NAS Box Advice.

OliverQueen

OliverQueen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2019
Messages
170
About a year ago my NAS box decided to throw a fit amnd not want to work any more. The 2 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA6Gbps 7200rpm 64MB cache drives are fine still as it was the actual NAS box itself that threw a fit. It was working one minute, then all of a sudden, it just kept losing one or both of the drives at random which in a RAID0 array isn't good! The information on the array was only digital copies of films I own for use across DLNA around the house.

At the moment I am running a PLEX server from the "new" build rig in my signature, but I am rapidly running out of space on the 2 x 3TB array in RAID0 with all the rerips of the BluRay's & UHD discs (movies & TV). The only reason I am putting them on the network is so I don't have to go downstairs & physically grab the disc because they are mainly watched when I am laid up in bed after a MS flare up.

The problem I have is that there are only 2 x 3.5" drive bays in the Corsair Crystal X570 case so I either have to remove the existing ones & replace with a pair of higher capacity drives again, or to get another NAS enclosure with 4 or more bays which would then take the transcoding on the fly away from the PC (not that it makes a massive difference to performance anyway even when streaming 2 x 4K films simultaneously using the Intel iGPU to do the majority of the work beings it is not being used for anything (no cables connected)).

The previous enclosure was a Zyxel NSA320 which for the price done a bloody good job of things especially when compared to the Buffalo drive that I originally bought that was slower than frozen shit down a greasy slide!

I was thinking of a Synology box but all I seem to hear is that it will last a long time or it will just give up without warning. Obviously if I haven't got a full back-up of the Array, everything is going to be lost & require redownloading & optimising again. Reliability is my main concern as I can handle a few seconds extra when starting to playback if it means that it is not going to drop out after the first 10 minutes.

Any suggestions that offer enterprise style reliability, have built in DLNA or can have Plex installed on to it & don't cost the same as a medium sized hatchback car! Same goes for the drives as well; need lots of capacity but also reliability & low operational volume.

Thanks in advance.

Save me Obi [H], you are my only hope.....
 
A Qnap 4bay nas was on sale yesterday at B&H but appears to be out of stock. Don't know much about it but here is the link if you want to sign up for when it come back in stock. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...be_2g_us_ts_453be_4_bay_professional_nas.html


I personally run freenas for my NAS at home. https://freenas.org/
A guy at work pointed me to this and I setup a pair of dell t30s that stores all my digital stuff. One I have setup up local and the other is at my parents where I have it mirrors offsite. Freenas does some really cool things for reliability using ZFS. It verifys the data integrity every 30 days and if it finds bad data it will copy the data from the other drive thus preventing bit rot. Also with it supporting raid if a drive goes bad it you can replace it and it will rebuild the data on the new drive. Freenas can run Plex on it but I've never tried. Power usage for the machine sits at around 40w with 2x 7200rpm drives in it.
https://deals.dell.com/en-us/work/compare/2foe
 
You could grab a Corsair 750D and get 12 drive bays without modification. Or use some snips and modify the case and fit 24 drives into it

0735052B-E393-4FC4-AF9A-8FC8BC6263A6_1534256712533.jpeg

(not my pic but I also have the same tower and drive setup)
 
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OliverQueen said:
About a year ago my NAS box decided to throw a fit amnd not want to work any more. The 2 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA6Gbps 7200rpm 64MB cache drives are fine still as it was the actual NAS box itself that threw a fit. It was working one minute, then all of a sudden, it just kept losing one or both of the drives at random which in a RAID0 array isn't good! The information on the array was only digital copies of films I own for use across DLNA around the house.

At the moment I am running a PLEX server from the "new" build rig in my signature, but I am rapidly running out of space on the 2 x 3TB array in RAID0 with all the rerips of the BluRay's & UHD discs (movies & TV). The only reason I am putting them on the network is so I don't have to go downstairs & physically grab the disc because they are mainly watched when I am laid up in bed after a MS flare up.


Save me Obi [H], you are my only hope.....
Click to expand...


I'd check out the QNAP TVS-951X.

I like mine so far.
 
