As nigelpb comment - l really don’t think Plex cloud is close to being a reliable alternative.
And certainly not for a big library.
With Synology NAS I know you just add the new drive and their proprietary raid does it all.
Same when increasing the size of a single drive - take out the old one and slip in same or bigger and the NAS just fixes it .
I am pretty sure this is the process with most NAS but can only speak for Synology.
You seem keen on the WD Cloud Pro - the price is not much different from the Synology or Qnap - which are probably the most popular 2 NAS brands for Plex.
What models are you talking about of Synology and Qnap? I am pretty keen on the WD My Cloud Pro currently, simply because of the reviews and articles I have found about it and how well it runs Plex. It can transcode 4 simultaneous streams at 1080p and has quite a bit of power behind it. I have read the users manual and several forums about the My Cloud Pro and it seems like you can switch out your drives easily and not lose your data by adding or changing a drive. It seems to fit what I want, and at a reasonable price. I also like the other apps and capabilities of it. I am mostly leaning towards this device currently but Im not sold yet. Thats why I wanted to hear from everyone to get their thoughts and opinions on the matter. I will certainly look more into Synology and Qnap, but it would help if you gave me some model numbers that would closely match the My Cloud Pro, in both price and Plex capability.
As nigelpb comment - l really don’t think Plex cloud is close to being a reliable alternative.
And certainly not for a big library.
Have you actually used Plex Cloud? I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks & it’s been very fast & reliable. It’s also amazing for transcoding. I uploaded a 60Mbps 66GB 4K UHD Blu-ray rip as a test & it happily plays on all the clients that I have tried even over 3G/4G for my iPhone. I am really impressed with Plex Cloud for my purposes. The OP is contemplating a 4TB NAS so that is not a large library. Of course if the Internet connection is too slow that is another matter but before spending money on a NAS it behoves the OP to take a look at what Plex Cloud can offer.
Alternatively as a low cost alternative I can recommend the NAS that I use which is a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud which is the cheapest & lowest powered NAS you can buy. It costs little more than a 4TB USB 3.0 external disk. If you use a decent client like a Roku 3 or Ultra or iPhone 6 then there is no need for transcoding & it will stream at least five simultaneous 1080p videos to various clients.
Don’t forget that all those who have invested heavily in hardware have an interest in recommending purchasing heavy duty hardware to validate their own purchases
Personally I love the idea of Plex Cloud and I hope that that is the future for my library, but with my current internet provider it would take years to upload everything that I have. When the time comes when Plex once again supports Amazon Drive I will consider that as an option, but until then I don’t find it very reasonable.
The other issue I have with the cloud is privacy. Even though my library is all of my legal movies and tv shows I don’t want to be put under investigation of the legality of my library by the cloud service provider. And privacy for cloud services is not very good. With NAS its my own cloud and I am under control of it.
I haven’t used Plex cloud since the beta days, and in that time I was very unimpressed.
@win22jim In what respects RAID in Synology NAS you can simulate what happens, in terms of usable space, when disks of different sizes are inserted (and/or removed) in the Synology Hybrid Raid. In order to not waste space the “rule” is to have at least 2x HDD of the highest size
For the moment Syno NAS only supports HW transcoding in docker mode (unlike the WD model that you are considering, where HW transcoding is supported natively).
For the moment Syno NAS only supports HW transcoding in docker mode (unlike the WD model that you are considering, where HW transcoding is supported natively).
To provide background information if I may? The reason you have HW transcoding in Docker is because the Docker image is a 64 bit PMS. The current distribution of PMS for Synology is 32 bits. HW transcoding is not supported by the processor for 32 bit processes.
Most off-the-shelf solutions for NASes can expand the raid and increase the size as your needs increase. I know first hand Asustor can do this, at least. (Pretty sure, based on other’s comments on QNAP and Synology devices, they can do this, too. No clue about WD or NetGear devices, though.)
Asustor you can even take the drives from a smaller model and put them into a larger one and have the data move seamlessly. (Have done this a couple of times, too.) This is where brand loyalty has it’s perks. Going to a different manufacturer and moving drives with live data on them generally results in clean drives.
The problem is, to increase the size of a Raid 5, you need to sequentially replace each of the drives in the array, one at a time, and then you can increase it after all the drives are swapped out. That means going from a 4 drive array of 4TB to a 4 drive array of 8TB you are looking at 3-4 days before you can increase the size. And that’s without adding any more data to the array.
I did this once, going from 4x3TB to 4x6TB and it took right at 4 days. But after that 4 days I had almost 19TB usable. (starting at just a touch over 9TB with the first set of drives.)
Of course the amount of data involved can increase the time (or reduce it.) If you have a lot of media files, plan on it taking longer than a weekend… If the drives are empty (relatively) then the question must be asked “Why are you upgrading the storage?”
If you really want a good off-the-shelf solution I can’t sing the praises of the Asustor AS-7004T enough. It serves up all of my media flawlessly!
EDIT: The AS-7004T does support the HW transcoding Beta version, and I really can’t wait for this to be merged back to the live versions. There are so many thing I’m missing out on since it’s now at least 3 updates old.
As nigelpb comment - l really don’t think Plex cloud is close to being a reliable alternative.
And certainly not for a big library.
Have you actually used Plex Cloud? I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks & it’s been very fast & reliable. It’s also amazing for transcoding. I uploaded a 60Mbps 66GB 4K UHD Blu-ray rip as a test & it happily plays on all the clients that I have tried even over 3G/4G for my iPhone. I am really impressed with Plex Cloud for my purposes. The OP is contemplating a 4TB NAS so that is not a large library. Of course if the Internet connection is too slow that is another matter but before spending money on a NAS it behoves the OP to take a look at what Plex Cloud can offer.
