Current home NAS/Plex server options

TLDR: Is there anything better than a QNAP for NAS, light VM and possible plex duty? Need time machine support.

Have a 2 bay QNAP in my office that has been reliable except for a disk that failed recently. Had 2 6TB drives but I'm really only using about 2TB of space so I bought 2 4TB drives thinking I could resize the volume and migrate the array to the smaller drives. I was wrong. If I want to continue using the QNAP then I'm basically starting over with fresh array and factory settings.

I really have no complaints with the QNAP other than I ask too much of it. It uses a quad core atom CPU and has been upgraded to 8GB RAM. I run a torrent VM on it which works well enough but I'd really like a box too run more. I'd also like Plex transcoding capability. The Atom will handle a single stream, mostly, but both the wife and kids tend to jump on it at the same time so I've been using my office gaming rig for Plex which seems wasteful since I only really play games on it (55" couch setup) on the weekends and the GPU heats up my office. Been contemplating selling the whole right anyway since any actual productivity occurs with a laptop.

Ran an Xpenology box for quite a long time which I liked but I never trusted it's "hacked" nature. I need reliable Time Machine support and just don't have the desire to mess with a linux VM on a windows server for this.

Does FreeNAS still require ECC? (I know officially yes) Any other alternative setups to look at? A built rig has appeal since I can equip it for Plex duties and knock out a few problems at once but my days of constantly "messing" with what is supposed to be a server rig are behind me. I just want the damn thing to quietly work.

Running applications and needing file storage still screams Server to me (as opposed to NAS). Just run Windows 7 if you can and all will work well.

Valnar said:

Running applications and needing file storage still screams Server to me (as opposed to NAS). Just run Windows 7 if you can and all will work well.

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Need Time Machine support. A MacBook Pro pays my bills.

a small server in a desktop cage with proxmox on it and a freenas vm, and any other vm you want to spin up, is in your future. cheep and reliable. an old AMD AM3 system with a gygabyte MB will support unbuffered ECC, can be low power, will be 64bit with support for all the VM features, reliable, i could go on an on about it. (i have, check out my build log, and note that the hardware can be as low or high power as you want/need) and it is way simpler than the vmware all in one server most people build.

Not cheap, but this product looks nice. https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-677

If it were me, I would just build a custom box that supports ESXi and run VMs.

Vengance_01 said:

Not cheap, but this product looks nice. https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-677

If it were me, I would just build a custom box that supports ESXi and run VMs.

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i mean that is a pretty nice product, but for 1.7k MSRP? i don't know. OP says he likes building something and this is [H] soooo....for that amount of cash i'd go for a dual socket xeon box or something. i mean you can easily build a 32 thread xeon e5 system for way less than a grand. why wouldn't you?

Honestly... a few years ago I looked into the whole NAS for Plex server, and as an external storage system as a whole.

I ended up just building a mini-ITX system with a 3770k CPU. Gives me a bit more power to run other stuff (like a VM) and was able to toss two Hard Drives in there anyway.

I suppose newer NAS systems are more powerful now, but you should look into a "cheap" server. Hasn't failed me yet. Price isn't going to be a huge difference either

Edit: That ryzen 5 one is nice!!

Do the Ryzen CPU's support virtual machines as well as Intels do?

I'm going to recommend unRAID. I've been using it for about 6 years now. It's not an off-the-shelf solution like a QNAP, as it's wholly DIY; as in buy all the components you need and build a computer.

The upside to unRAID is that you can use a mix of any disk size you want, as long as it doesn't exceed the size of the parity drive. You can also run Plex and other applications as Docker apps. And if you have the horsepower (CPU), you can even run virtual machines!

Time Machine works great. My Mac is set up with TimeMachineEditor to back up nightly.

The nice thing about DIY is that you can replace individual components if they die or want to upgrade to something better. But with QNAP and other pre-built NAS, you have to replace the whole unit!

I know you have probably solved your issue, but wanted to add that freenas supports time machine, you just have to create an afp share address to your NFS share and force afp:// (time machine seems to need afp instead of smb) when connecting on your apple device (to get around the SMB auto-preference in osx).

Western Digital PR2100 or PR4100

Supports Plex hardware transcoding, I’ve seen 4 streams transcoding with no trouble on mine

TimeMachine works natively

Power draw is very minimal

Torrent client works fine

The HDD’s are louder than the fans in mine.

Only Con is that it’s not cheap. Mine paid for itself (including 4 new drives) in power savings in 13 months.

A cheapo PC running your preferred OS works just fine. NAS requires virtually NO processing power. A used Windows machine with shared drives is usually cheaper than a NAS box, and doesn't have the limitations of a NAS box. If power is of concern, underclock it, or run whatever speed stepping it has. When processing power is needed for Plex transcoding, allow the turbo clock to work.

ARM processor NAS boxes seriously cripple what all you can do with to device. Prebuilt x86 NAS boxes are a waste of $ when your 10+ year old PC components you have laying around will do the same thing.

Asustor is really trying to break into the NAS market. Might want to give them a look.

build server keep qnap for time nachine

gunbust3r said:

Asustor is really trying to break into the NAS market. Might want to give them a look.

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From the reviews on smallnetbuilder, they do have great performance but if you plan to use external USB 3 drives for more backup, they have the WORST performance, around 10Mb/s write speeds..

I use FreeNAS on a custom built box, running plex in a jail, and it supports timemachine backups out of the box. Don't have ECC.