The time has come to replace my old combination of a Synology DS410j (with 4x WD Red 3TB) and a Mac Mini (late 2012) on which I have been running PMS and other minor apps. It’s been running too slow lately and Plex has been adding too many cool features (mainly DVR) in the mean time that are begging for some experimenting.
I’m thinking of building my own all-in-one NAS now (cause Synology is easy but I need a challenge and avoid a rip-off), that should be able to handle the following:
Run PMS, Sonarr, Radarr, Sabnzbd, etc. Thinking of using Docker.
Transcode 1-2 4K streams or lower at the same time. I don’t have a lot of 4K files but want to be future-proof
Plex DVR, i.e. watching 1 stream and recording 1 stream at the same time
Serve as photos backup and use Plex to stream those
CPU: Intel Core i3 8100 (fixed typo: was 3100 before)
Mobo: Asus Prime B360M-A
RAM: 8GB DDR4 - 2400
Case: Fractal Design Node 804
Couple questions:
Will it work?
Is it future proof?
Which OS to use? Thinking of UnRaid, but read that compatibility with TV tuners (specifically Hauppage WinTV-quadHD) could be tricky.
Migration: I don’t think I will be able to plug in my old drives into the new setup but just in case anyone has an idea, I’ll be glad to hear it and avoid migration headaches. Current plan is to create JBOD of 3 old 1TB WD Caviar Green + 1 new 3TB WD Red on new system, copy over existing data (< 6 GB) from old system, move 4x 3TB WD Red from old system in new RAID5, copy over data from JBOD to new RAID5, take out 1TB drives and add new 3TB WD Red to existing RAID5 to expand to max 8 drives over time.
Do not use Green drives. Use NAS rated drives if you’re accumulating storage NAS style.
If you’re building a RAID, green / blue / and black drives won’t handle it. They will fail very quickly due to how RAID operates.
Go with an OS you’re familiar with.
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to learn the OS at the same time you’re trying to implement your solution.
Greens will be fine with unraid since it’s not raid, it’s jbod. I have a bunch of greens from years ago. One of them has been spinning non stop for over 8 years in my Unraid box.
If you want future proof for unraid which has docker and vm support, I would recommend a newer cpu and more ram (I couldn’t find any info on i3 3100, I’m assuming it’s an older one).
I have a pentium g4600, a dual core hyperthreaded cpu I bought for very cheap, does hw transcode, and can do VMs if you ever need them. It’s a workhorse for that price. That’s my backup unraid that now runs my plex server.
For ram, 8gb will be enough for plex and a few dockers. But get more if you can afford it.
Older greens are great… until they realized what ppl were doing and I swear they added fail switches. Well, they did muck with the tler on them after a certain point… I’m with @ChuckPa on staying away from the current gen of greens unless you’re mirroring them or simply don’t care about data loss.
If you want cheap mass storage shuck the externals when on sale… YOLO
If you want cheap mass storage and data retention is important… it doesn’t exist so break open that piggy bank cause it’s REDs and Wolfies for you plus some 3rd party cloud backup solution which will be $$ per month.
I went middle ground… I have some REDs in a raid 5 that I put important/time consuming (my CD backups for example) and google cloud mirror that. Video media I just jbod and pray to the noodly appendage one as I can replace those easily enough if needed… I also monitor I/O and smart like a hawk with automated reports.
On second read, I noticed your plans of migrating to raid5? Unraid does jbod with parity protection (up to 2 parity drives). No raid5. Plus, for a media server you probably don’t want raid5.
Advantages of unraid’s jbod, if you have multiple drive failures beyond what the parities can save, you still have your data on the remaining disks because there is no striping. Also unlike raid5, unraid allows you to mix and match different size drives. I have ones ranging from 1tb to 8tb as I add and/or replace over time.
Nice thread. I offer this, jez stripe the media drives and let a NAS handle all the backing up. Was this said already? I’ve never messed much with raid 5, except maybe my own home pc? idk
@aptalca I didn’t know that about Unraid, but the advantages over RAID5 make a lot of sense @melrhombus good idea. I assume you refer to SSD, in the 100 - 250 GB range? @WillieBuckMerle@melrhombus I currently use Amazon Glacier to backup all my ultra-important stuff, and I’ll continue to do that especially when moving away from RAID5 to Unraid JBOD. I’ll have to find a suitable replacement for the Synology Glacier app though. Or I can keep it alive just to handle that for me.
So it looks like there are no other showstoppers in my configuration?
16GB min for ram…
Unraid has a trial for 1 month which can be extended twice i think. So if you want you can play around beforehand as it isn’t free but imo a reasonable 1 time cost. The trial is full featured as well so you have access to everything. In your case check out binhex’s repo… He has everything you mentioned all dockered up with vpn/privoxy built in… Literally click and installed.
You can find free alternatives like ESXi and docker managers but requires more running about and maintenance. Unraid is simple and I’m lazy so perfect! Others similar are freenas, open media vault, and nas4free
Yeah, I used a mirror’d SSD cache which I back up every week to a tarball using an automated tool created by one of the support devs. I put all my Dockers there with their config and media is NFS mount from a NAS. Photos and some other stuff I have on the xfs array which is also backed by cloud plus raid1 elsewhere… I’m paranoid.
I have multiple synology and Qnap nas devices what I did was bought a used hp-proliant u1 server from Amazon ( HP ProLiant DL360 G7 1U 64-bit Server with 2xSix-Core X5650 Xeon 2.66GHz + 32GB RAM + 4x146GB 10K SAS HDD, RAID, NO OS servers365 vendor is a great vendor on amazon)
bumped memory to 64gig for ($250) and then just cifs/nfs mount the existing nas drives to this server so you use the disks storage you already have and use the proliant as the media server and transcoder, i installed centos 7 .
This works great i have about 50 people that connect to my plex services and no slowdowns or any buffering issue. My QNAP does all the recording since its just serving up files it never gets pegged with cpu usage or anything. this was simple cheap solution for me . I have over 8k movies and 500 tv-series all served up by proliant front server using nas/usb and other network drives as storage.
you can message me if you have questions about centos or proliant config, it was easy and works great. the stock proliant disk are way more then enough for plex server, but not as a storage unit thats all off-lined to nas and external drive servers.
the other + is proliant server shows all sections/drives as single topics so no switching servers or having to look at different plex servers its all presented as 1 external plex server, even though you may have many physical storage units or nas devices.
Update: I assembled and installed everything, and everything is working fine except decoding a 4K (HEVC Main 10 HDR) 64435 kbps file to my TV. I decided to buy an intel i3-8300 coffee lake which should handle this just fine based on this article. I have also enabled hardware transcoding in Plex and Unraid and verified that PMS is actually doing it (I see the (hw) tag in the Activity screen). Unfortunately the video is still stuttering every 30 seconds. Am I missing something? Shouldn’t my CPU be able to handle this effortlessly?
Lots of variables here…
Is the content on the array or cache drive?
Does it have subtitles?
Is it transcoding or direct?
If transcoding is dec AND enc both hardware?
