Suggestions about nVidia shield and QNAP TS-231+

General Discussions
1

Hello everyone,
I currently have a nicely working system:
Dell PowerEdge Server running Windows 2008 R2 Standard and my plex library lives on a 1TB RAID 10 drive (4x512GB, Mirrored and Striped). I have a few TV’s with either roku’s, chromecast’s or an nvidia shield for media playback.

My problem is that my server is extremely loud. I can pretty much hear it throughout my house and on hot days, well it’s even worse.

I’m thinking about getting a little NAS to replace my Dell server. I don’t plan on getting one powerful enough to do transcoding duties, just something that can do a RAID mirror and has enough bandwidth capability to send the file to my nvidia shield as my new plex server. I’d plug a drive into the shield and just use that, but I fear that not having a backup will eventually cause my entire collection to disappear one day. I also think that copying new movies (from primarily windows based computers on the network) would be sort of a pain.

Has anyone used a NAS device in conjunction with a shield as their Plex server? I should think that I’d need only about 2 concurrent transcodes at a time at the max, and I hear it can probably do 3, but I don’t know if having the actual library stored on a NAS and the shield accessing files via the network would be a problem.

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts!

2

There are several threads about the Shield not liking PMS very well. It appears that any drive connected via USB or network becomes a read only drive as soon as the Shield makes it’s connection. That means that you can’t put new content to it, delete content, etc.

Do a search on it, and you’ll see quite a number of issues along this line. (can’t add in any channels, can’t access the Plex Media Server directories, and the list goes on.)

The shield might make a fair player, though. So that means you need to decide if that’s the route you want to go or not. Of course, to keep the fan noises down, you’re going to need to replace the jet engines in that Dell, or replace the Dell completely… If you go the later route and want a decent NAS to handle your media, it’s going to cost you a little bit of coin, though.

The Asustor AS-6x0x series might fit, but they are going to be a fair amount higher priced than what you want to spend. And they won’t handle 1080p transcoding in RT. That might be an issue unless your media is goldilocksed. (just right) I have the Asustor AS-7004T, which is an absolute TANK of a NAS. It can hold its own against some much bigger and faster systems. (But I maintain my media in goldilocks state.) It might be a different story if/when hardware transcoding ever makes an appearance on any device other than the Shield…

HTH

3

Thanks Mike for your detailed explanation. I didn’t realize that PMS on the shield would make a network share read-only. Doesn’t seem right, but I’ll take your word for it!

Most of my media is Handbraked into MKV files, from an original MKV from makemkv. I don’t know if that will require transcoding from the shield or not.

I think what I’ll do is copy a couple movies to a share on one of my crappier desktop computers and configure the shield to use that as its repository. Then I can see how well it works (if at all) and see if it makes it read-only.

I’ll play around with some things, and if I can’t get anything to work the way I want to, I might have to go with the expensive NAS like you have.

4

Well, I did a little research tonight and here’s what I’ve found:

I have a windows domain, not a workgroup so YMMV but I created a service account for the shield to use, called it “media” and set a password for it.

From there, I then created a folder on my security camera / webserver computer (I know, I know, bad combo) and shared it out. Granted permission for the media user and copied a couple movies over to it. This computer is another dell, happens to be a optiplex 780 with a core 2 dua E8400 processor, but is usually quite busy recording from one of 3 IP network cameras around my house or serving up my neighbor’s website for his home based business. It’s not very fast by any stretch of the imagination.

Then, I went down to the Shield and mounted the shared drive under Settings > Device > Storage & Reset > Mount network storage. It found my test computer and I entered the media username and password. From there, I started the plex app on the shield and turned on the PMS.

Once that was running, I went to the web interface of the plex server on the shield and added a movie library, then selected the mounted storage.

It created an “android” folder in the share location and pulled the movies that I had placed in that folder and downloaded metadata for them. It allowed me to play, fast forward and enable subtitles. I then tried to copy one of my larger, higher definition movies to the folder and it worked just fine. After refreshing the library, the metadata downloaded and played beautifully.

This should mean that a cheap NAS with enough storage and bandwidth for my collection should do just fine. The bigger part to worry about is moving the database over without having to redo everything but I don’t know if it will work out as good as moving from PC to PC, since it’s android and I don’t think I have access to the root folders. I might though, that’s a test for another day.

I guess the only thing I’ll miss is plexpy and keeping tabs on what and how much / often my friends are streaming, but that’s not a huge deal. A quiet house with a slightly less expensive electric bill will make up for it!

Sorry for the long-winded post, but hope this helps someone out in the future. I’m off to go NAS shopping :slight_smile:

TL:DR version, it works pretty darned well!

5

@MikeG6.5 said:
There are several threads about the Shield not liking PMS very well. It appears that any drive connected via USB or network becomes a read only drive as soon as the Shield makes it’s connection. That means that you can’t put new content to it, delete content, etc.
That is not quite true. The Shield itself cannot write to anything other than the internal storage. If you connect a USB drive and mount it as internal storage, then you can write to it. Keep in mind that converting a drive to internal storage will wipe that drive. If you leave it as external storage, then it will be read only. The Shield can read from a network drive, but not write, so you cannot delete the content, which is correct. However, since it is a network drive, you can still access it from another computer and can still write to it using that computer.

6

Yes MovieFan, that’s what I have found so far. I didn’t want to plug an external drive directly to the shield because I knew it would adopt the drive and make it slightly more difficult to copy files to it over the network. I know I could have used something like ES File Explorer but I’d much rather just transcode a movie on my desktop and move it to my library from there using SMB share.

Anyway, thanks for everyone’s input, I think I have it all figured out so far. My new NAS should be arriving tomorrow and the drives for it will be here a few days later. Can’t wait! :slight_smile: