Morning all. New to Plex but love what I see so far.
Using an old QNAP TS-410 (pre-Plex) with 4 x 6TB WD in Raid 10 and has worked really well but it’s time to move on.
Been looking at higher power QNAP box as replacement but would like to get advice on the best route going forward from those with more knowledge than me.
Is QNAP better than other NAS options or is there a ‘must have’ NAS for Plex?
Or am I better off building a powerful server?
Just a bit about my environment. We have a fully RJ45 wired home environment, several Panasonic TV’s, quite a few Sonos boxes, older CCTV camers, a couple of consoles and a laptop and desktop, all hard wired, all via an older Netgear unmanaged gigabit switch and to a fast VM internet connection. Very little wireless. All configured very vanilla, zero complex stuff. PC’s are Win 10 64bit, also is a Sony z5 android phone and a top end Pixelbook in there as well.
Interested in your input as which way to go … off shelf NAS or server.
If NAS then recommendations and suggestions very welcome.
If server then any resource or links or articles on an ‘optimum build’ would be very interesting.
Note I do have a high configuration desktop PC i7/32gb/ modern MB, small SSD’s installed and to be honest is very under used in reality. Also there’s a Nivida
Many thanks in advance. P.S if my Plex terminology or understanding is a bit poor then it’s because I’m coming from a Twonky shaped world and early days learning.
I think that sinking money into a NAS just for your Plex library is a waste of time & money. It’s much better to use Cloud storage. G Suite for Business gives unlimited storage on Google Drive for $10/€8/£6.60 per month even for just one user (the oft quoted minimum five users has never been enforced). Then mount your Google Drive on your local Plex server & access you media as though it were local.
You didn’t mention the format in which you actually stored your media now but keeping it so that it can DirectPlay or DirectStream to your players (x264/AAC/MP4 most likely) makes a beefy server or NAS unnecessary.
You also didn’t mention exactly why you found your current NAS now unacceptable but having media in the cloud is going to be an aggravation the first time your Internet goes out or gets slow.
Just as aggravating as when Netflix or Amazon Prime or BBC iPlayer is unavailable because your Internet goes out or gets slow? In my case that is never. Most people have pretty decent & reliable Internet nowadays & if it goes down not being able to access your Plex library is going to be the least of your aggravations. You also save yourself a lot of work in management plus the cost of hardware replacement.
Personally I prefer to throw enough CPU/GPU at the problem that I don’t care if something transcodes. Then I don’t have to fuss with my media or even worry about what client is playing it. That being said I do try and store things in a format that direct plays in my house (Roku’s everywhere) but beyond that I don’t worry about it.
I am still using a 3rd generation I5 and an older NVida card and I never have a problem with 3+ things transcoding at once. I am sure that will not hold up with 4k media but I don’t have any at this point. Once I do my plan is to throw hardware at it so I can continue not messing with it.
From a NAS perspective, there are a couple different ways you can go.
Keep using NAS for storage, but host Plex on separate device (PC, NV SHield, etc)
Keep both Storage and Plex on that NAS.
Really from a horse power perspective, the performance issue really comes into play if you have to transcode. If you are doing directplay for everything, you really don’t need that much performance.
In terms of NAS brands, QNAP tends to have the wider range of performance options in terms of CPU/expansion capabilities vs. say a Synology. They also have several models that overlap.
I personally run PMS on a Qnap TS-877 and with recent updates have enabled HW transcoding to my Nvidia 1060 GPU. I have also ran Plex on the TS-877 w/o GPU and a TVS-673.
It just depends on how many transcodes you need, and the video files you are dealing with as to how much horse power you need.
One benefit of having everything on the NAS is I don’t have to worry about data transfer/protocol/etc. headaches between the NAS & PMS server.
Have to confess to being a ‘third way’ I’d even considered Nigel. I do have a huge amount of movies each one weighing in between a minimum of 0.8GB to some music videos over 7GB. There’s currently just under 500 of them and a significant amount of photos a good deal of which are approx 7mb each. Music a lot less as these live on an older Buffalo device to feed Sonos … and we do use a lot of online music services.
Would the cloud based services provide enough performance for what is essentially local use in the main currently? I ask that somewhat out of naivety as it genuinely is a function I’d not considered?
thanks for the reply dduke. You know what I’m not fully sure…don’t think it’s consistent. And to be entirely honest I’m not yet familiar with DirectPlay or DirectStream but certainly the formats you mentioned in brackets, I do have a quantity of.
The TS-410 has been rock solid and for years but I’m told that Plex is not supported on Arm processors. It certainly installs, loads and scans contents but app on TV will not connect.
And even it’s Twonky predecessor can run rather slow … mind it still runs and solidly but when I upload a couple of thousand photos after holiday it takes days to thumbnail them. If I look at the dashboard stat’s it is running very high … partly I believe as it is in Raid 10 format and partly as the arm processor is working hard and quite under powered.
The QNAP guys did a remote access some months back when Twonky started running slowly and suggested it might be time to thinking about new options. I guess they would but said to switch less used apps off to help with horse power. it did work.
Is certainly not down to reliability etc. Oh and QTS is not supported past 4.2 on that model now as well.
