this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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9
NAS/Media Server Build Recommendations (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi everyone. I’m on the verge of building a new NAS/Media server, and wanted to check here to see if any of you could provide some recommendations based on my goals (below) or your current builds. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 4 running some basic services (Portainer, Home Assistant, Plex, sonarr/radarr/prowlarr, sabnzbd, etc.), but would like to expand my options and capabilities as my interests in the hobby grow.

My goals:

  • Ability to have 4+ 1080p streams on Plex. Right now my Pi works surprisingly well at home with one 1080 stream, but basically shits its pants doing much more. Would like to give my parents and a friend or two access.

  • Document storage/backup. Interested in Nextcloud, but it seems people have mixed experiences here.

  • Photo storage/backup.

  • Hosting the services mentioned above, plus some extra headroom for others. I’ll probably move back to Home Assistant OS on my Pi, unless you think I should utilize it for something else.

  • OS - unRaid. Not opposed to others, but this does seem to be a great option with a lot of how-guides and videos available.

  • Storage/Drives - I honestly don’t know how much I want or need. As it stands, my partner and I probably have less than 1TB of files and photos between the two of us (being very generous with that figure). Would like to expand the media server capabilities as mentioned above.

  • Budget - $1000 max including drives.

While the details above are what I would like to achieve with this, you can also consider me an empty canvas. Open to all ideas and suggestions. Let me know if there are other details I can provide that would be helpful. Lastly, thank you all for creating such a great community here.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

As far as motherboards go, you would probably be fine with any consumer desktop brand but you should probably look for something with dual NIC. If you want something a bit more robust AsRock Rack has some really great options. I've been using the X470D4U for about 4 years now without any issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
PSU Power Supply Unit
Plex Brand of media server package
PoE Power over Ethernet
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
VPN Virtual Private Network
nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #385 for this sub, first seen 29th Dec 2023, 21:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

To play off what others are saying i think a mini pc and a stand alone nas may be the better route for you. It may seem counter intuitive to break it out into two devices but doing so will allow room for growth. If you buy a creeper bare bones mini pc and put more of your budget towards a nas and storage you could expand the mini pc without messing with your nas. You could keep the pi in the mix for a backup if your main pc is down or offload some services to it to balance performance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just want to second this - I use an Intel nuc10i7 that has quicksync for Plex/jellyfin, can transcode at least 8 streams simultaneously without breaking a sweat, probably more if you don't have 4K, and a separate synology nas that mainly handles storage. I run docker containers on both and the nuc has my media mounted using a network share via a dedicated direct gigabit Ethernet connecting the two so I can keep all the filesystem access traffic off of my switch /LAN.

This strategy was to be able to pick the best nas based on my redundancy needs (raidz2 / btrfs with double redundancy for my irreplaceable personal family memories) while being able to get a cost effective low power quicksync device for transcoding my media collection, which is the strategy I chose over pre-transcoding or keeping multiple qualities in order to save HDD space and be flexible to the low bandwidth requirements of whoever I share with who has a slow connection.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What synology model did you go with? Do you host any other services with that type of setup?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I went with the DS1621xs+, the main driving factors being:

  • that I already had a 6 drive raidz2 array in truenas and wanted to keep the same configuration
  • I also wanted to have ECC, which while maybe not necessary, the most valuable thing I store is family photos which I want to do everything within my budget to protect.

If I remember correctly only the 1621xs+ met those requirements, though if I was willing to go without ECC (which requires going with xeon) then the DS620slim would have given me 6 bays and integrated graphics which includes quicksync and would have allowed me to do power efficient transcoding and thus running Plex/jf right on the nas. So there's tradeoffs, but I tend to lean towards overkill.

If you know what level of redundancy you want and how many drives you want to be running considering how much the drives will cost, whether you want an extra level of redundancy while rebuilds are happening after 1 failure, how much space is sacrificed to parity, then that's a good way to narrow down off the shelf nases if you go that way. Newegg's NAS builder comes in handy if you just select "All" capacities and then use the nas filters by number of drive bays, then you can compare whats left.

