Hi everyone. I’m on the verge of building a new NAS/Media server, and wanted to check here to see if any of you could provide some recommendations based on my goals (below) or your current builds. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 4 running some basic services (Portainer, Home Assistant, Plex, sonarr/radarr/prowlarr, sabnzbd, etc.), but would like to expand my options and capabilities as my interests in the hobby grow.
My goals:
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Ability to have 4+ 1080p streams on Plex. Right now my Pi works surprisingly well at home with one 1080 stream, but basically shits its pants doing much more. Would like to give my parents and a friend or two access.
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Document storage/backup. Interested in Nextcloud, but it seems people have mixed experiences here.
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Photo storage/backup.
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Hosting the services mentioned above, plus some extra headroom for others. I’ll probably move back to Home Assistant OS on my Pi, unless you think I should utilize it for something else.
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OS - unRaid. Not opposed to others, but this does seem to be a great option with a lot of how-guides and videos available.
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Storage/Drives - I honestly don’t know how much I want or need. As it stands, my partner and I probably have less than 1TB of files and photos between the two of us (being very generous with that figure). Would like to expand the media server capabilities as mentioned above.
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Budget - $1000 max including drives.
While the details above are what I would like to achieve with this, you can also consider me an empty canvas. Open to all ideas and suggestions. Let me know if there are other details I can provide that would be helpful. Lastly, thank you all for creating such a great community here.
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For your CPU I recommend Ryzen 5700G. Powerful enough for everything you want to do, the TDP is only 65 watts so it’s not going to destroy your power bill, has a decent integrated GPU, and costs only about $200. Another positive is that it uses DDR 4 so you can load up on that for pretty cheap too.
How much do you care about power/energy usage?
Also, how important is having one do-it-all server vs. a few separate servers? Sounds like you’re ok with at least two servers (Pi turns into HA OS, and you get a new one for everything else).
I wouldn’t say energy usage/efficiency is super high on my list, but I am also not opposed to being somewhat conscious about that. Basically, a little bit extra on my electric bill won’t kill me.
Separate servers is also something I would be fine with. The Pi has been great, and I figured I could keep utilizing it the way I have been with some other services. It is currently running some form of Ubuntu server (can’t remember off the top of my head), and everything is containerized.
Cool! I just got an Orange Pi 5 Plus, 16GB RAM**, but haven’t set it up yet so can’t give any recommendations. On paper though it looks great — significantly beefier than a RPi 4 (my current server), and supports M.2 NVME as well. Might be worth looking into for your use too, but the emphasis here is kinda on computing with a very low power budget, so I’m sure you could get more horsepower with e.g. an x64 NUC or similar.
Here’s a review, and note that this is without extra heatsink so it was probably thermally throttling (as was the RPi?): https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-5
**I first ordered the 32GB version but it got seized for counterfeit postage, and then some shenanigans ensued. If buying from Amazon I would suggest only buying units in stock and shipped from Amazon. May only apply to US though…
As far as motherboards go, you would probably be fine with any consumer desktop brand but you should probably look for something with dual NIC. If you want something a bit more robust AsRock Rack has some really great options. I’ve been using the X470D4U for about 4 years now without any issues.
If you live near Washington, DC, I’ve got a good system ready to go that I’m selling.
I’m near DC and looking for a new system to replace my Synology NAS, what do you have?
I put it all under a spoiler tag because it’s a lot. Let me know if you’re interested!