Have not used a great deal of cloud stuff to date so have to plead guilty to having limited knowledge on speed, reliability etc.
If I understand you correctly WBowelll then I may be in the same territory. Some movies run a dream on certain TV’s, some do not or there is no sound … even within the same manufacturer stable…in our case older and newer Panasonics.
I was sort of hoping to do the transcoding at the back end and have less work to do for the client TV. But again I have limited knowledge of this … except that some movies work on some TV’s and not on others.
I’m also using one Roku device … happily as it goes but rest is direct to TV currently.
I would (given I have a chance to upgrade or change strategy) like to aim toward 4k media but understand this is limited at the NAS end … apologies if misunderstand, learning on the fly here … is all good input.
I too tend to use hardware to sledge hammer solutions but keen to understand from folks here the relative merits of approach. Thanks
Wow, learning here … so fast NAS to store and run Plex on a PC or similar? Another new option for me
One of the other guys mentioned directplay … could you give me a layman’s explanation as to what that actually is/does please?
So the transcoding is making the video/audio ready in a format that a client TV can reognise and run…would that be right? If it’s the case then is it best that the back end does the work and the TV just play? I definitely see differences between TV’s and sticks in TV’s as to what movies they will play on what. Strangely my new 4k Panasonic seems less adept than the older Pana model at recognising and running some of the movie files held on the NAS … currently in Twonky.
My Plex library is 40+TB & increasing by 1TB every few weeks. Nowadays I download Blu-ray remuxes that are about 30-40Mbps & 30-40GB. These stream beautifully to my local PMS & also from the VPS I have.
Check out this excellent guide on how to set up a VPS with Google Drive. I used the legacy tutorials to mount my Google Drive Plex library on my local Plex server. https://www.techperplexed.ga/p/index.html
Re: Fast Nas to store - not too huge of a requirement in terms of NAS speed (your 1Gb NW likely will bottleneck before your storage) but just depends on if you were playing say several 4k high bit-rate movies at the same time.
Here are a couple good articles regarding playing vs. transcoding.
How are Direct Play, Direct Stream, and Transcoding different?
As for Plex clients devices, they do have quite a bit of impact on playback performance/experience.
Everything from how good/bad the “CPU/GPU” embedded in the TV/Stick, NW capabilities (WiFi/Ehternet), etc.
In some cases I ignore the embedded “Plex Client” on my TV and use a streamer instead. So while my 4k Vizio has a Plex App, I have an Nvidia Shield hooked up to it as that gave me much more flexibility and is updated more frequently.
I also don’t have to worry about all the “viewing data” that most TV’s now force you to share with them.
I think Cloud for some use cases makes sense, but it also depends on the recurring VPS bill, whether you are have metered broadband, what your up/down capabilities for ISP are, etc.
If you have little or no remote use of Plex then you don’t need a VPS. However a VPS or seedbed is useful for downloading media from torrents & from Usenet in the first place. Broadband here in the UK is generally unmetered & the gating factor is most likely your actual line speed while most will like me have around 70/15 if you live in the sticks it might be a lot lower.
Many thanks for the data Nigel. Yes I’m going to take a full read…it’s clear I need to do a bit of catch up with the overall architecture and options. I had sort of approached it has a ‘hardware choice’ … it may still end up to be that but is clear that’s more to get the best out of it.
I appreciate the data sources … it will help to make the best decision
Thanks again MwC for the information … again going to give that a good read and most likely come back with a host of questions…but I’m learning … is a very helpful forum in my limited few days on here.
I don’t think I will need more than one or two 4k sources now or near future that I can predict. And currently no real need for remote. Our viewing sources live under this roof and I think will be limited to that for the foreseeable but that said … things move quick.
So if I,m understanding correctly, the NAS store I have could be ok if I used a powerful server in front of it? I have the bones of that in terms of CPU, memory, fairly recent MB and a powerful GPU … a Nivida 1070GTX I think it is. And this could feed to our home network to the TV’s? … with the bandwidth limitations you mentioned.
Would that mean the transcoding would be done by the new server drawing data from the NAS?
Apologies getting a bbit ahead of myself in the understanding before reading fully
That will be ample speed especially as you have no remote use.
There’s just the two of us so we only ever have have one TV in use at a time & I can happily stream 40Mbps Blu-ray remuxes.
You don’t want to transcode if at all possible (for quality reasons alone) & the best way to avoid transcoding is to have a decent client that will Direct Play everything like an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield or Amazon Fire TV 4K.
So transcoding 4k sources are fairly CPU intensive if your system doesn’t have HW transcoding (which requires Plex Pass subscription).
So based on your config, you would go with something like this.
NAS (media storage)<-- 1GbE Hardwired NW - >PMS Server (PC)— > (wired/wifi, but wired preferred) -->Plex clients (TV’s, Streaming sticks, etc.)
Correct… PMS pulls data in from NAS (via SMB/NFS/etc.) , transcodes inside server/pc… streams output to specific client that needs it.
As for the GPU, that is a good card, but NVidia has limited it to a max of 2 HW transcodes simultaneously. I believe after that it switches over to CPU or embedded GPU (incase of Intel chips) for any extras. If most clients are doing direct play, then it really isn’t a big issue.
