Looking for suggestions on a NAS setup for my use-case

[icarus69]

Budget (including currency): £400

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Music streaming, some occasional 4k streaming, photo storage.

 

Looking for suggestions on a setup for my use-case

 

Beginner DIY NAS for music playback (e.g. Roon) and some photo/video storage

 

My desire is to have a NAS that’s between 4-16TB in size, including backup/clone drives. I only have about 500GB of music, but it’s constantly growing and I feel it’s time to take the jump into this.

 

My interest in NAS’ are for their use as huge storage systems as well as the ability to stream content from them.

 

For streaming music, I like the sound of using Roon for this. I probably wouldn’t use the NAS much for watching video content, but this may be something I would be interested in doing further down the line.

 

I do also have a growing family photo collection that I’d store on the NAS. Growing from 0GB, as I’ve only just begun the mountainous task of digitizing old prints we had in the loft.

 

Really, my priority is having a setup that a) has sufficient storage and backup storage and b) performs well enough that I could stream my music library very quickly, with WiFi or data speeds being the only discernable bottleneck.

 

I’m not really sure which component/s in a NAS setup would be the most important for this use-case (e.g. CPU, RAM, SSD etc).

 

Ideally I’d like to spend under £300 for the whole setup, but can go over this if needed. If I need to start with a smaller amount of storage (e.g. 2TB storage and 2TB clone/backup) in order to meet my performance requirements (i.e. a more powerful CPU/RAM if needed), I am fine with this.

 

Suggestions on builds would be massively appreciated! And if you aren’t able to/don’t have the time to suggest a full parts list, guidance on how to shop for different components, and which components I should prioritise, would be awesome.

 

Thanks!

 

[tkitch]

While you're staying small-scale, a used business PC would be a solid starter box.

 

you can get 7th gen boxes for ~100ish bucks on ebay.

 

example:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126121677941

 

6 cores, plenty of RAM.  Buy whatever HDDs you want.  (I'd suggest 8TB drives to start, going smaller hits significant diminishing returns on the drive prices.)  The towers should fairly easily hold more than 2 drives.

[icarus69]

20 minutes ago, tkitch said:

While you're staying small-scale, a used business PC would be a solid starter box.

 

you can get 7th gen boxes for ~100ish bucks on ebay.

 

example:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126121677941

 

6 cores, plenty of RAM.  Buy whatever HDDs you want.  (I'd suggest 8TB drives to start, going smaller hits significant diminishing returns on the drive prices.)  The towers should fairly easily hold more than 2 drives.

Will check it out.

 

The aim is small scale but high performance. There's probably crossover with people that would instead say they want to forego scale in order to not sacrifice on performance. In this context, high performance is being able to stream audio fairly seamlessly.

 

Concerning my primary desire to be able to stream audio remotely (either over WiFi or over data on my mobile), what components (and features of those components) are most important? Are there any specs I should look for as a minimum (e.g. x amount of RAM, x single core/multi core speed, SSD/HDD speed)? 

[tkitch]

streaming audio can be done off a Raspberry Pi.  That's a super not-intensive task.

 

You need a streaming server software setup, as well as access outside going into it.  That's not hardware, that's all software config.

 

[icarus69]

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

streaming audio can be done off a Raspberry Pi.  That's a super not-intensive task.

 

You need a streaming server software setup, as well as access outside going into it.  That's not hardware, that's all software config.

 

Gotcha. Out of interest though, what is being drawn on the most when streaming? Drive speeds I assume, rather than RAM or clock speed? 

[icarus69]

4 minutes ago, tkitch said:

streaming audio can be done off a Raspberry Pi.  That's a super not-intensive task.

 

You need a streaming server software setup, as well as access outside going into it.  That's not hardware, that's all software config.

 

I suppose the thing that might make a Raspberry Pi a bad choice would be the fact that services such as Room have a number of minimum hardware requirements to perform well. Obviously I can just go look up what those requirements are, but my question for the forum is how to configure a setup that gets close to those minimum requirements within a minimal budget.

[tkitch]

5 minutes ago, icarus69 said:

Gotcha. Out of interest though, what is being drawn on the most when streaming? Drive speeds I assume, rather than RAM or clock speed? 

none of the above.

