Thinking about upgrading my NAS

[T1m4]

Hi All,

 

Looking for some advise on upgrading my NAS.

 

Currently running a core i3 3240T with a lonely 4gb of ram which has just about been doing the job. Currently got 8 hard drives of all different sizes running windows 10, used a day to day storage and back up and also a Plex media server. Now I'm feeling its time for an upgrade and don't really know where to start. I would also like to add some data redundancy into the mix as currently I have none. So I'm thinking os something like Unraid of FreeNAS but haven't used them and also am thinking I could do with adding hardware transcoding for Plex. 

 

Any help or advise on where to start looking would be great!

 

Thanks

 

[voyager_]

Unraid is a great place to start. It works well with different size disks and they can be added one at a time. A big thing to consider is that Unraid needs 1-2 parity drives and they have to be equal too or the largest drives. So if you use a 2Tb drive for parity the largest disk you can add will be 2tb, just something to keep in mind and plan for. Unraid does support plex hardware transcoding with a plex pass. I have mine using a quadro k2200 i picked up used off of ebay for about $100. Hardware transcoding does save alot of cpu resources when transcoding is needed. You will also want a cache drive of atleast 500gb, i just tossed in a good samsung ssd. This will speed up transfers to the system and and you can lock you plex, docker, etc directories to the cache drive. This greatly improves response from plex when having to load all of the thumbnails or previews. Ram transcoding is also useful, it wont have any realy impact on performance. It will just create a temp directory in memory to transcode to, this way your not writing so much to the SSD. It just saves a little wear and tear on the drive. Both Space Invader and byte my bits on youtube have great setup videos.

 

As far as cpu you dont need anything crazy unless you need a bunch of cores for vms and dockers. I have two machines running a ryzen 1600x and a 2600x both are running vms, minecraft servers, plex, and get along without any issues. With memory atleast 8-16Gb, if all you want is plex and storage you can get away with 8gb. 16-32 is more of the sweet spot if you want to run more services on it. depending on your budget you can get away with used hardware where it makes sense to. 

 

 

Besides plex and storage did you have any other uses in mind? Minecraft, Home assistant, Windows/linux Vm? 

[T1m4]

Thanks for the reply. Unraid is where I'm thinking due to the various size of drives. My biggest is current 8tb but likely to need to get another one for parity. Does it have to be Nvidia gpu's or can you use AMD? as I have a rx 580 not in use currently. If thats the case with the CPU would as G4400 be okay with 8-16gb of ram? I have got a 250gb ssd which I was planning on using as again its not currently in use. I have seen some of byte my bits videos will look up space invader!

 

Other uses if possible iPhone and android backups, maybe with time machine and also windows windows back up, but thats the main use cases.

[voyager_]

1 hour ago, T1m4 said:

Does it have to be Nvidia gpu's or can you use AMD? as I have a rx 580 not in use currently. If thats the case with the CPU would as G4400 be okay with 8-16gb of ram?

It does need to be a Nvidia GPU for hardware accelerated transcoding. I picked up my older Quadro K2200 for $100 on ebay and it has zero issues with multiple streams. The P420 and P620 is also popular for transcoding and can be picked up cheap second hand. I'm not sure about the Cpu, that's an older chip and a dual core may be pretty limited. I would think that it would be okay but if you can i would try and pick up a quad core. Plex will still have to be using the cpu for some tasks and Unraid will need it as well for parity calculations but the majority of the load from transcoding will be on the GPU. 8-16gb of ram should be perfect, if you can swing 16gb it would be better for the extra headroom.