to control all sorts of other client-controlled things that can trigger transcoding anyway (client network bandwidth, subtitles, etc) is far from a “simple” setup.

11

@sremick said:

@nigelpb said:
The simplest setup is a single device with PMS running on the NAS. You won’t want to do any transcoding so you need to select video file formats & Plex clients appropriately.

I would argue that the work involved to re-transcode files to the lowest-common-denominator supported across all your clients (degrading quality), combined with the inability to control all sorts of other client-controlled things that can trigger transcoding anyway (client network bandwidth, subtitles, etc) is far from a “simple” setup.

Completely agree. At least some teanscoding ability would be nice. There are way to many things beyond your control once remote access is in play. I actually run two copies on my server. One at the full blu-ray bit rate. And one converted with vbr at optimal quality. Even the converted one gets frequently transcoded.

12

@mavrrick said:

@sremick said:

@nigelpb said:
The simplest setup is a single device with PMS running on the NAS. You won’t want to do any transcoding so you need to select video file formats & Plex clients appropriately.

I would argue that the work involved to re-transcode files to the lowest-common-denominator supported across all your clients (degrading quality), combined with the inability to control all sorts of other client-controlled things that can trigger transcoding anyway (client network bandwidth, subtitles, etc) is far from a “simple” setup.

Completely agree. At least some teanscoding ability would be nice. There are way to many things beyond your control once remote access is in play. I actually run two copies on my server. One at the full blu-ray bit rate. And one converted with vbr at optimal quality. Even the converted one gets frequently transcoded.

You guys obviously have more complex environments & are investing far more time & effort into Plex than I want to.

Remote access is a very low priority. Other than demonstrating how cool it is to access my media at home with my iPhone when at work I would never actually want to do that. If I want t watch a movie it is on my 60" screen sat in my living room not on a tiny screen in the palm of my hand.

There is no requirement to transcode to a lowest common denominator if all the clients are capable & network adequate.

As I mentioned I am setting up a ‘black box’ Plex solution (literally:-) for a family member. It just comprises a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud plus an Amazon Fire TV 4K.

I am revisiting Plex for the first time in many years. I first used Plex when it was a fork of the Mac version of XBMC. I am impressed with the development in the intervening years. I have been maintaining all my media manually on a a Synology 5-bay 1511+ NAS with 5-bay extender (disk configured in RAID-5) & using a Boxee Box as a the media streamer. I recently purchased an Apple Fire TV 4K & discovered the Plex client then thought that I would use a Mac Mini for the PMS accessing files on the NAS. As the setup of Plex on the Seagate Personal Cloud has been so successful & simple my plans have now changed so that I now propose running PMS on the Synology NAS. I foresee no requirement for transcoding but if it were to arise in the future then it would be simple enough to run PMS on a Mac Mini or similar with all the media files still residing on the NAS. The work involved in cataloguing & naming all the TV series & movies is the same whatever hardware the PMS runs on.

13

Actually I agree a NAS is nice. You have to be careful though as some cheap NAS Appliances can provide sufficient disk performance. I have just read many posts of someone trying to use a device like that and being upset because transcoding is needed. The shield TV console if it can do what the folks here say it can will be a good entry way into handling 2-3 transcodess at once.

My solution was built well before I thought to put plex on it. If it is complicated it is beacause of that. If I was starting from scratch today I would probably go the NAS and Shield TV route myself.