Your audio files are, what, 10MB/minute?  (assuming very HQ audio?)  That's NOTHING.  A spinning HDD can do 100MB per second.

[icarus69]

2 minutes ago, tkitch said:

none of the above.

Your audio files are, what, 10MB/minute?  (assuming very HQ audio?)  That's NOTHING.  A spinning HDD can do 100MB per second.

Gotcha. I did also mention I would be doing some light video streaming. I could deal with 1080 over 4k.

 

I suppose then the software configuration is going to matter more than the hardware. Since I'm starting from scratch and have no prior connection to any given NAS setup, do you have any suggestions on which route I take on the software side?

[tkitch]

If you're storing 4K video, you'll want more drive space.

 

If you're transcoding:  make sure it's got a supported GPU for plex.  that's about it. (unless you're getting into more than a couple simultaneous streams)

[icarus69]

3 minutes ago, tkitch said:

If you're storing 4K video, you'll want more drive space.

 

If you're transcoding:  make sure it's got a supported GPU for plex.  that's about it. (unless you're getting into more than a couple simultaneous streams)

Just to being this back to my original goal (high performance within my use-case), take a look at the suggested requirements Roon have - https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-are-the-minimum-requirements

 

I understand what you're saying about how little is needed to stream audio, but it sounds like it's not just pure streaming of audio I need to factor in - it's also the running of platforms like Roon.

 

Considering they're recommending i3, 8gb and SSD to run, do you have any recommendations on how to tick those boxes while still remaining a budget setup?

[icarus69]

5 minutes ago, icarus69 said:

Just to being this back to my original goal (high performance within my use-case), take a look at the suggested requirements Roon have - https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-are-the-minimum-requirements

 

I understand what you're saying about how little is needed to stream audio, but it sounds like it's not just pure streaming of audio I need to factor in - it's also the running of platforms like Roon.

 

Considering they're recommending i3, 8gb and SSD to run, do you have any recommendations on how to tick those boxes while still remaining a budget setup?

Also to go beyond hardware...

 

Clearly there are many different ways of turning a box into a NAS, and many of these configurations could run the same software, and serve the same purpose. So are there any particular software configurations you'd recommend?

[tkitch]

14 minutes ago, icarus69 said:

Just to being this back to my original goal (high performance within my use-case), take a look at the suggested requirements Roon have - https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-are-the-minimum-requirements

 

I understand what you're saying about how little is needed to stream audio, but it sounds like it's not just pure streaming of audio I need to factor in - it's also the running of platforms like Roon.

 

Considering they're recommending i3, 8gb and SSD to run, do you have any recommendations on how to tick those boxes while still remaining a budget setup?

Fucking devs.  They give you useless specs.

i3's can be anywhere from 2 cores, no HT, on up to 4 Cores with HT.  (So anywhere from 2-8 threads, depending on the chip.)  How exactly is that useful?  Also, 2nd gen i3?  10 gen i3?  13th gen i3?  HUGE change in performance, what fucking i3?   There's literally more than 100 i3's that intel's made for desktops. 

 

An i5 8500 is 6c 12t, so that should be more than enough.  for whatever you're running, unless you need the server to do a lot of data processing.

[icarus69]

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

Fucking devs.  They give you useless specs.

i3's can be anywhere from 2 cores, no HT, on up to 4 Cores with HT.  (So anywhere from 2-8 threads, depending on the chip.)  How exactly is that useful?  Also, 2nd gen i3?  10 gen i3?  13th gen i3?  HUGE change in performance, what fucking i3?   There's literally more than 100 i3's that intel's made for desktops. 

 

An i5 8500 is 6c 12t, so that should be more than enough.  for whatever you're running, unless you need the server to do a lot of data processing.

Say I built a basic setup around an i5 8500. What drive configuration would you recommend (e.g. RAID)?

[tkitch]

3 minutes ago, icarus69 said:

Say I built a basic setup around an i5 8500. What drive configuration would you recommend (e.g. RAID)?

if you're running windows?
Storage Spaces.  Not Hardware raid.

 

If you're not running windows, then TrueNas or similar, and configure software RAID in there.  

 

 

Don't use hardware raid in 2023.