Some new to NAS assistance please

[jordan12]

I have an Asustor with 10 bay so all inclusive.

Had it 6 years and is ok. But I really need a NAS with more power. This only has a celeron 2.0 GHZ.

So I can buy an I5 Asustor 10 bay at $2300 bucks, or build my own.

So I know I need parts and a case to handle that many drives. My big question is how do I get 10 SATA connections for custom build and hopefully not have issues.

I use my current one for Plex mainly. But its streaming abilities and speed are slow.

Any help?

 

[MrGuvernment]

So need some decoding ability for plex..

You need HBA cards, or raid cads you can put into IT mode to pass through, or several SATA PCIe cards

 

[Randall Stephens]

I have an Asustor with 10 bay so all inclusive.

Had it 6 years and is ok. But I really need a NAS with more power. This only has a celeron 2.0 GHZ.

So I can buy an I5 Asustor 10 bay at $2300 bucks, or build my own.

So I know I need parts and a case to handle that many drives. My big question is how do I get 10 SATA connections for custom build and hopefully not have issues.

I use my current one for Plex mainly. But its streaming abilities and speed are slow.

Any help?

You can buy HBA cards with IT flashed to them already. IT mode allows the OS to see the drives directly and not have to deal with whatever RAID implementation the HBA has. With 10 bays you’ll have a more limited number of case options. If you want hot swap capability you may need to hit up eBay for cases with exposed 5.25 slots. CM stackers are popular as they can handle 3 5.25 hot swap bays... some things to think about are that new hdds have the lubrication sweep every 5 seconds or so, and it drives some people crazy, so you can get isolating mounts that take care of most of that noise. If you want more info about those I can share my experience.

 

[Spartacus09]

Are you doing direct play streaming locally or transcoding the videos to a different resolution?
A decent CPU can do about 1 transcode stream for every 2k passmark (as a rough estimate) but pretty much infinite that the storage speed/network connection will allow for direct play.

Per the above responses the first question is, do you care about noise?
There are some solid 2U 12 bay hot swap supermicro enclosures but they're often loud AF since they're enterprise servers.
If you want quieter and more normalized in a tower then the Fractal Design 7 XL has been pretty popular for alot of drives.

Additionally I have used a Corsair 750D in the past too that can hold 9 drives natively, but modified 18-23 drives or more.

 

[LukeTbk]

So I know I need parts and a case to handle that many drives. My big question is how do I get 10 SATA connections for custom build and hopefully not have issues.

For me (On Debian Linux):
A simple this:
https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-Con...SI-PEX40064+4+Port+SATA&qid=1611684411&sr=8-3

On a standard motherboard that had 6 SATA ports achieved that at a low price.

I use my current one for Plex mainly. But its streaming abilities and speed are slow.

One thing to maybe consider (maybe you already did or that it make no sense for the userbase of your server) is to consider changing the client machine to make sure the server never encode/transcode itself and is just a passive NAS, if possible, maybe your old celeron could do the trick and in a very nice package/power usage/10 gb interface ?, hot swap bay ?

If it does not make sense and a shift is wanted, there is nice guide how to make your own NAS/Plex server online:
https://www.serverbuilds.net/the-original-nas-killer-v10
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-5-0/3072

Maybe you have old hardware lying around that could do it.