And since the 1621xs+ has a pretty powerful xeon, I run most things on the nas itself. Synology supports docker and docker compose out of the box (once the container app is installed), so I just ssh into the box and keep my compose folders somewhere in the btrfs volume. Docker nicely allows anything to be run without worrying about dependencies being available on the host OS, the only gotcha is kernel stuff since docker containers share the host kernel - for example wire guard which relies on kernel support I could only get to work using a user space wire guard docker container (using boringtun) and after the VPN/tail scale app is installed (presumably because that adds tap/tun interfaces that's needed for vpn containers to work.

Only jellyfin/Plex is on my NUC. On the nas I run:

  • Adguard

  • Sonarr/radarr/lidarr/prowlarr/transmission/overseerr

  • Castblock

  • Grocy

  • Nextcloud

  • A few nginx instances for websites

  • Uptime-kuma

  • Vaultwarden

  • Traefik and wire guard which connects to a vps as a reverse proxy for anything that needs to be accessible from the public internet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

For your CPU I recommend Ryzen 5700G. Powerful enough for everything you want to do, the TDP is only 65 watts so it's not going to destroy your power bill, has a decent integrated GPU, and costs only about $200. Another positive is that it uses DDR 4 so you can load up on that for pretty cheap too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For 1k you can build a beast.

Just throwing out an option if you aren't aware, gohardrives on ebay and on their site sell used Hdds. 10Tb for $80. The catch is they've been used in data centers for 5 years. The company will guarantee the drives for an addition 5 years and it could save you a lot of money depending on how much you want to risk it. I went with 3, one being a parity drive in case other goes bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I currently have 6x10TB of these drives running in a gluster array. I've had to return 2 so far, with a 3rd waiting to send in for warranty also (click of death for all three). That's a higher failure rate than I'd like, but the process has been painless outside of the inconvenience of sending it in. All my media is replaceable, but I have redundancy and haven't lost data (yet).

Supporting hardware costs and power costs depending, you may find larger drive sizes to be a better investment in the long term. Namely, if you plan on seeing the drives through to their 5 year warranty, 18TB drives are pretty good value.

For my hardware and power costs, this is the breakdown for cumulative $/TB (y axis) over years of service (x axis):

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You may want to consider a mini PC. That was my upgrade after torturing my raspberry pi for many years. I landed here after agonizing over building the perfect NAS media server. Still very low on power consumption, but the compute power per dollar is great these days. All this in only a slightly larger form factor over the pi. I brought over the drives from the pi setup and was up and running for a very low cost. The workload transferred from the pi (plex, NAS, backups, many microservices/containers) leaves my system extremely bored where the pi would be begging for mercy.

I don’t do a lot of transcoding, so I’m no expert here, but looking at the documentation I believe you would want a passmark score of 2000 per each 1080p transcode, so 8000+ for your 4+ streams, not including overhead for other processes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the great info! What mini PC did you end up going with? I’ve heard Beelink and a few others thrown around here and there, and most seem to be impressed with what they can do. Do you mind elaborating some on how you handle your drives with this type of setup? Do you just have some sort of NAS connected directly to the pc?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

No worries. I got a beelink S12, non-pro model with 8G RAM and 256G SSD. It was on sale for about $150 USD. Fit my use case, but maybe not yours, although you might be surprised. Perhaps those extra plex share users won’t be concurrently transcoding?

The drives are all USB, the portable type that requires no power source. Like you, I don’t need much. I have ~12T across 3, with a small hub that could provide more ports in a pinch. This model I believe also provides a SATA slot for a 2.5” drive, but I haven’t used it. All of these drives were previously connected to a rpi 3B+, haha!

The drive shares are done via samba and also syncthing. I have no need for a unified share via mergerfs, but I did take a look at this site for some ideas. I’m the type that rolls all their own services rather than using an NAS based distro. Everything is in an ansible playbook that pushes out my configs and containers.

Edit: I should make it clear the NAS is for other systems to access the drives. Drives are directly connected via USB. All my services are contained in this single host (media/backup/microservices/etc). My Pi’s are now clustered for a k3s lab for non critical exploration.

I’m a bit of a minimalist who designs for my current use with a little room to grow. I don’t find much value in “future proofing” as I’ve never had much success in accomplishing that.