NAS Build for Plex ONLY

[brmood03]

I am pretty novice to this stuff but I love a challenge and am currently shopping my next build. I currently run plex off my 2012 Mac Mini with a 4TB WD external attached usb. I want to upgrade that and maybe build a PLEX ONLY NAS but it seems a bit daughting. I know I want a case with some hot swap bays, I know im probably going to be using the new Pentium process for the price break, I know ill get 8 or maybe 16gb of DDR4 based on the budget, and i know i want to use either ironwolf or wd red drives. I only need about 2TB right now but i want to leave room for expansion. 

 

so my question is linus posted a video a while back about building rack style server grade nas. im ok with just having my nas standalone on the floor running in the background. i know i dont really need a lot of power since this machine will only be running the plex. heres my main 2 questions:

 

1) i am not that knowledgeable in raid....what should i be using. I know im going to use linus' tip and go with the $60 limetech route, but thats about as far as ive gotten.

2) what about this raid card/HBA/LSI 9211-8i conversation? do i even need that and what is it for??

[Br3tt96]

I know nothing about raid. The Pentium will be good for a lot, but don't count on transcoding HVEC x265, and I 100% prefer WD reds over any Seagate

[NelizMastr]

6 minutes ago, brmood03 said:

1) i am not that knowledgeable in raid....what should i be using. I know im going to use linus' tip and go with the $60 limetech route, but thats about as far as ive gotten.

2) what about this raid card/HBA/LSI 9211-8i conversation? do i even need that and what is it for??

1) LimeTech makes the UnRAID software. It's not RAID in itself, it's just what they call it. I believe it's based on ZFS for using multiple disks (please correct me on this, I'm not into this product myself). RAID isn't meant to be extended or modified much, it's not that flexible. You either make one array from the get go with a lot of drives, or you add other arrays later on. ZFS is a software solution that's more flexible, but again, I'm not that knowledgable on it.

 

2) RAID card to HBA conversions, or flashing from IR to IT mode, is helpful when you want direct access to the disks and the controller doesn't do anything but act as a passthrough. This means you can let the software take control of the disks rather than your controller. It's more flexible.

 

Disk wise, I'm partially a Seagate fanboy, so I recommend Ironwolfs. I'm running 4TB versions in my NAS and they're going strong. Component wise, an 8th gen pentium should cope with one 4K HEVC stream at a normal bitrate. An i3 is recommended, though.

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

I believe it's based on ZFS for using multiple disks (please correct me on this, I'm not into this product myself).

Its using md for parity and their own pooling solution. You can use btrfs, xfs or ext4 for the file system. No zfs here.

 

9 hours ago, brmood03 said:

1) i am not that knowledgeable in raid....what should i be using. I know im going to use linus' tip and go with the $60 limetech route, but thats about as far as ive gotten.

How much storage do you want? How much budget? Unraid makes a lot of sense here.

 

9 hours ago, brmood03 said:

2) what about this raid card/HBA/LSI 9211-8i conversation? do i even need that and what is it for??

How many drives do you need? Id use the 6 ish ports on your board first. Id get bigger hdds like 8tbs too

[Mikensan]

Last I heard unraid was running btrfs which I think development has slowed or stopped since ZFS came to linux.

 

If you convert your movies to h264 to make transcoding / direct stream easier on the server and clients, you could get away with murder in terms of CPU. I'm running plex on an old X5670 and it doesn't seem to have an issue transcoding up to 3 streams.

 

Depending on your budget (and location), you could by an older workstation running 1366 socket xeon(s) and throw in a $50 x5670 and be under $300. Workstation will take larger fans and you have more options to keep it quiet - it just isn't pretty.

 

Small pretty and new, you could just buy a mid tier synology / qnap type of solution for $600 which should support h264 natively and not have any trouble running as a PMS.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS918-Diskless/dp/B075N1Z9LT/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1533827680&sr=8-2&keywords=synology%2Bplex&th=1

Those running the intel core tend to be a little pricier.

[NelizMastr]

12 hours ago, Mikensan said:

Small pretty and new, you could just buy a mid tier synology / qnap type of solution for $600 which should support h264 natively and not have any trouble running as a PMS.

 

Those running the intel core tend to be a little pricier.

Some Synology models don't support Plex because they have a different CPU. You're generally safe when it's either Intel or Marvell, others will only work with Emby I've found.

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 8/9/2018 at 11:23 AM, Mikensan said:

ast I heard unraid was running btrfs which I think development has slowed or stopped since ZFS came to linux.

It Ican use btrfs, but thats single drive or raid 1 btrfs, both of those are fully stable. BTRFS is still very in devolpment and there are lots of new big updates. ZFS isn't replacing it mainly due to linences and how it doesn't work that well in linux. 

 

[Mikensan]

On 8/11/2018 at 10:54 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

It Ican use btrfs, but thats single drive or raid 1 btrfs, both of those are fully stable. BTRFS is still very in devolpment and there are lots of new big updates. ZFS isn't replacing it mainly due to linences and how it doesn't work that well in linux. 

 

I though OpenZFS has made a lot of progress in linux, lot of developers involved as of late. I know I migrated my pools to linux for a few months without any issue - granted the only ZFS features I used were snapshots and replication.