Server for Plex and Storage

[Nzxtime]

I want to setup a plex server, which handles my downloaded content and acts as a NAS (downloading from and to movies, games and such). Currently I have a spare setup with an i7 4790, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM and about 2 TB of space.

I have no experience concerning NAS's and appreciate your recommendations and tips for changes, recommendations and tips.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Nzxtime said:

I want to setup a plex server, which handles my downloaded content and acts as a NAS (downloading from and to movies, games and such). Currently I have a spare setup with an i7 4790, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM and about 2 TB of space.

I have no experience concerning NAS's and appreciate your recommendations and tips for changes, recommendations and tips.

I’d look into unraid if you plan to add storage slowly over time. Besides that… start watching YouTube videos and looking into how to go about it. It’s all well documented and there are endless videos that will walk you through it. 

Truenas and its ZFS file system have advantages, but the main drawback is, ZFS is not friendly to slowly upgrading storage capacity over time. I recommend looking into this as well, specifically how to add more storage, understand what a pool is, how a pool consists of vdevs, each vdev needs its own redundancy, and you can’t add drives to vdevs. Once you understand this, you will see why unraid has advantages for slow rolling storage upgrades. But ZFS’s advantage is performance (not needed at all for most home users and especially Plex servers for home users), and data corruption/bit rot/randsomeware protection. ZFS will work harder then any other file system to keep your data safe. 

[Nzxtime]

7 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d look into unraid if you plan to add storage slowly over time. Besides that… start watching YouTube videos and looking into how to go about it. It’s all well documented and there are endless videos that will walk you through it. 

Truenas and its ZFS file system have advantages, but the main drawback is, ZFS is not friendly to slowly upgrading storage capacity over time. I recommend looking into this as well, specifically how to add more storage, understand what a pool is, how a pool consists of vdevs, each vdev needs its own redundancy, and you can’t add drives to vdevs. Once you understand this, you will see why unraid has advantages for slow rolling storage upgrades. But ZFS’s advantage is performance (not needed at all for most home users and especially Plex servers for home users), and data corruption/bit rot/randsomeware protection. ZFS will work harder then any other file system to keep your data safe. 

unraid costs compared to Truenas, or am I missing something?

[LIGISTX]

17 minutes ago, Nzxtime said:

unraid costs compared to Truenas, or am I missing something?

I believe there may be a free tier of unraid, but I’m not sure. I don’t use it. 

Regardless of the cost, compare what features are what you want. If you want to talk cost… ZFS expects you to build out an entire vdev right from the start. So that’s going to be a many hundreds or thousands of dollar upfront cost. If that isn’t an issue for you, then ya, truenas. If that is an issue, unraid suddenly seems very cheap .