I’ve been running Plex for about a month now on an old Mac Mini and a Drobo FS. After hating everything about that setup since day one (constant buffering, CPU spiking), I ordered a Synology ds918+. It should arrive on Tuesday. I’ve been reading all the FAQs (this forum has been an amazing help during the research phase) on the Synology thread, and have a decent list of things I think I need to do once it comes (picked up 3 10tb drives too to ease with the migration from the Drobo).
I wish there was a basic how-to guide from unboxing to getting Plex up and running (e.g. what raid is recommended, what filesystem, how to install Plex from the official Plex site, etc.) I “think” I’m getting most of the way there by piecing together several threads here. I just dread doing something wrong, and having to redo everything.
Anyway, can’t wait to get started. Thanks in advance for helping with the undoubtedly stupid questions that are bound to come this way.
Think you will be happy with the 918+, I pretty much got it for the same reason as you did, a Plex server with benefits of a NAS. There are several articles about what RAID to run, I decided to run SHR which is proprietary to Synology, but basically it is much like RAID 5 but can use different sized drives, and I have 4 x 8tb drives in a storage pool (or volume). Some will run 3+1 but since I have backup of my NAS to another computer with 2 drives in RAID 1, wasn’t worried about back up redundancy. (I also added the max memory of 16 GB and installed 2 x 256 M2 SSD drives for cache, both are overkill).
It is all GUI based and think once you get the NAS up and running, Plex will be pretty straight forward. Like you I tried to be prepared to know what to expect, but as I recall it was pretty straight forward. Just remember to use the 64 bit version of Plex, and all you have to do is download the file from Plex and use the Package Center within the Synology interface and do a manual install. First time as I recall, during the initial install, you have to tell Plex what folder on your NAS to use for storage, etc. And afterwards all updates have to do be done the same way, manually. Note, once installed, if you go back into the Package Center, you will see Plex Media Server, and a button that says “Installed”, but if you click on the text “Plex Media Server” you can get to a menu that you can either stop or uninstall Plex, which is handy if you need to restart the Plex Server.
Today on my Mac, when there’s a Plex update, it looks like from within PMS, I can just click update - from what you’re saying, it seems I have to do that manually - assume that’s because I wouldn’t have installed it from Synology’s add-ons?
Yes, it can take up to 16 GB of RAM. Upgrades, you will get a notification that there is an upgrade, but you have to then download it to your PC, and use the Package Center to manually install it, which does the upgrade.
What did you do to migrate from your previous Plex library to the 918? Just followed the FAQ listed here? Looks like just move the ApplicationSupport/Plex folder on my Mac to the 918.
Sure you can PUT 16GB in it but all it will EVER use is 8GB.
Putting in 2x 8GB will leave memory unbalanced in that the CPU will only ever user the first 8GB SODIMM. 16GB “installable” is a fluke of how the SODIMM’s SPD information is reported and summed in Linux.