Looking for a NAS for plex server

[silk186]

I'm looking to buy a NAS 5-6 drives to run a plex server and file sharing for video editing. I've heard that h.265 can be an issue. Is this still the case if I'm streaming the content to an Apple TV, tablet and computer or only when running PLEX from the TV? I read that I would need that I would need an i7 to play back 4k h.265 content. A few youtube channels have been saying the an intel CPU is needed for the iGPU. Is this true??

[Needfuldoer]

If your playback devices can decode H.265, all the NAS has to do is shove the files over the network. That takes very little processing power compared to transcoding.

 

EDIT: You'll want the Plex metadata database on an SSD instead of your spinning drives. That should make the interface feel far more responsive.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Needfuldoer
Plex DB SSD recommendation

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, silk186 said:

I'm looking to buy a NAS 5-6 drives to run a plex server and file sharing for video editing. I've heard that h.265 can be an issue. Is this still the case if I'm streaming the content to an Apple TV, tablet and computer or only when running PLEX from the TV? I read that I would need that I would need an i7 to play back 4k h.265 content. A few youtube channels have been saying the an intel CPU is needed for the iGPU. Is this true??

Transcoding is where you need processing power. And transcoding 4k is not something you want to do. 
 

If your devices can direct play your media content, Plex will run on a potato. If you need to transcode, you will want to store 4k AND 1080p versions of the same content, the 1080p files can be seen as “comparability” files which won’t have issues playing on things and/or will be much much easier to transcode. 
 

h265 can still be an issue, and I am honestly not sure which devices will play nicely. I know my nvidia shield TV handles everything I throw at it, but my  stick version of the shield doesn’t. 

[silk186]

5 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Transcoding is where you need processing power. And transcoding 4k is not something you want to do. 
 

If your devices can direct play your media content, Plex will run on a potato. If you need to transcode, you will want to store 4k AND 1080p versions of the same content, the 1080p files can be seen as “comparability” files which won’t have issues playing on things and/or will be much much easier to transcode. 
 

h265 can still be an issue, and I am honestly not sure which devices will play nicely. I know my nvidia shield TV handles everything I throw at it, but my  stick version of the shield doesn’t. 

It's good that I don't need a NAS with a really high end CPU to keep the cost down.

I know I want 6-8 drives, probably 20TB

For memory it seems taht 8GB should be enough I think

Do I need an M.2 drive for caching, if so how large should it be.

I want at least one port that can do 2.5 GbE as I'm planning to get a 2.5 GbE switch as a switch with 10 GbE is too expensive.

What should I consider in regards to the CPU?

I will go with either Synology or QNap, is one better than the other in my use case?

I will be playing PLEX mostly from most recent Apple TV, I'm also hoping I can run Sonarr and torrent software on the NAS as well if it isn't too difficult to manage on a NAS.

Any suggestions/advice is appreciated.

[Jarsky]

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

It's good that I don't need a NAS with a really high end CPU to keep the cost down.

The CPU is really only used for scanning and updating metadata, and for audio transcoding most of the time. As long as you have modern devices, most content locally should be direct play or direct stream. But even when you transcode, if its a modern CPU a couple of cores is enough. I personally converted my entire TV library to H265 (using Tdarr) which reduced my content to 50% the size of H264 with virtually no quality loss. H265 plays perfectly fine, and in many cases because some of the content was encoded weird, it actually plays better and more consistently. File transfer is fairly negligible for file transfer. 

 

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

I know I want 6-8 drives, probably 20TB

So you want 120-160TB of raw space? 20TB drives are quite expensive, 18TB drives are considerably cheaper (by like 30%)

 

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

For memory it seems taht 8GB should be enough I think

8GB is plenty, but 2 sticks will of course give you dual channel, so extra performance. You'll probably find a 16GB kit (2x8GB) is cheap enough that its worth it over a single 8GB stick. 

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

Do I need an M.2 drive for caching, if so how large should it be.

I wouldn't bother for caching, but i'd get an NVMe drive for your OS (unless you go with something that runs off USB) and to keep your Apps & Plex database/metadata on

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

I want at least one port that can do 2.5 GbE as I'm planning to get a 2.5 GbE switch as a switch with 10 GbE is too expensive.

If you want 2.5gbE onboard, then you'll probably have to go a Z690 or X570 board. Typically lower chipset boards dont have 2.5gbE

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

What should I consider in regards to the CPU?

I'd probably go a modern i5, then if you want to ever do hardware transcoding on it, you can use the Xe Iris integrated graphics. Or look at a Ryzen 5 APU like the 5600G 

38 minutes ago, silk186 said:

I will go with either Synology or QNap, is one better than the other in my use case?

