NAS device, or cheap efficient pc?

[trolouce]

Been wanting to set up a NAS for a while now but the NAS devices (min 4 drives) are around 600+(cdn). right now i am useing my gaming machine to run a plex server and network share, but it requires me to keep my (mid-range?) Gaming rig running all the time.

 

So question is, is better to go for a 4 drive NAS device thats capable of plex (usually like 1.7ghz with 1g ram) or build a cheap, efficient pc to do the task (will be bigger, but more potential for extra tasks or drives)

In which case, what would you reccommend? Theres embedded boards with lower end chips for decent prices online, or should you go for some used, like 2 or 3 gens old chips? I realize ram capacity and speed could be important for a nas, but how much processing power do you need to run a solid plex server?

 

Current rig is ryzen 3600, 16GB 3600mhz ram, rtx 2060, asus tuf x570 mobo, supernova 850P PSU. Storage drives are two WD red 4TB drives, i plan to expand with 2- 6TB or 8TB drives next. Have had bad situations with raid and dont use it anymore.

[Senzelian]

Personally I went with a 5 year old Synology RS815.

It is definitely worth looking around on for example eBay for used QNAP and Synology NAS... NASes... NASs? What's the plural? lol

 

Keep in mind that you might run into a few compatibility issues when running an ARM based chip.

There are x86 and ARM based Synology devices and the ARM stuff can't run Docker for example.

 

Building it yourself is probably cheaper, but also comes with less support and more stuff can go wrong.

[Thirdgen89GTA]

With the appliance type NAS you are limited to what the on-board ASIC can do.  Its ability to transcode is based in hardware, so is not flexible enough to deal with oddball formats.  But, at the same time, they are much more power efficient than a full on PC is. 

 

Personally, I like having the raw CPU power to do whatever I want. Even my old 4790k can deal with 4k (just 1 stream).  But its also a 9 year old CPU and a modern CPU could power through it no problem.  It'll do whatever I throw at it and its 1080p performance is more than adequate.  But, its not really power efficient.  With all of the disks in there, it idles around 130w, and consumes about 180-190w full load.  Most of that is actually taken up by the nearly 23 disks inside. Each disks idles around 7 watts (since I don't allow it to park the head or spin the disks down). About 15 of the disks are full 3.5" drives.  Almost 80% of the servers power usage is taken up by the disks themselves.

 

The UPS I have monitoring the server reports it consumes roughly 22kw/hours per week.  So figure about 100kw/hr per month. But that's a 86TB full on server that runs 24/7/365.

[Jarsky]

You might be interested in checking out the new Helios64 by Kobol https://blog.kobol.io/2020/01/02/helios64-annoucement/

It just started shipping last month. They do a 5 bay enclosure with a custom board based off the RK3399 (RockPro64) chip. It's USD $295 + shipping, so you could install a ARM distro such as DietPi to run it as a NAS along with a Plex Server etc...

[Thirdgen89GTA]

9 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

You might be interested in checking out the new Helios64 by Kobol https://blog.kobol.io/2020/01/02/helios64-annoucement/

It just started shipping last month. They do a 5 bay enclosure with a custom board based off the RK3399 (RockPro64) chip. It's USD $295 + shipping, so you could install a ARM distro such as DietPi to run it as a NAS along with a Plex Server etc...

That looks really nice.

[Salacious B Crum]

On 9/8/2020 at 10:21 PM, Thirdgen89GTA said:

That looks really nice.

Wow sure does!