NAS for plex, photos, backups

[xbkuba]

Hello everyone,

 

I am looking for a NAS that would play 4K movies on 2 tvs, store some photos and make some backups. I chose synology DS918+ will it be good enough for my usage? Namely the 4K movies on two tvs at once. Also which HDD should I buy? Some 4TB but not sure which one. Last question: should I buy ssd for cache?

 

thanks everyone for help.

[wojtepanik]

I just got qnap 251a it is really nice and advanced, definitly can recommend that, with bigger models you can get 2xhdd plus ssd cache, which is nice for frequent accesses, WD red are reliable and not that expensive, don't go seagate, 

[NelizMastr]

 

Just now, wojtepanik said:

WD red are reliable and not that expensive, don't go seagate, 

My Ironwolfs and backblaze disagree   

 

 

14 minutes ago, xbkuba said:

Hello everyone,

 

I am looking for a NAS that would play 4K movies on 2 tvs, store some photos and make some backups. I chose synology DS918+ will it be good enough for my usage? Namely the 4K movies on two tvs at once. Also which HDD should I buy? Some 4TB but not sure which one. Last question: should I buy ssd for cache?

 

thanks everyone for help.

The DS918+ is a great NAS for media server usage, the other tasks aren't intensive in the least. It should handle 2 transcodes of 4K HEVC content no problem. Just streaming natively is even easier on the box. 

 

Drive wise, there aren't many NAS drives with actual red flags (pun intended). Just stay away from the horrible WD Red 3TB and any regular consumer drives.

 

Seagate Ironwolf and WD Red are the standard in NAS drives. The 4 and 8 TB drives of each are decently reliable for 24/7 use.

[manikyath]

22 minutes ago, wojtepanik said:

don't go seagate, 

honestly, the only seagate drives that i've seen be notably more "shit" are the 3TB barracuda's.

[NelizMastr]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

honestly, the only seagate drives that i've seen be notably more "shit" are the 3TB barracuda's.

3TB drives are kinda shite in general it seems. WD's Red 3TB is a pretty bad drive. High DOA rate and not that reliable. Also, I wouldn't run Barracudas in a NAS anyway. They're not designed for that, especially in a 4 bay NAS it's asking for trouble.

[wojtepanik]

I just installed personally 2x2tb wd red, at my work we mount on avarage 80 drives a month to cctv servers we use only wd red/gold and they never come back, only toshiba and seagates from prebuilds that we resell come back on warranty .

[NelizMastr]

31 minutes ago, wojtepanik said:

I just installed personally 2x2tb wd red, at my work we mount on avarage 80 drives a month to cctv servers we use only wd red/gold and they never come back, only toshiba and seagates from prebuilds that we resell come back on warranty .

Those prebuilts use consumer drives, so that's normal. In fact, most OEMs get bottom of the barrel drives due to cost savings. 

[xbkuba]

I am still looking around the net and found Dell PowerEdge T30 for almost the same price with Xeon E3-1225 v5 and 8Gb DDR4. Would that be a better solution? Maybe with some vmWare or just throw a Windows 2016 server and be done with it, maybe some SSD instead of the 1TB harddrive. The NAS seems "easier" and but on the other hand the DELL tower will be more flexible and I could use it for more stuff in the future.

 

What are your thoughts?

[NelizMastr]

54 minutes ago, xbkuba said:

I am still looking around the net and found Dell PowerEdge T30 for almost the same price with Xeon E3-1225 v5 and 8Gb DDR4. Would that be a better solution? Maybe with some vmWare or just throw a Windows 2016 server and be done with it, maybe some SSD instead of the 1TB harddrive. The NAS seems "easier" and but on the other hand the DELL tower will be more flexible and I could use it for more stuff in the future.

 

What are your thoughts?

Pretty nice, yeah. The only downside is that it won't do Plex transcoding since that Xeon doesn't have an iGPU so no quicksync. Two 4K streams on what's basically an i5 4c/4c disguised as a Xeon is going to chug. You'll need to put in a GTX1050 for proper acceleration for Plex. You'll need Windows to do so. You can't pass through Nvidia consumer cards on VMware, though. It's unsupported and throws a ton of error 43s in your face.

 

I'd say get the NAS and build a small server for other things down the road. The i5 and i7 NUC models are great for this.

[xbkuba]

2 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Pretty nice, yeah. The only downside is that it won't do Plex transcoding since that Xeon doesn't have an iGPU so no quicksync. Two 4K streams on what's basically an i5 4c/4c disguised as a Xeon is going to chug. You'll need to put in a GTX1050 for proper acceleration for Plex. You'll need Windows to do so. You can't pass through Nvidia consumer cards on VMware, though. It's unsupported and throws a ton of error 43s in your face.

 

I'd say get the NAS and build a small server for other things down the road. The i5 and i7 NUC models are great for this.

Alright so just to get this straight...

NAS CPU: Intel Celeron J3455 

DELL CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5

 

so the NAS CPU is better for plex because it has better iGPU for transcoding. But do I need transcoding if I have good end device like LG OLED65C8 TV?

I have been told to get the Dell because it has more powerful CPU, but you are saying that is has worse iGPU so I should get the NAS right?

[NelizMastr]

13 hours ago, xbkuba said:

Alright so just to get this straight...

NAS CPU: Intel Celeron J3455 

DELL CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5

 

so the NAS CPU is better for plex because it has better iGPU for transcoding. But do I need transcoding if I have good end device like LG OLED65C8 TV?

I have been told to get the Dell because it has more powerful CPU, but you are saying that is has worse iGPU so I should get the NAS right?

You will need transcoding unless all media is in the exact same format using the same codec that also happens to be natively supported by Plex. Afaik, TVs are too dumb to decode the video you sent to them so the encode/decode process is always done server side. 

 

I also just caught a mistake on my end, most Xeon E3 chips have no iGPU. The 1225v5 actually does, so you're good there. The iGPU in that is actually a lot faster.

Forget what I said, the Dell would appear the better overall machine