rate my nas/plex box
What software do you intend to run for the NAS side of things?
most likely freenas or exsi vmware.
Recommendation and clarification:
vmware is only the virtual host. You still need to put the platform OS.
Why not run XPEnology? We’ve had great success. All you need to implement it is the dedicated USB boot thumb drive. You won’t need VMWare and you’ll have a software raid which you can later take anywhere you can load Linux and the ‘md’ raid drivers.
Doing it this way, you’ll have the UI of DSM and the same PMS which runs on all the Synology X86 boxes.
Exsi so i can torrent behide a VPN on a VM & host plex server with another VM i have 2 network cards coming but also looking to running a freenas for personal files
That makes perfect sense too. The question comes down to portability and personal preference. Which software raid is most portable and which UI do you like the best.
Your motherboard and RAM are not the right choices for FreeNAS. You design your hardware around your chosen software/OS, not the other way around.
@sremick said:
Your motherboard and RAM are not the right choices for FreeNAS. You design your hardware around your chosen software/OS, not the other way around.
i have a budget sadly that what i can go with if i can get it cheaper some where else let me know.
Seems excessive for a dedicated NAS, why not use your PC and stream over WiFi or but a small form factor Synology or similar?
forgot to state it’s also a homelab
@Decked said:
Seems excessive for a dedicated NAS, why not use your PC and stream over WiFi or but a small form factor Synology or similar?
Between my old ARM NAS which was running out of space and having to leave my power hungry PC on all the time which used around 170 watts of power or so, it just didn’t make sense anymore. I found a USED Netgear ReadyNAS 516 which is fast enough to transcode a couple 1080P streams at once with PLEX installed on it and running some other software like NZBGet, and so on. I got it used for about half th eprice of a new one!!! I can power off my PC now. I can also add up to 6 HDD, and up to 6TB in size from the 4 drive 3TB limit before in my old ARM NAS. I now have 5 3TB drives in it and another sitting here to plug in when I need it to expand to more room or to replace a bad HDD. If I run out of space going to 6, 6TB HDD’s, I can plug in another 2 or 3 external 5 drive units for more HDD storage. That seems crazy, but I have that flexibility. It works perfect. I have since upgraded the software on it a couple times.
Maybe you don’t have quite the flexibility of a system you build yourself. But it’s small and compact and ready to go. If I needed to transcode more then a couple 1080P streams at once then I’d need a faster Intel CPU and maybe custom built would be needed at that point, but the more power, the more power hungry it’s going to be. I also like the simplicity or being able to just pop in a HDD at any time and have my system grow that much larger, and even expand to a larger HDD and have it grow larger that way without having to backup and install a drive and copy everything back. When you’re talking over 10+TB of Data right now, that takes days, not hours to copy.
If you go custom, you clearly need to decide what OS you want to use along with what software you may want to run on it besides PLEX!!! If you can get a version of that software that will run on that OS, once you figure that out then you can figure out the hardware that will work with it. You really don’t need a ton of RAM. Mine has 4 Gig’s. Getting much more costs more money and uses more power. Same goes with the CPU. How much power do you really need? Then you need a motherboard that supports the OS and features you need that will work with the case you want to use. The best thing is to look at what others have built and what kind of results they get.
@JBDragon said:
I found a USED Netgear ReadyNAS 516
6 bays. Good. Make sure you’re using RAID6 and not RAID5:
