Another Newbie Wants A NAS

[jkirkcaldy]

 

4 hours ago, Blebekblebek said:

Specially if you suggesting Ryzen in the system, not only it's overkill the GPU it self already waste of money.

Plex are working on hardware transcoding so in a future release there may be use for the GPU on Ryzen. 

 

4 hours ago, Blebekblebek said:

And how celeron/pentium would struggle to do any of that?

 

My first File server/Plex box ran using an Core2Duo processor and then I upgraded to a Pentium. The pentium was great as long as media was being directly played or it only had one transcoded stream but anything more than that and it started to struggle so my server now runs an i7 3770 with 32GB ram. 

 

Plex can eat a lot of processing power even with one user. If you want to sync any of your media to your iphone it will likely transcode it to a compatible format, add a stream on top of that and whilst it will do it, it will just take much longer. 

 

It's all about how much stress you are likely to be going onto your system and how easily you want to be able to upgrade it in the future. I would always lean on the build it myself side of things as I like to tinker and upgrade in stages. Also with a prebuilt nas it's more likely that using some of the more advanced features of Plex like DVR and live tv will be more difficult. But you may attach more or less importance to that depending on what you want to use it for long term.

 

Also a system with more power than you need leaves room for more use cases down the line. I for example was only using my server for Plex with a 2TB drive to begin with, now its Plex, file server, backup server, game server for Ark, runs 2 linux VM's for Nextcloud and a separate torrent downloader all with over 35TB of raw storage.

 

There is no way that I could be doing all of this with the lowly core2duo that I started with. And if I had gone with a prebuilt nas I probably wouldn't have even looked into some of this. but it all depends on what you want. And what you think you might want to use it for in the future. You don't want to invest in a closed system if you know you want to upgrade in the future. 

 

2 hours ago, SupaCupa said:

From reading through this thread and some other NAS topic threads I just need to find a case, mobo with gigabit, about 16BG of ram, a lower power CPU and a few drives. Oh and a reliable power supply. Should be simple enough. Thanks for all the help, any further suggestions would be welcome. 

I would look for a mobo that has 2 gigabit lan ports if possible, and I would also stress on getting a ups. I didn't bother for years and then I had 4 micro power cuts in the space of a couple of hours (lasting a couple of seconds each in the middle of the night) and because my server was set to turn on after a powercut it caused a few issues that I needed to sort out the next day. I went for this one but I don't know what the availibility is like in Australia https://www.amazon.co.uk/APC-Back-UPS-BX-Uninterruptible-BX1400UI/dp/B00T7BYPDG/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1496916803&sr=8-5&keywords=ups

 

If the internet where you live is not great for the best experience I would also strongly suggest having it on your local network. Mine sits in the living room and you can barely hear it. and it will give you greater flexibility with how you want to use it. 

 

[Blebekblebek]

At that point, that is no longer a NAS.

 

Just call it Server.

[jkirkcaldy]

1 minute ago, Blebekblebek said:

At that point, that is no longer a NAS.

 

Just call it Server.

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