Help deciding on a NAS solution

[Melhisedek]

Hi there folks,

I have a lot of photos and videos of my family that have been cluttering my PC for a while now. I also have around 300 movies, some old mp3, documents and even some games. We are talking perhaps 3-5 TB. All on my main PC. Now I would want to put everything on a NAS and make it available to everybody in the house, mostly photos as my wife is crazy about them.

 

So I checked my options and there are plenty. I love tinkering with stuff and would love to build my own NAS and set it up, but living is Sweden, it would be needlessly pricey to order stuff from ebay, pay shipping and taxes for it (hate swedish electronics tax), so perhaps ordering a finished built NAS is easier/cheaper. Like Qnap or Synology.

Than there is prebuilt old PC, 6-7 years old which I can hopefully get for 200-300 $

There is also possibility of a Raspberry Pi or Odroid HC2 which could be paired with a 6TB drive and call it a day. This is perhaps enough for me and that is what I hope you guys can help me with.

I would like my NAS to be:

1. Able to support 2-3 screens at the absolute most, 90% of time just one screen. (not two movies, but like one movie and other screen photos/docs) I already use Kodi on a Rpi connected to TV so just streaming to it is enough

2. Able to connect to it offsite

3. Can browse my pictures, watch videos on pretty much anything (phone, laptop, TV)

Do you recommend going with a prebuilt old PC (i3-i5) and couple of drives in some RAID (still reading about RAID), or just having a cheap Raspberry PI or Odroid with one disk and call it a day, or go with a finished NAS product?

 

This is not a backup, just convenience thing, but I would like to learn and not spend a ton of money.

Thank you for your time!

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, Melhisedek said:

• Able to support 2-3 screens at the absolute most, 90% of time just one screen. (not two movies, but like one movie and other screen photos/docs) I already use Kodi on a Rpi connected to TV so just streaming to it is enough

•  

So you want to use this nas as a desktop aswell? This normally isn't best practice for security. Id get a seprate desktop and nas.

 

7 minutes ago, Melhisedek said:

Able to connect to it offsite

try someting like nextcloud to access remotly, or scp/sshfs.

 

8 minutes ago, Melhisedek said:

Can browse my pictures, watch videos on pretty much anything (phone, laptop, TV)

Nextcloud is pretty nice here, or just have a fileshare, depends on how you want to view it.

 

8 minutes ago, Melhisedek said:

Do you recommend going with a prebuilt old PC (i3-i5) and couple of drives in some RAID

Well if you want multiple displays the old desktop is your best option. Id just get one or 2 8 or 10tb hdds. I don't see a reason to get any more drives, you can expand later if you want. You probably want a backup for this too

 

 

 

 

[Melhisedek]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

So you want to use this nas as a desktop aswell? This normally isn't best practice for security. Id get a seprate desktop and nas.

 

Please excuse me as English isn't my first language I was thinking more as in, this solution could stream to 2-3 screens. Like my PC, TV, laptop and such. If I were to have a case it would be tucked somewhere and not have monitor connected to it

[Olaf6541]

I think your best option is to get an old pc as cheap is possible, then see if it fits your needs.

I use apollo lake/gemini lake SoC's, you may want to look into these. They consume significant less power than old rigs and are the reason i sold my i7-870 and bought a D1800M instead (45w idle for 870 vs 15w for j1800). I'm using a j3355 board  now with freenas on one core and a pfsense vm with openvpn for remote access on the other core. 

As for storage, you can get dual sata port pcie cards on ebay for 10 bucks + free shipping to expand your storage. And streaming: if you just set up a SMB share and connect the nas using 1gb ethernet you'll have no problems serving multiple users.

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 hours ago, Melhisedek said:

Please excuse me as English isn't my first language I was thinking more as in, this solution could stream to 2-3 screens. Like my PC, TV, laptop and such. If I were to have a case it would be tucked somewhere and not have monitor connected to it

old that makes much more sense. How are you streaming? Do you need transcoding?

 

Most semi modern systems should do this fine.

[Melhisedek]

Well this is all just so new for me and I'm learning as I go

 

I have used my PC as a server I guess for my Rpi which had Kodi installed, I just shared a folder with movies and I guess Kodi did all the work, so I thought I could do the same with NAS? Just share those files on my network and Kodi can pick them up.

 

On the other hand... If I have Plex on my NAS, than I can install Plex on everything I own and do it that way (have learned this just couple of hours ago). All in all I'm looking forward to learning and seeing all the nice things I can use NAS or server for. I'm heavily leaning towards old PC and just putting a couple of discs in it and than going from there

[Lipe123]

If you have an old computer you can use freenas or something similar to quickly make it into a nas/media server.

 

If you don't have spare hardware look at something like a cheaper 4bay synology unit. They are usually very well priced and have a decent app store with lots of free apps for media server etc.

They have all the functions you need built in and are super easy to configure.

[Melhisedek]

Well I just bought an older PC:

 

HP Z420 Workstation

Intel Xeon 1620 V2 3.7GHz Quadcore

16GB DDR3 1866MHz ECC

500 GB HD

 

Well I'll be ordering a 8TB WD Red soon and that is that for now as I have blown my budget. So what do you guys recommend installing on it? I know freeNas is mentioned a lot, but I heard it is hard on resources? What about OMV? Would that be enough for my original needs of streaming stuff to multiple screens, and being remote accessible?

 

Also I plan on getting another 8TB drive around back friday or Xmas, should I go for RAID for redundancy (and which one) or just chuck it in and get double storage?

[Olaf6541]

59 minutes ago, Melhisedek said:

I heard it is hard on resources?

It's really not, you can easily run it on that system.

1 hour ago, Melhisedek said:

Also I plan on getting another 8TB drive around back friday or Xmas, should I go for RAID for redundancy (and which one) or just chuck it in and get double storage?

If your backup strategy is decent you can take the risk and go with no redudancy but i think everyone here will recommend to go with raid1 with 2 drives (or raid5 with 3 drives).

[Donut417]

On 7/29/2019 at 11:14 AM, Melhisedek said:

Well this is all just so new for me and I'm learning as I go

 

I have used my PC as a server I guess for my Rpi which had Kodi installed, I just shared a folder with movies and I guess Kodi did all the work, so I thought I could do the same with NAS? Just share those files on my network and Kodi can pick them up.

 

On the other hand... If I have Plex on my NAS, than I can install Plex on everything I own and do it that way (have learned this just couple of hours ago). All in all I'm looking forward to learning and seeing all the nice things I can use NAS or server for. I'm heavily leaning towards old PC and just putting a couple of discs in it and than going from there

The old PC might be worth doing. If you dont put your media in the right format and have to transcode, that NAS hardware might not be able to do it. Most NAS's dont have high performance hardware. This is why I run Plex on an old gaming laptop and just use my NAS for storage.