NAS or Pi?

[asheenlevrai]

Hey

 

I have a couple Synology NASes that I "inherited" and that I use mostly to store files. They are sitting in my living room and are quite noisy when active (streaming movies, or running backups). Most of the time they are in sleep mode and thus quiet, though. (I guess only the HDDs are sleeping and the OS is still active 24/7 but I'm not familiar with how sleep/hibernation works here)

 

I was thinking about installing JellyFin (to replace Video Station) and PiHole as Docker containers on one of my NASes. I'm not familiar with Docker containers yet or with either of these apps but I see it as a new opportunity to learn and experiment.

 

Now I also recently "inherited" a couple Raspberry Pi 4. I thought maybe I could use one of them (or both, if necessary) to run PiHole and/or Jellyfin. Since I never used Pies before, this would be another opportunity to learn and grow.

 

My concern now is about efficiency (power & noise levels). It would make more sense for me to have less devices running and group apps on a single device, if possible (thus on one of the Synologies) but, on the other hand, I wonder if this would mean that the NAS would be more noisy (HDD noises). I guess running PiHole wouldn't require much access to disks and they could still stay in sleep mode most of the time. Similarly, I guess JellyFin needs to wake the disks only when it needs to access the files, right?

 

But, if that's not the case, maybe it would be better to run these on a Pi. IDK...

 

What would you recommend?

 

Thanks for your advice and help

 

Best,

-a-

[KidKid]

12 minutes ago, asheenlevrai said:

Hey

 

I have a couple Synology NASes that I "inherited" and that I use mostly to store files. They are sitting in my living room and are quite noisy when active (streaming movies, or running backups). Most of the time they are in sleep mode and thus quiet, though. (I guess only the HDDs are sleeping and the OS is still active 24/7 but I'm not familiar with how sleep/hibernation works here)

 

I was thinking about installing JellyFin (to replace Video Station) and PiHole as Docker containers on one of my NASes. I'm not familiar with Docker containers yet or with either of these apps but I see it as a new opportunity to learn and experiment.

 

Now I also recently "inherited" a couple Raspberry Pi 4. I thought maybe I could use one of them (or both, if necessary) to run PiHole and/or Jellyfin. Since I never used Pies before, this would be another opportunity to learn and grow.

 

My concern now is about efficiency (power & noise levels). It would make more sense for me to have less devices running and group apps on a single device, if possible (thus on one of the Synologies) but, on the other hand, I wonder if this would mean that the NAS would be more noisy (HDD noises). I guess running PiHole wouldn't require much access to disks and they could still stay in sleep mode most of the time. Similarly, I guess JellyFin needs to wake the disks only when it needs to access the files, right?

 

But, if that's not the case, maybe it would be better to run these on a Pi. IDK...

 

What would you recommend?

 

Thanks for your advice and help

 

Best,

-a-

A Raspberry Pi would use less power and make much less noise than a NAS with HDDs. With a pi, you'd need a pi hat for NVME SSDs, or maybe a cable convertor for USB for different storage, like SATA.

[RedWulf]

Jellyfin by default will scan for new files and new Metadata periodically and will obv access the files to play, so it would still wake your drives up. You can however elect to store meta data and other info locally, so you could minimize how often it needs to wake them if you're on a pi vs on the nas. Pis are fun, and it's worth the experience to do it anyway. I ran a pi for the longest time that, let's say transferred, movies to my NAS, just bc, but I agree adding an extra device complicates things.

 

TLDR: if it's for the sake of, go for the Pis, and it will probably reduce the frequency of spin ups, but I doubt it'll be life changing.

[wanderingfool2]

Can't really talk about efficiency as I haven't really run those so I don't exactly know about how much draw they will add...but one thing that you might consider is just a touch of sound proofing nearby the devices.  While you don't want to cut off airflow and creating something that get's toasty...you will be surprised at how even a simple box with some fabric around a device can help reduce noise to a level where you don't care about it.

 

Like one idea, a box with slats in the bottom to allow air convection to work and a lid with enough holes to keep the thing also cool and enough room between the walls and device for proper airflow and you can really deaden a sound in a room without compromising the heat level by too much.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, asheenlevrai said:

 

 

Now I also recently "inherited" a couple Raspberry Pi 4. I thought maybe I could use one of them (or both, if necessary) to run PiHole and/or Jellyfin. Since I never used Pies before, this would be another opportunity to learn and grow.

 

Pi's are inherently not capable devices for this use. They're IoT scale devices.

 

Like the reason most NAS's are Intel CPU + Multi SATA drive's is because that is what the chipset supports. ARM based NAS devices tend to be so weak and underpowered that they can't keep up with the speed of the drive.  Like if you have 4 7200 RPM drives, that is 1GB/sec of data it needs to be able to read/write and if there is a 10GBe connector, it won't be able to saturate that. 

 

 

 

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/

Quote

"While hardware acceleration is supported on Raspberry Pi hardware, it is recommended that Jellyfin NOT be hosted on Raspberry Pis or other SBCs. ..."

 

Whatever device you use to run JellyFin, needs to be at least capable of decoding H264/H265/AV1 in realtime, depending what you encoded things at.

[asheenlevrai]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

Pi's are inherently not capable devices for this use. They're IoT scale devices.

 

Like the reason most NAS's are Intel CPU + Multi SATA drive's is because that is what the chipset supports. ARM based NAS devices tend to be so weak and underpowered that they can't keep up with the speed of the drive.  Like if you have 4 7200 RPM drives, that is 1GB/sec of data it needs to be able to read/write and if there is a 10GBe connector, it won't be able to saturate that. 

 

 

 

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/

 

Whatever device you use to run JellyFin, needs to be at least capable of decoding H264/H265/AV1 in realtime, depending what you encoded things at.

Thanks.

 

I never considered using a Pi to replace my 8-bays Synology NASes but I thought maybe JellyFin could run ion the Pi (rather than the NAS) and access the files on the NAS to stream them to the TV. Now that I thought about it better I realize it doesn't make much sense or much of a difference in terms of how often the drives would spin up... My original thoughts were about PiHole and I just kept that going when I thought about JellyFin...

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, asheenlevrai said:

Thanks.

 

I never considered using a Pi to replace my 8-bays Synology NASes but I thought maybe JellyFin could run ion the Pi (rather than the NAS) and access the files on the NAS to stream them to the TV. Now that I thought about it better I realize it doesn't make much sense or much of a difference in terms of how often the drives would spin up... My original thoughts were about PiHole and I just kept that going when I thought about JellyFin...

Honestly if you wanted to keep the noise down, just put something sound-absorbing in front of it.

 

Like if you can't remove it from the room, the next option is to get like some foam, glue it to a piece of wood and just place it in front so that the noise isn't directed into the room. Back in the 80's and 90's, it was common to have entertainment units that had wood or glass fronts on them, and that's where you'd stick devices that generated a lot of noise (though it would heat up the space.)