Hi Everyone
I am a noob to the forum but a 4+ year user of Plex Media Server for my home. As my library has grown, I recently made the decision to migrate from a Windows Server running local storage to a QNAP TVS-671-i5-8G NAS (6 - 6TB drives) to host my Plex library. In addition to running Plex, I would also like to use the NAS to host Time Machine backups and to serve as centralized file storage for my family.
I have seen similar questions in the forum previously but wanted to evaluate a couple different options for storage setup. The three options I am considering are the following. In each case, I am planning to use RAID6 :
- Create a single static volume to store everything and create shared folders with appropriate permissions to provide isolation. My understanding is this is beneficial for performance and simplicity but also incurs the downside of no future flexibility
- Create a single storage pool and an initial thick volume using some percentage of space leaving some unallocated space for future use. I would still assign purpose-specific shared folders. The benefit here is I can enable snapshots for valuable data and I can also leave some unallocated space for future use
- The last option I am considering is creating a single storage pool and multiple thick volumes for Plex and backups but assign thin volumes for personal file storage in my family. My thought with this option is it reduces the used space for personal storage which I expect to be pretty low anyways and also creates some boundaries so Time Machine does not simply continue to consume all the space it can. I can also enable snapshots to recover important data if needed.
I’m really hoping somebody has faced a similar use case and may be able to give feedback on what worked for them. I’m leaning towards the third option but would appreciate any feedback.
Thanks
Matt