If you decide on the prebuilt route then most of the above is irrelevant. I'm not sure which (if any?) Synology have 2.5gbE in their consumer range. You would probably have to get something like a DS1821+ and an add-on card for the 10gbE adapter in that case. From QNap you could get a TS-873A which does have 2.5gbE networking. Both of these support NVMe's and use Ryzen processors. Theyre both pretty even as far as their OS and Docker support etc.. though QNap does recently support ZFS if you want to run a ZFS pool. Just keep in mind the 8 bay systems are fairly expensive for their power. Though they are pretty rock solid

 

[silk186]

I'm moving to China is a few days which blocks access to all English streaming services so I will be building up my own server. Currently, I have 550+ anime series. I will need to build up kids content as well, both movies and tv series. In addition, I will be adding a bunch of content that I normally stream and movies. I will use local streaming services for my wife's Chinese content so I want a lot of space. Also, a bit for back up of family media and b-roll and video my wife makes on social media.

 

I had heard that price/GB was roughly similar across all capacities so I was going to go for 20TB, but with that price, 18TB seems a better option. Currently, I have two 12TB drives that are both full. I would be using RAID 5 so 90-108TB of usable storage.

 

Will the performance difference of going from 1x8GB to 2x8GB be noticeable?

 

If it's just for OS, a small M.2 like 32GB or 64GB should be enough.

 

I've seen that QNap has models with 2.5 GbE and Synology has 2-4 1 GbE and ones with 10GbE that can do 2.5GbE. I don't think I can currently benefit from 10GbE and it would be significantly more costly to set up.

 

I watched a few videos on ZFS vs RAID 5 and it seems the main advantage for me would be error checking for data corruption?

 

I'm fine going up to $1500 for 8 drives as long as it is rock solid and I can expect to get 10+ years from it. I see that the TS-873A has 2x 2.5 GbE which should be more than enough with link aggregation. I think it will be a long time before we see 10GbE become common place in home hardware (motherboards, consoles, wireless routers, ect.).

 

The price difference between the QNAP TS-673A and the TS-873A is pretty minor considering the overall cost when including drives.

 

Looking at 18TB drives, are the Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB a good option? They are going to be a fair bit cheaper than WD Red Pro drives.

[Jarsky]

59 minutes ago, silk186 said:

Will the performance difference of going from 1x8GB to 2x8GB be noticeable?

It wont be noticable in the single tasks you're wanting to do, but the multi-channel helps with overall system performance. So you would see more consistancy when youre running tasks that utilize 100% core or 100% CPU. 

 

59 minutes ago, silk186 said:

If it's just for OS, a small M.2 like 32GB or 64GB should be enough.

I imagine you're going to keep applications on there as well, and the appdata. Such as the Plex and its Library metadata. 

I can tell you that my Plex appdata for a 120TB Plex server is 33GB. You want to have this on SSD as it signicantly improves the experience when browsing Plex. 

I would personally do 2 x 128GB in mirror as a minimum, given you could easily use 40GB just for Plex metadata. You can get 128GB M.2's for about $20 these days 

 

59 minutes ago, silk186 said:

II watched a few videos on ZFS vs RAID 5 and it seems the main advantage for me would be error checking for data corruption?

There are a few benefits for either. Benefits for ZFS over Hardware RAID5 is that it can be moved to new systems and isnt hardware dependant. 

It can do advanced features as well like deduplication, optimize datasets for speed / compression, and checks to avoid bitrot. (Hardware RAID does regular CRC checking, theyre called 'Patrol Reads')

 

59 minutes ago, silk186 said:

I'm fine going up to $1500 for 8 drives as long as it is rock solid and I can expect to get 10+ years from it. I see that the TS-873A has 2x 2.5 GbE which should be more than enough with link aggregation. I think it will be a long time before we see 10GbE become common place in home hardware (motherboards, consoles, wireless routers, ect.).

I'd recommend you consider keeping files in H.265 these days, you'd be surprised how quickly you can fill 100TB with Plex data these days. Especially transcoding them with CPU as you'll typically reduce filesize by half compared to H.264. Comparing files ive transcoding, I can tell you the loss is virtually indistinguishable.  

 

These larger drivers are generally covered by a 5 year warranty. In saying that once my drives are past 3 months, I found failures are not very common during this period

I would urge you consider a RAID6 / RAIDZ2 though. Drives as they exceed 5-7 years ive found start to become more at risk of a failure. If you have a disk fail after 5-7 years of continuous operation, the stress to rebuild your parity can cause premature failure of additional drives. (Given it would take like a week of continuous 70%+ to rebuild) 

 

59 minutes ago, silk186 said:

Looking at 18TB drives, are the Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB a good option? They are going to be a fair bit cheaper than WD Red Pro drives.

I'd also consider the Seagate Exos X18 Enterprise drives, theyre also $30-40 cheaper than IronWolf Pro 18TBs. 

[silk186]

That's a lot of good advice. I will looking at the price or 128GB and 256GB M.2. I hadn't through about needing two to mirror them as I don't really hear about m.2 drives failing.

 

Saving $30-40 x8 sounds great, I will look at the Seagate Exos X18 Enterprise drives.

 

I will also have to check the price of going 2x 8GB for the ram. 

