New storage 20-30tb

General Discussions
1

I have been asked to set up a Plex server from for a good friend. He lives a long way away so we are going to ship the hardware and media to me to assemble and set up. I know how I would do it for me BUT a computer as a file server and a bunch of USB drives is not appropriate for him.

For several reasons I am going to use a 500 gb Shield as a server but the storage is an issue.
It needs to be self contained and either networked or directly connected to the Shield, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, have a good degree of safety and redundancy and preferably be able to be mostly managed remotely. Oh, it must be at least 25tb or so to start.

I have researched quite a bit but, as I have never really looked for this kind of hardware (web or remote storage is not an option) I need some help.
I can handle the setup but the hardware choice is proving to be “challenging” to put it mildly.

Remember the Shield needs network storage (which I “think” is more doable) to be a standard Windows share or it need to look like a standard USB drive to directly connect to the Shield.

Also this is a “from scratch” setup but the network it will live on is about three years old and nothing really special but well installed and maintained.

I thank everyone for any suggestions. Price is not a primary concern BUT clearly saving money without sacrificing functionality is always a good thing.

BTW: The best purchasing option for us is Amazon but that does not mean other options would not work as well.

2

What have you found so far? Any hardware that’s caught your eye that you think would be good?

3

@kegobeer-plex said:
What have you found so far? Any hardware that’s caught your eye that you think would be good?

That is a good question and my not so good answer is that I have found several NAS systems that look OK BUT I hate to admit I am totally overwhelmed with the choices and the extreme variations in reviews and prices and stated abilities.

I decided to ask this as open ended as possible so I might get a varied but focused (Plex users and developers) set of ideas that, hopefully, will be easier to sift through.

That is I am asking for help as if I were the dumbest stump in the field and need someone to dynamite my ideas so something new can be planted.

So, at least for now, I do not want to list what I might be considering as that might limit responses. Later on I very well might ask for opinions on the final choices but I am just so out of my depth at this stage that I am just hoping that some users of larger systems of storage will chime in with their suggestions.

My research has examined everything from full NAS systems that are rack mounted with their storage and so were expandable to near infinity to simple disk arrays that plug into a USB port and I am about as lost as I can get at this time.

4

I’ve had a Shield TV as a Plex server for about six months. Media is on a Synology DS414 that I’ve owned ~3 years. Both connected via wired gigabit ethernet.

Works great. On a day-to-day basis I don’t have to touch things. I’m just doing the basics - playing movies & music. No DVR, TV tuners, etc. I’ve about 10TB of movies & music. Movies are Blu-ray & DVD rips and mp4/m4v files processed by Handbrake from my old iTunes library. Music is CD rips & downloads in FLAC/ALAC/MP3.

The Synology does have a learning curve but it is straightforward. It helps if you understand basic networking - assigning a fixed IP address, adding users & permissions, etc. Also the concept of RAID, so you understand why four, 4 TB drives results in 12 TB, not 16 TB, available storage. I’ve no experience w/ QNAP or other NAS vendors, but from what I’ve read online, Synology is considered just as user friendly as the others.

No SMB file sharing problems since last Shield update to v5.2. Note that Shield is limited to SMB 1, so if you go with networked storage be sure it supports SMB 1.

Shield TV auto-mounts the NAS after rebooting the Shield or the NAS. When on Shield v5.1, I occasionally had to re-mount the NAS, but process is straightforward. I made a userid on the NAS just for the Shield TV and it has access to just the folders holding my media. It mounts the same way every time and no worries about accidentally mounting a wrong folder.

I’ve owned one NAS, the DS414, so can’t give comparison vs QNAP/others. However, Synology is easy to maintain. All sys admin is via web interface, which can be accessed remotely (has firewall so can limit to specific IP addresses, etc).

Hardware maintenance obviously requires somebody on-site. I had two disk failures about two years ago. Physically replacing a drive is straightforward and does not require tools. Everything else is via the web GUI.

The DS414 motherboard failed about a year ago, requiring replacement of the entire unit. Troubleshooting with Synology was straightforward, but did need somebody to touch the unit - steps such as removing drives, rebooting device, observing status lights, connecting direct to a laptop instead of via a Ethernet switch.

Installing the replacement unit was straightforward, but would need somebody on-site to interact with the unit. The replacement arrived with out of date software (it is a 2014 model). I had to boot with a spare hard drive and upgrade to current version of software. The download & upgrade is straightforward & via web browser, but would be difficult to perform remotely (DHCP address instead of fixed, etc). After the upgrade everything was easy. Power down, put original drives back in unit, power on. Done.

Synology supports backup to local USB drives, remote NAS units and to the cloud. I backup to two USB drives. It runs as scheduled. Restoring is straightforward. Backups to Amazon Cloud Drive has issues, but they are ACD related. That will be going away anyhow due to ACD pricing change in the US. No experience backing up to “real” backup destinations such as Rackspace, Amazon Glacier, etc.