My first suggestion is to build your own, an unRaid server is what i would go for, specially since you are into media files and you can grown the array as you go, still has a max 2 disk redundacy if you chose to, it has a wide amount of apps including plex, and you can chose your own CPU and GPU. One big plus of unraid is if for whatever reason you have more than the redundacy fail, the drives are readable individually and you only lose what what lost with the drives.

If you dont want to build your own, I really like the Synology Diskstation DS1019+ with the celeron with igpu should allow you your plex transcoding. With Synology hybrid raid you can add drives as you need increases.
 
As an FYI, the setup of the TVS-951X was easy. Since I'm new to using a NAS device I mapped my drive to the 1GB connection, not the 10GB connection. Once I pulled my head outta my bee-hind, I got everything working pretty well.

Shows the performance copying to/from my NAS using the built-in 10GB connection between my computer and the NAS.

https://hardforum.com/threads/solved-networking-issue-with-my-new-nas.1982174/#post-1044212117

It has a slightly faster CPU than the DS1019+ and the NAS has HDMI out so you can do everything the Synology does (hybrid raid too, IIRC) and you can use the NAS as a spare computer in its own right.
 
I said screw it and bought a QNAP TS-1677X and started it off with 4 of the WD 10TB white labels. I'll just add more and expand the array as I need space.

My current Plex box is i7-3570k running a 4x8TB WD Red array that I had migrated to from a 4x4TB Toshiba array which I had migrated to from a 4x2TB Hitachi array. It's a pita to migrate the array's with the LSI firmware because you can't just replace the drives and then resize the volume, you're stuck with the disk size what you started with, the only way to expand is too add more drives and they'll only be able to use the space of the original drives.

I messed around with a QNAP TS-453mini as a backup device for the past few years and it's done well, so might as well switch over completely.
 
EniGmA1987 said:
You could grab a Corsair 750D and get 12 drive bays without modification. Or use some snips and modify the case and fit 24 drives into it

View attachment 165472
(not my pic but I also have the same tower and drive setup)
Click to expand...

What MB are you using that supports that many drives? Or do you have a RAID card installed?
 
You can also look for workstation boards, if they have a server chipset they'll have support for additional SAS/SATA ports. The X79S-UP5 I use as my backup box has 14 ports total on board. Storage spaces support in Windows has gotten better in 2019 to the point where you don't need to use hardware RAID any longer if you don't want to.
 
Dodge245 said:
What MB are you using that supports that many drives? Or do you have a RAID card installed?
Click to expand...
sata or sas expanders are a good, cheap way to go, however I started out using some SuperMicro SAS/SATA HBA cards. They were $100 each and provide 8 ports per card. I had driver issues on Win 10 at one point and replaced the old model cards with a much newer LSI/Broadcom 24 port SAS/SATA HBA and it has been working very well for me. Speed of a host bus adapter card is better than using an expander. Expander will share bandwidth, HBA will not to a certain extent.
 
In personal exp. for home NAS. I recommend going with cheapest mini-itx or even embedded solutions, getting a raid pci-e card or sas card *or sata for cheap. Maybe even some old PC from ebay for $100... they'll do. No need for x79 or any special mobo...

something as such (maybe even 2)
https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-aoc-sas2lp-mv8-sata-sas/p/N82E16816101792?

then grabbing 2 of those
https://www.newegg.com/athena-power-bp-15287sac-other/p/N82E16816119044?

grab some memory which we'll use as ramdisk cache if you have plenty - else just use writeback / writethrough caching, and install zfs.


In the end this will be much cheaper than what would actual nas be. In terms of performance if you fill it with ssd's you'll still be going at almost full speed of pci-e ports.
 
If you're looking at FreeNAS don't cheap out on CPU/RAM. ZFS is wonderful but fairly resource intensive as filesystems go. Plex plays quite nicely on top of FreeNAS, but more advanced configurations may require some learning. It's a fun hobby. :)
 
thewarden00 said:
FS is wonderful but fairly resource intensive as filesystems go.
Click to expand...

It also works great on Linux- CentOS 7 with Plex and ZFS (and others...). Helpful if you want a more familiar or more versatile system, as virtualization is pretty rough on FreeNAS while KVM is native and fast.
 
I use a 3570k and a 16-drive array with FreeNAS. It's a decent solution if you are going to invest in gear that can transcode several streams.