 

I guess I will have to do more research into ZFS vs RAID 5 and think about going RAID6 / RAIDZ2 through I will be sad to give up the capacity.

 

After I get the NAS all set up I will be building a solid gaming/work computer when the new hardware is out from AMD and NVIDIA and I can look into how I can convert my library to h.265. My main computer right now is a gaming laptop with i7 with 3080 but I think it would melt if I set it to convert my entire library. Did you find a solution that will detect which media is not h.265, convert and replace the old files or did you have to do it manually? I can imagine this being a pain otherwise with 550+ series and movies.

 

Another thing I'm wondering. With and 8 bay NAS, is their any benefit going beyond 2.5 GbE? I recently heard about WIFI 7 coming in a few years with 5.8Gbps.

[Jarsky]

1 hour ago, silk186 said:

After I get the NAS all set up I will be building a solid gaming/work computer when the new hardware is out from AMD and NVIDIA and I can look into how I can convert my library to h.265. My main computer right now is a gaming laptop with i7 with 3080 but I think it would melt if I set it to convert my entire library. Did you find a solution that will detect which media is not h.265, convert and replace the old files or did you have to do it manually? I can imagine this being a pain otherwise with 550+ series and movies.

 

I personally used Tdarr. It can be run in Docker, and can be distributed, so you can have a central management instance, but have multiple workers. So you could set it up on your NAS, and have your PC as a worker, or even have both your NAS & PC as workers. 

 

You set up the libraries. You can define filters such as certain file extensions, or resolutions you want it to pick up or ignore. 

When you scan the library it will do a check on the files and analyse what codecs it currently uses, all of the streams, what resolution it is, etc...and then transcode it or change it based on what you tell it to do. It will create a copy, it will then health check that copy to make sure it passes certain criteria, then it can save it as a new copy or replace the old copy. It's a very flexible and powerful solution (it uses ffmpeg or handbrake to do the actual processing). 

 

Techno Tim has a really good video about it. But personally I would recommend using CPU over GPU transcoding. 

It takes significantly longer, but its a substantial difference in size. GPU transcoding (hevc) will save you around 25-30% while CPU transcoding (x264) will save you around 50-60%

 

 

 

1 hour ago, silk186 said:

Another thing I'm wondering. With and 8 bay NAS, is their any benefit going beyond 2.5 GbE? I recently heard about WIFI 7 coming in a few years with 5.8Gbps.

Single modern HDD's are capable of sustained 150MB/s-180MB/s synchronise read/write, substantially more so for burst speeds with their caches.

So you can definately saturate 2.5gbE (250MB/s) with 2.5gbE. Ive tested some of my arrays up to 1GB/s with 10 disks.You can saturate 10gbE with enough disks.

The bigger advantage for SSD's/NVMe's if you look at the likes of LTT who use it for video editing, is the low latency that flash storage provides. And for the number of users they have hitting the NAS, the fact that seek times also doesnt constrain their performance.

 

I wouldnt really think Wifi 7 will be widely available for a while, Wifi 6E still isnt really a thing yet. 

[silk186]

On 8/6/2022 at 3:41 PM, Jarsky said:

 

I personally used Tdarr. It can be run in Docker, and can be distributed, so you can have a central management instance, but have multiple workers. So you could set it up on your NAS, and have your PC as a worker, or even have both your NAS & PC as workers. 

 

You set up the libraries. You can define filters such as certain file extensions, or resolutions you want it to pick up or ignore. 

When you scan the library it will do a check on the files and analyse what codecs it currently uses, all of the streams, what resolution it is, etc...and then transcode it or change it based on what you tell it to do. It will create a copy, it will then health check that copy to make sure it passes certain criteria, then it can save it as a new copy or replace the old copy. It's a very flexible and powerful solution (it uses ffmpeg or handbrake to do the actual processing). 

 

Techno Tim has a really good video about it. But personally I would recommend using CPU over GPU transcoding. 

It takes significantly longer, but its a substantial difference in size. GPU transcoding (hevc) will save you around 25-30% while CPU transcoding (x264) will save you around 50-60%

 

 

 

Single modern HDD's are capable of sustained 150MB/s-180MB/s synchronise read/write, substantially more so for burst speeds with their caches.

So you can definately saturate 2.5gbE (250MB/s) with 2.5gbE. Ive tested some of my arrays up to 1GB/s with 10 disks.You can saturate 10gbE with enough disks.

The bigger advantage for SSD's/NVMe's if you look at the likes of LTT who use it for video editing, is the low latency that flash storage provides. And for the number of users they have hitting the NAS, the fact that seek times also doesnt constrain their performance.

 

I wouldnt really think Wifi 7 will be widely available for a while, Wifi 6E still isnt really a thing yet. 

I'm thinking I will add 2x M.2 drives in raid for the OS and caching.  the nic on the QNAS is 2x 2.5 GbE in aggrigate so 5 GbE. In that case, it is probably enough and I can just get a 2.5 GbE switch which will save me some money.