In summary, Shield TV + Synology NAS has been great for me. I would much rather have a NAS than several USB drives attached to a Shield TV. Any NAS maintenance such as s/w upgrades, making new shared folders, etc can be done remotely. Hardware maintenance requires somebody on-site, but that would be the same for any other such device. Synology supports 10 TB drives, so you could load a four drive unit with 4x10TB and have about 30TB of space. Current equivalent of my NAS is DS916+. It supports an expansion chassis to add additional drives. Additional options, both rackmount & desktop, if you want more drive slots. Also, if you do go with Synology, get one with a 64-bit architecture (it is a checkbox on their Product Comparison page). Not strictly needed for Plex. Just future-proofing as some features/enhancements will only be available on models with 64-bit processors.

5

For the storage side, get a massive NAS and save yourself the trouble. A Synology 8 bay might do the trick. A Sheild or a Mac mini for the Plex server would make for a good server. That’s what I have (Mac mini + Synology NAS).

6

Depending on the NAS and the media containers, you could eliminate the Shield all together. Have everything in one self contained system, plug in power, plug in Ethernet and bang there it is in the new location.

If it were me asked to do this the first question I would have is “what is the budget?” This is ALWAYs a great starting point.

I run my entire 30TB+ on a rather expensive, but high end Asustor NAS. (They now make models with i5’s and i7’s so they go even higher ended than what I have) If you get a model with enough drive bays, just plug in another drive and there it is, more storage.

My NAS ran $1300 for a bare bones system. It can transcode (without HW beta) 2+ streams as needed. With HW Transcoding we’re looking at 5-7 streams able to be transcoded without hitting the CPU too hard.

Mine is a 4-bay machine. And if I had it to do over it would be an 8 or 10 bay model. All of the drives in a single machine, no enclosures… Nothing on a USB or eSATA connection.

@Elijah_Baley if you want some recommendations off-line, send me a PM and I can give you a few choices that won’t break the bank, but still give you a good Plex experience on almost any client device out there. (Yeah, probably not going to get a lot of 4K on a NAS in any case…) :slight_smile:

And give us an idea of budget…

7

As a couple have mentioned above
Go with a high end NAS that has the CPU to transcode.
But if your friend is never going to serve remote clients the NAS all in one options grow significantly and at lower cost.

I have a 1815+ and just bought the 1817+
They will serve locally (and as we know that all depends on the media).
And also have a Shield and a Skull NUC as servers to use remotely.

Down to 2 options
The Shield and a Synology NAS (bigger the better)
or the high end NAS from Qnap or Asustor to do it all!

8

@“MikeG6.5” (The period in your user name forces me to actually think and use quotes if I want things to work correctly. Bad Mike!!!)

The budget is exactly “it depends” total under $3000.00 including drives. The Shield is not part of the budget as it is already in its home.

I have already set up ripping and encoding for him so he will eventually have most, but not all, in an mp4 format that will direct play on his most commonly used client, Roku. Fortunately he is almost as old as I so his eyesight and hearing are not good enough to require fancy settings. In fact for most TV shows are fine using Handbrake’s fast 1080p setting and the old ones use 720 and even 480 without him seeing or hearing a difference.

After further calculations I have come to realize that a system with about 20tb usable storage will be a good start as long as he can expand it later as his library grows but that will take some time as most everything he currently has is still on DVD or at best in a DVD format on disk.

While that budget is $3000.00 I would really like to save him some money as his income is less than mine and his health issues are greater and his veteran benefits do not help as much as they should. The government really screws a large number of vets. He wants no help and would hate that I even mentioned it BUT I feel the need to help him as much as I can and as much as he will allow.

Thanks for any help and if you want you can send suggestions to me off line.

9

Right now, i am using my imac 5k with 2 hard drives one 8tb other 4tb. They’re getting full. So thing about buying a dell 710 3.5mm drive version with 2 2.5gb xeon processors and 20tb with around 100gb of ram. I figure the whole setup will cost me around 1100$. Also it will be running freenas.

10

To further follow up on this we are leaning toward:


It is quite a bit overkill but it would STRONGLY future proof the setup.

Now for an even harder choice: Which drives to put in it to have at least 30tb of safe storage (as safe as a raid can be) available.

4 of these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST10000VN0004/dp/B01IA9GU0Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500255306&sr=1-1&keywords=10tb+hard+drive
5 of these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST8000VN0022/dp/B01M1BUBSO/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500255379&sr=1-3&keywords=8tb+hard+drive
6 of these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST6000VN0041/dp/B01LZDFMWQ/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500255469&sr=1-2&keywords=6tb+hard+drive
7 of these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-ST5000DM000-3-5-Inch-Internal/dp/B00KIVMRWU/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500255526&sr=1-3&keywords=5+tb+hard+drive
9 of these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST4000VN008/dp/B01LOOJBQY/ref=sr_1_9?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500255617&sr=1-9&keywords=4+tb+hard+drive

are all a possibility with variable available spaces from 30-32 tb.

