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DIY NAS and Plex Server

ZlYtR
By ZlYtR
in Servers, NAS, and Home Lab
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Posted

Hey guys.

 

I'm new to this whole NAS/homeserver thing and want to build my first system. So I have a bunch of questions.

Now the goal here is to have a NAS and a Plex Server running on it with support for transcoding (4K Bluray-Rips). Maybe later on I would deploy a few docker-services like Bitwarden, NextCloud or whatever.

 

So far my research has led me to the following components:

Intel core i3 10100 4C/8T CPU

Scythe Mugen 5 Cooler (existing)

MSI H410M-A Pro Mainboard

Crucial Ballistix 2x8GB DDR4-3000C15 Kit

Nanoxia Deep Silence 4 Case (target was something with dust-filtration, not huge, support for at least 4 hdds and ideally soundproofing)

EVGA SuperNOVA G3 550W (existing. from a previous build)

8 TB Harddrive (taken from my existing WD MyBook external hdd. obviously might add more drives)

 

Which roughly puts me at 350€ (incl. VAT) given my already existing parts.

 

Now to my questions:

1. Is anything wrong with any of these parts / are there better recommondations?

2. Do you recommend FreeNAS/TrueNAS, Unraid or OpenMediaVault?

3. What type of SSD layout would be recommended? Just a small one as boot drive, or 2 drives one for boot and one for caching?

 

Thank you for all your help! 

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1. shoudl work fine. You will probalby want plex pass for gpu video encoding here.

 

2. Id go unraid for the easy expansion.

 

3. Unraid will boot from a usb stick. Probably won't need a ssd here at all, but can add them as a cache for vms/containers if you want.

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30 minutes ago, ZlYtR said:

Do you recommend FreeNAS/TrueNAS, Unraid or OpenMediaVault?

 

27 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id go unraid for the easy expansion.

Although I think Unraid is awesome, I personally use TrueNAS it works pretty amazingly for it being free. Although the downside (and why you may want to go with Unraid) is that TrueNAS is a FREEBSD based system and thus comes with the problems associated with that.

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32 minutes ago, ZlYtR said:

What type of SSD layout would be recommended? Just a small one as boot drive, or 2 drives one for boot and one for caching?

If you decide to go with TrueNAS you could just use a USB 3.0 or better flash drive to boot from and use your SSD for a Cach.

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7 minutes ago, ZlYtR said:

And what kind of problems would that be?

"In my opinion, the biggest arguments for going with Unraid over TrueNAS CORE for home use is the fact that you can add drives one at a time and the ability to mix-and-match drive sizes. As normal computer cases can only house a limited amount of hard drives you might at some point not be able to add another three or four drives needed for TrueNAS Core. If you are using OpenZFS increasing the storage capacity of your NAS always means buying multiple drives. For example, every RAID-Z2 group will need at least three drives."

 

"the Unraid community is open to everyone and beginner-friendly. That is not something that can be said of the TrueNAS community."

 

However "Unraid can’t compete with TrueNAS CORE in terms of read/write performance. If you are using any level of OpenZFS data will be stripped and written to multiple drives simultaneously. Because TrueNAS is more targeted towards businesses and not necessarily for home use restoring data is made as easy as possible using the snapshotting feature."

 

https://unraid-guides.com/2020/06/18/why-unraid-beats-truenas-core-freenas-for-personal-use/

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Also don't forget that in TrueNAS CORE

  • Fault tolerance greatly reduces capacity
  • No choice in file system

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39 minutes ago, ZlYtR said:

Also if I was to add an ssd-cache:

 

How big should the ssd be? In terms of storage I think for the foreseeable future I'd probably get a second 8TB hdd and then leave it at that for storage.

Personally I have never set up a SSD cach so maybe someone like @ShrimpBrime would know or someone who would know? I would like to eventually set up a SSD cach so I personally would also love to know.

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8 minutes ago, birdflyer said:

Personally I have never set up a SSD cach so maybe someone like @ShrimpBrime would know or someone who would know? I would like to eventually set up a SSD cach so I personally would also love to know.

You do it through Intel RST. 

Just enable acceleration and select the drive you want. Then select the cache size.

Pretty straight forward actually.

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35 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

You do it through Intel RST. 

Just enable acceleration and select the drive you want. Then select the cache size.

Pretty straight forward actually.

In linux there are much betteroptions, Don't use rst here.

 

33 minutes ago, ZlYtR said:

Question was more how big of a ssd I should choose.

Id probalby not have any cache ssd for a basic plex server, won't be needed, and movies really aren't that high of bitrate, so it won't matter with the speed increase.

 

 

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18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

In linux there are much betteroptions, Don't use rst here.

 

Id probalby not have any cache ssd for a basic plex server, won't be needed, and movies really aren't that high of bitrate, so it won't matter with the speed increase.

 

 

Ah, I didn't read the thread. On mobile, just replied to the notification.

 

Can you describe how to do this in a Linux environment please?

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1 minute ago, ShrimpBrime said:

Ah, I didn't read the thread. On mobile, just replied to the notification.

 

Can you describe how to do this in a Linux environment please?

If there using unraid, Id just use the cache drives in unraid.

 

Otherwise, there is bcache, lvm caching, and zfs that all do ssd caching.

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15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If there using unraid, Id just use the cache drives in unraid.

 

Otherwise, there is bcache, lvm caching, and zfs that all do ssd caching.

Right on thank you. zfs I've heard of. But I don't Linux much. Ubuntu on a thumb drive for windows diagnostics though XD.

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13 hours ago, birdflyer said:

However "Unraid can’t compete with TrueNAS CORE in terms of read/write performance. If you are using any level of OpenZFS data will be stripped and written to multiple drives simultaneously. Because TrueNAS is more targeted towards businesses and not necessarily for home use restoring data is made as easy as possible using the snapshotting feature."

also keep in mind this here only matters if you have 10G networking as the 1G basically everyone has will not even be close to max out even under unraid.

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So I'm thinking for that same reason I don't really need a caching SSD when I'm only on 1G Lan. And if I later upgrade to 2.5G or whatever adding a caching ssd in Unraid is super easy, right?

 

Though since Unraid boots from a USB stick and runs in RAM I wonder where the VMs/Dockers would run from. Should I have a ssd for that?

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You can do all of this pretty easily in OpenMediaVault...  TrueNas is nice, but has a steep learning curve, Unraid is OK, but not FREE... OpenMediaVault is a lightweight NAS implementation, with great hardware support.. plus you can run VM's in it.

 

If you arent going balls deep with lots of drives for redundancy, you can achieve great results with OMV running LVM (omv-lvm plug in needed). You can run with 1 disk and add additional disks to your LVM group pretty easily... tho spanning disks in groups comes with its own concerns..

 

imo, you wont need caching.. Im not sure your workload dictates it, nor available lan bandwidth.

 

booting from an SDcard/USB Stick is lame.. you can find a tiny ass SSD and not have to worry about the R/W durability for much longer.. 

 

Keep your OS/VM's on SSD's, and storage on the HDDs of course.

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