That said, I'm very nervous about an upgrade I will be undertaking soon. It has quirks.
 
Probably the biggest decision OP needs to make is if he cares about bitrot, and to what level of risk he is willing to accept. If you do care, do you just care about detection, or also correction?

This answer will drive all other suggestions IMHO. Many of the consumer suggestions bring suggested may or may not be able to detect bitrot and correct it. This answer complicates everything from hardware choices (ECC memory for example) to file system (ie ZFS raidz level).

Also, I’m sure you are aware but raid /= backup.
 
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Erebus said:
Also, I’m sure you are aware but raid /= backup.
Click to expand...

For file serving on the large, I prefer just a bunch of disks and backups vs RAID. YMMV. I mean if you need five 9's of storage uptime, then RAID. Otherwise, I'd save the money.

I'm not against RAID, I'm just cheap.
 
cjcox said:
For file serving on the large, I prefer just a bunch of disks and backups vs RAID. YMMV. I mean if you need five 9's of storage uptime, then RAID. Otherwise, I'd save the money.

I'm not against RAID, I'm just cheap.
Click to expand...

That method would have very recently caused me a ton of grief. At the minimum RAID5 - the overhead isn't too costly for just one parity drive.
 
Thank you for the advice.

I was thinking of getting a used rack off of eBay & somehow mounting a load of 2.5" SSD's & 3.5" HDD's in an empty shell and running SATA cables externally to the drives via PCIe add-in SATA cards, then either RAID or JBOD them using Windows Disk Management RAID utility/JBOD if different capacities obviously keeping the HDD & SSD arrays separate. I know that it will cost more in overheads using software configurated arrays but as it is purely going to be used as a PLEX server, I am not too worried about the speed over all as long as the media plays without "buffering". I have a spare Windows 7 Home Premium license so OS wise I am covered (unless it has some sort of limitation on drive capacities etc that I don't know about). As for transcoding performance, there will be no more than a couple of devices streaming from the server at any one time & only 1080p maximum (if going to watch 4K media I will watch it off of the actual 4K BluRays as only got the one 4K tv in the house & the one that gets used the most by me for watching media in bed is a 32" 1080p panel). I reckon I could probably get away with a 2nd generation i7 (or another 4th Gen even as got a load of DDR3 ram sitting around the office still).

One option I am still up in the air over is the transcoding side. Do I stick with the CPU only or get an add-in card to handle that side of things? I have a GTX660 & a GT640 sat on the shelf in their boxes still, but don't want to put them in the system unless they would make a difference over the iGPU of whatever CPU I decide on.
 
OliverQueen said:
Thank you for the advice.

I was thinking of getting a used rack off of eBay & somehow mounting a load of 2.5" SSD's & 3.5" HDD's in an empty shell and running SATA cables externally to the drives via PCIe add-in SATA cards, then either RAID or JBOD them using Windows Disk Management RAID utility/JBOD if different capacities obviously keeping the HDD & SSD arrays separate. I know that it will cost more in overheads using software configurated arrays but as it is purely going to be used as a PLEX server, I am not too worried about the speed over all as long as the media plays without "buffering". I have a spare Windows 7 Home Premium license so OS wise I am covered (unless it has some sort of limitation on drive capacities etc that I don't know about). As for transcoding performance, there will be no more than a couple of devices streaming from the server at any one time & only 1080p maximum (if going to watch 4K media I will watch it off of the actual 4K BluRays as only got the one 4K tv in the house & the one that gets used the most by me for watching media in bed is a 32" 1080p panel). I reckon I could probably get away with a 2nd generation i7 (or another 4th Gen even as got a load of DDR3 ram sitting around the office still).

One option I am still up in the air over is the transcoding side. Do I stick with the CPU only or get an add-in card to handle that side of things? I have a GTX660 & a GT640 sat on the shelf in their boxes still, but don't want to put them in the system unless they would make a difference over the iGPU of whatever CPU I decide on.
Click to expand...

I use CPU for transcoding. It works well.

I have been using supermicro chassis - a 12-drive and 16-drive. I use 8-port (so, two breakout cables) HBA's to connect the drives.
 
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