inventory/specs
UPS
Eaton 5SC 1000 full sine-wave inverter
Rack
13U enclosed rack w/casters and magnetic front door
Networking
TP-Link EAP225 Wifi AP
Aruba Networks S2500-24P-US Switch
- 24 Port Gigabit Switch
- PoE
- 4x SFP+ 10Gbit ports
Servers
Dell R720xd
Components
- 2x Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 @ 3.3GHz (8-core CPUs)
- 14x 8GB Samsung ECC 2Rx4 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (112 GB)
- Intel 4P X520 NIC (2x SFP+ 10Gbit, 2x 1Gbit)
- 2x 750W PSU
- IDSDM 6YFN5 dual SD module
- 2x Sandisk 16GB UHS-1 Extreme SDHC SD cards
- PERC H710P Mini Host Bus Adapter
- PERC H310 Host Bus Adapter
- Dual 2.5" Hotswap Drive Backplane 0JDG3
- 2x Crucial MX500 500GB SSD
- 2x 2.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays
- Front Hotswap HDD Backplane
- 12x HGST Ultrastar KP06 6TB 7200RPM HDDs
- 12x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays
- Rack Rails (They hold the server in place, but they’re missing some bearings. If the server is pulled out on the rails it may not go back. Replacing these should be less than $50)
- Locking front panel
- iDRAC Module
Notes
- Runs ~235W at idle
- Can handle many VMs and multiple simultaneous 4k Plex transcodes
- This is basically the best set of parts for the xx20 series Dell servers and is more capable than a lot of the xx30 units
Dell R710
Components
- Rack Rails
- Locking front panel
- CD Drive to 2.5" Drive Adapter
- Samsung 860 Evo 250GB SSD
- Front Hotswap HDD Backplane
- 6x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays
- 2x 870W PSU
- PERC H216 Host Bus Adapter
- 2x Intel Xeon L5640 @2.26GHz (6-core CPUs)
- 18x 4GB Samsung ECC 2Rx8 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (72GB)
- Dell 0KJYDB 2xSFP+ 10Gbit NIC
Notes
- Set up to be an ideal backup server
- Just add hard drives and it will be ready to go
- iDRAC modules are available on eBay if you would like out of band management
You may want to consider a mini PC. That was my upgrade after torturing my raspberry pi for many years. I landed here after agonizing over building the perfect NAS media server. Still very low on power consumption, but the compute power per dollar is great these days. All this in only a slightly larger form factor over the pi. I brought over the drives from the pi setup and was up and running for a very low cost. The workload transferred from the pi (plex, NAS, backups, many microservices/containers) leaves my system extremely bored where the pi would be begging for mercy.
I don’t do a lot of transcoding, so I’m no expert here, but looking at the documentation I believe you would want a passmark score of 2000 per each 1080p transcode, so 8000+ for your 4+ streams, not including overhead for other processes.
Thanks for the great info! What mini PC did you end up going with? I’ve heard Beelink and a few others thrown around here and there, and most seem to be impressed with what they can do. Do you mind elaborating some on how you handle your drives with this type of setup? Do you just have some sort of NAS connected directly to the pc?
No worries. I got a beelink S12, non-pro model with 8G RAM and 256G SSD. It was on sale for about $150 USD. Fit my use case, but maybe not yours, although you might be surprised. Perhaps those extra plex share users won’t be concurrently transcoding?
The drives are all USB, the portable type that requires no power source. Like you, I don’t need much. I have ~12T across 3, with a small hub that could provide more ports in a pinch. This model I believe also provides a SATA slot for a 2.5” drive, but I haven’t used it. All of these drives were previously connected to a rpi 3B+, haha!
The drive shares are done via samba and also syncthing. I have no need for a unified share via mergerfs, but I did take a look at this site for some ideas. I’m the type that rolls all their own services rather than using an NAS based distro. Everything is in an ansible playbook that pushes out my configs and containers.
Edit: I should make it clear the NAS is for other systems to access the drives. Drives are directly connected via USB. All my services are contained in this single host (media/backup/microservices/etc). My Pi’s are now clustered for a k3s lab for non critical exploration.
I’m a bit of a minimalist who designs for my current use with a little room to grow. I don’t find much value in “future proofing” as I’ve never had much success in accomplishing that.
I’ll probably start out with just letting my parents access Plex to see how it performs. They would be remotely streaming off an Apple TV, so I’m not entirely sure how much, if any, transcoding will be needed. My other issue is that transcoding is uncharted territory for me, so I should probably work on getting a better understanding of how/when it might come into play in my situation.
Everything else you described sounds like it would fulfill what I’m looking for. I don’t plan on solely hosting “mission critical” aspects of my life on this (at least for now while I continue to learn and possibly break things), but it would help me take the training wheels off my bike.
Happy to help. As I have it configured, my local network is set to prefer direct play, so any transcoding gets done from connections that traverse the boundary of my network. If you don’t live with your parents this would likely apply.
Transcoding may also occur when you have subtitled content and I believe for certain audio formats, but the transcoding would be limited to the audio track.
To play off what others are saying i think a mini pc and a stand alone nas may be the better route for you. It may seem counter intuitive to break it out into two devices but doing so will allow room for growth. If you buy a creeper bare bones mini pc and put more of your budget towards a nas and storage you could expand the mini pc without messing with your nas. You could keep the pi in the mix for a backup if your main pc is down or offload some services to it to balance performance.
You know, I’m not sure why this didn’t cross my mind as I started doing research. I have seen this recommendation countless times around here and people seem to have great experiences going the mini pc route. Thanks for your insight. Do you have any specific mini pc or NAS in mind that you would recommend?