I believe I read, and understood (mostly), that the server can be configured to even handle different size drives without wasting space by using “SHR” Raid as long as there are at least two of the largest drives.

There is also a “better” technology available called “SHR-2” that uses two disk as protection that I “think” might be useable.

Now for questions:
What do folks think of this setup?
Does anyone have any alternatives and/or different drives or setups that they would recommend?

While suggesting alternatives be aware that this NAS is quite able to run Plex itself but that is NOT a priority as there will be a Shield Pro in the mix that can act as a server using the NAS as simple storage.

Thanks for any help.

11

have you looked at building a NAS and using unRAID as the backend? I am currently at 32TB with an unRAID setup, no issues for about 5 years thus far.

12

@don.alcombright said:
have you looked at building a NAS and using unRAID as the backend? I am currently at 32TB with an unRAID setup, no issues for about 5 years thus far.

I’ve looked quite a bit and I am comfortable with the hardware and software of such an operation BUT it has been almost 20 years since I built a computer from scratch and I have found the selection of all the pieces a bit daunting.

When I did it before there were just a few choices to be made and then you were done. Now it is like walking into a supermarket wanting a box of cereal and going to the cereal isl and being attacked by 100s of choices before you even consider the size options. I have tried to find guides etc but they were more confusing than not and the “video” guides are worthless for actually accomplishing anything.

But I am open to the idea. The one thing is that the case I choose must have at least 8 bays and 10 or 12 would be better.

Any Ideas?

13

Another vote here for Synology. I run a 1815+ with 4 6TB drives in Raid 10. PMS is running on a always on i7 server.

Works perfectly and never let me down. Serves all the clients in the house and many outside as well.

Synology has lots of nice features as well. I have SFTP setup to share stuff with my brother in the states as he manages his own Plex Server. It has a built in firewall so I can restrict access to only the server. Anyone else on my network can’t access the NAS. It has link aggregation which is handy so I can stream to multiple clients and also do large file transfers at speeds at 100+MB/s speeds with no effect on other people watching.

Remote access is also easily setup but I prefer and encrypted VNC client on the server.

Another very useful feature for me is I can run a openVPN client on the sinology and route all external traffic through a VPN. I know a decent router can do this but I get better speeds doing it on the NAS.

14

Off topic a bit but about the Seagate Ironwolf 10TB drive.

Yes WD were sued years ago about this but maybe it’s time again .

I recently plugged 2 x 10TB drives in my NAS !

Now I knew what was coming but really
4tb = 3.6
6tb = 5.5
8tb =7.3
Now 10Tb you get 9.1TB

Using SHR 1 if you replace 2x4tb with 2x10TB you might think an extra 12TB - Nuh ! you get 6tb extra!!

15

I would either buy an inexpensive 8-Bay NAS and stuff it with 8TB or 10TB NAS Hard Drives and continue to use the Shield as my server or I would roll my own NAS with FreeNAS and include sufficient CPU and memory resources to transcode as many streams as you need (recommend i7 or above).

16

@scurtis said:
I would either buy an inexpensive 8-Bay NAS and stuff it with 8TB or 10TB NAS Hard Drives and continue to use the Shield as my server or I would roll my own NAS with FreeNAS and include sufficient CPU and memory resources to transcode as many streams as you need (recommend i7 or above).

I thought about that but I cannot seem to find an “inexpensive” 8 bay NAS. Any suggestions?

17

Some of the lower end QNAP servers are not bad.

18

The cost of the NAS almost comes secondary.

Hard drives are the biggest cost !
8 x 4TB = $1000
8 x 10Tb = $2800

Cost per TB is about the same from 2TB to 10TB
at $30-$35 per TB

And a new model 1817+ $849 !
Drobo $800
Qnap $800

19

I think someone else mentioned it already, but a SuperMicro system running FreeNAS might also be a good way to go. I ran the QNap myself and it just would not hold up to what I needed. I currently run both a primary and backup FreeNAS server, one with 72TB usable (40TB in use) and one with 73TB usable (40TB in use). The second one I got off ebay used completely load with the 10Gbe and drives for $2k.

However, for home use, this may not work well since it is a server and not a small NAS box and not sure if your friend has a place for an actual server.

20

@Elijah_Baley I run a Drobo 5N2 as my media repository. I exclusively run HGST Ultrastar 6TB drives in the Drobo and on an internal Raid5 on my Plex media server (as a secondary backup copy). In hindsight, I probably would’ve gone with Synology but I’m satisfied with my Drobo. It’s very hands off and just works. Synology is a top notch device as well as QNAP. The hard part is going to be deciding on drives. Check this blog out and see if it can give you some direction on drives to purchase.

I would also suggest some type of backup. Hardware will fail and it would be a shame to lose all that media.