Alternatively as a low cost alternative I can recommend the NAS that I use which is a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud which is the cheapest & lowest powered NAS you can buy. It costs little more than a 4TB USB 3.0 external disk. If you use a decent client like a Roku 3 or Ultra or iPhone 6 then there is no need for transcoding & it will stream at least five simultaneous 1080p videos to various clients.
Don’t forget that all those who have invested heavily in hardware have an interest in recommending purchasing heavy duty hardware to validate their own purchases
Of course I have - Am I not allowed to comment on my experience - It is unreliable (for me) and I have a big library (but don’t have much “up there” )
I have 100mb up and down !
I’m not anti-NAS as I have a couple of them but I don’t use them for Plex storage. Mine are low end/low power used for storage of things other than Plex main storage. I use mine for SnapRAID parity backup of my Plex system, for backup of my notebooks, and typical business/home docs, etc
But getting back to what I was saying it’s important to know how the NAS will handle mixed drives or expansions of storage.
Will you ever want to upgrade to bigger drives? IE 4TB drives this year and 8TB next year?
Start with only half the bays used this year and filling them up next year?
These are REAL questions and things that happen all the time to people.
Ideally if you think you will want a lot of storage having an 8 bay cabinet is ideal compared to 4. It’s nice if you only need to populate 2 to 4 bays to start. But then can you add 1 additional drive or do you have to add in sets? Are the drives striped and you have to DUMP/RELOAD data or can it restripe the drives. Better yet can you use the NAS without striping and add one drive at a time?
Can you start out with 4TB drives this year and 6TB drives next year followed by 8TB drives the next year and have mixed size drives in use at the same time? Or do you have to pull/replace smaller drives and replace them with bigger drives which costs a LOT MORE in the long run.
These are all valid questions that should be asked and understood UP FRONT before purchase. None of this is a killer or a NO GO, but knowing the answers help you to plan accordingly.
Most of what I’ve commented on is strictly storage based. There is also the CPU speed/type that has to be taken into consideration if you PLAN on running Plex on the NAS. At that point it’s really a SERVER and not a NAS per say so why not consider using a real computer to start with? Again a valid question that should be asked up front and planned for.
Why spend $$$ on a powerfull CPU for transcoding and need to replace it when it’s no longer powerfull for transcoding ?
Why spend money on anything ever when you’ll just need to replace it someday? Your argument is rather specious.
I am now on year 3 of a combo NAS/PMS I built that was about only $700 sans drives, and I’m nowhere near needing more CPU yet. It’s called planning for the future, instead of cheaping out in the beginning. “Proper planning” if you will. Just because the majority of people can’t think financially past next week or wrap their head about what TCO is doesn’t mean the concept of investing in your own hardware is flawed.
Plex was designed for playing your media served off your hardware. While gimmicky offerings like Plex Cloud try to shoehorn the product into a perpetual subscription model (because turning everything into a “service” against users’ best interest is the latest fad), this doesn’t change the original benefits of the original vision. Running the show yourself keeps you in control, without concerns about privacy or losing access to your media because of the finicky whims of the various third-party players involved that are siphoning cash out of your bank account monthly. Already Amazon pulled a Darth Vader (“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”) A cloud provider might change their TOS, decide your content isn’t allowed anymore, mine your media for marketing or opportunities to report you to the MPAA, go belly-up entirely, or gradually wratchet up the subscription cost to determine your pain threshold (now that they’ve already got you committed and entrenched into using their service with your Plex infrastructure), etc. The majority of us that use Plex as intended are free from all of that nonsense… because that was the original point.
@sremick said:
Plex was designed for playing your media served off your hardware.
Things change. Xbox Media Player that Plex was developed from was designed to run only on the Xbox. Plex was originally the Mac port of XBMC (the successor to XBMP) thus only designed to run on Macs.
The home user couldn’t rent remote storage & severs but now they can so it makes perfect sense for Plex to utilise the Cloud now that it’s available.
The home user couldn’t rent remote storage & severs but now they can so it makes perfect sense for Plex to utilise the Cloud now that it’s available.
That addresses none of the issues and concerns I outline in my post. My points stand.
I don’t have a large investment in hardware so I don’t have to try & justify that investment by dissing Plex Cloud. Personally I think that Plex Cloud is amazing & incredibly cheap. It costs me just $10/month for Google drive. I have backups of all the media on disk at home so even in the vanishingly unlikely case that Google were to go bust I would just go back to serving up my media off a NAS locally again. Frankly the idea of Google mining my media for marketing opportunities (How? What opportunities?) or reporting me to the MPAA (big deal I don’t live in the USA) is just ludicrous paranoia.
Perhaps I lack imagination but how would Google mine Blu-ray rips for marketing opportunities? I pay £6.99/month for Google Mail as part of G Suite & I don’t use Google Photos.
It is paranoia to think that Google will single me out for referral to the MPAA because of what I have stored on my Google Drive. The worst that could possibly happen is that Google decide they don’t want to host my content any more in which case I will revert to hosting it locally.
I would be paying my G Suite subscription of £6.99/month even if I wasn’t using Plex Cloud & I already have a Plex Pass. Using Plex Cloud literally costs me nothing unlike the hardware described in detail in your .sig. I am very happy that I don’t need to invest in hardware beyond backup disks & may even reconsider that as I already have unlimited Amazon Cloud storage for £55/year & just need a low cost VPS to keep a backup of my Plex library there.