Most of that will be budget based and long term goal oriented. Do you want a 4 bay nas with 10tb drives set up in raid 5 or do you think you’d want a two bay system with 5tb drives set up in mirror raid? Do you want to start cheap and get a second hand thinkcenter off ebay or do you want to buy a brand new NUC and put a 2tb M.2 and 16gb of ram in one slot so you can add the other 16gb later? Some nuc can take up to 64gb of ram and have two 2tb drives in them.
I was originally thinking at least 4 drives (4 if I went the synology/other of the shelf option, or more if I went the DIY route). Not opposed to a secondhand computer, especially if the price and performance is good. It seems like a brand new NUC can get fairly expensive.
Just want to second this - I use an Intel nuc10i7 that has quicksync for Plex/jellyfin, can transcode at least 8 streams simultaneously without breaking a sweat, probably more if you don’t have 4K, and a separate synology nas that mainly handles storage. I run docker containers on both and the nuc has my media mounted using a network share via a dedicated direct gigabit Ethernet connecting the two so I can keep all the filesystem access traffic off of my switch /LAN.
This strategy was to be able to pick the best nas based on my redundancy needs (raidz2 / btrfs with double redundancy for my irreplaceable personal family memories) while being able to get a cost effective low power quicksync device for transcoding my media collection, which is the strategy I chose over pre-transcoding or keeping multiple qualities in order to save HDD space and be flexible to the low bandwidth requirements of whoever I share with who has a slow connection.
What synology model did you go with? Do you host any other services with that type of setup?
I went with the DS1621xs+, the main driving factors being:
- that I already had a 6 drive raidz2 array in truenas and wanted to keep the same configuration
- I also wanted to have ECC, which while maybe not necessary, the most valuable thing I store is family photos which I want to do everything within my budget to protect.
If I remember correctly only the 1621xs+ met those requirements, though if I was willing to go without ECC (which requires going with xeon) then the DS620slim would have given me 6 bays and integrated graphics which includes quicksync and would have allowed me to do power efficient transcoding and thus running Plex/jf right on the nas. So there’s tradeoffs, but I tend to lean towards overkill.
If you know what level of redundancy you want and how many drives you want to be running considering how much the drives will cost, whether you want an extra level of redundancy while rebuilds are happening after 1 failure, how much space is sacrificed to parity, then that’s a good way to narrow down off the shelf nases if you go that way. Newegg’s NAS builder comes in handy if you just select “All” capacities and then use the nas filters by number of drive bays, then you can compare whats left.
And since the 1621xs+ has a pretty powerful xeon, I run most things on the nas itself. Synology supports docker and docker compose out of the box (once the container app is installed), so I just ssh into the box and keep my compose folders somewhere in the btrfs volume. Docker nicely allows anything to be run without worrying about dependencies being available on the host OS, the only gotcha is kernel stuff since docker containers share the host kernel - for example wire guard which relies on kernel support I could only get to work using a user space wire guard docker container (using boringtun) and after the VPN/tail scale app is installed (presumably because that adds tap/tun interfaces that’s needed for vpn containers to work.
Only jellyfin/Plex is on my NUC. On the nas I run:
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Adguard
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Sonarr/radarr/lidarr/prowlarr/transmission/overseerr
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Castblock
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Grocy
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Nextcloud
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A few nginx instances for websites
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Uptime-kuma
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Vaultwarden
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Traefik and wire guard which connects to a vps as a reverse proxy for anything that needs to be accessible from the public internet
I have a beefed up Intel NUC running Proxmox (and my self hosted services within those VMs) and a stand alone NAS that I mount on the necessary VMs via fstab.
I really like this approach, as it decouples my storage and compute servers.
Based on some of the other comments, it sounds like this might be the way to go. What NAS are you working with?
I was using a WD PR4100, but I upgraded to a Synology RS1221+ and it’s been fantastic :)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package PoE Power over Ethernet RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
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For 1k you can build a beast.
Just throwing out an option if you aren’t aware, gohardrives on ebay and on their site sell used Hdds. 10Tb for $80. The catch is they’ve been used in data centers for 5 years. The company will guarantee the drives for an addition 5 years and it could save you a lot of money depending on how much you want to risk it. I went with 3, one being a parity drive in case other goes bad.
goharddrives seemes to good to be true, is there anything like this in Europe?
I currently have 6x10TB of these drives running in a gluster array. I’ve had to return 2 so far, with a 3rd waiting to send in for warranty also (click of death for all three). That’s a higher failure rate than I’d like, but the process has been painless outside of the inconvenience of sending it in. All my media is replaceable, but I have redundancy and haven’t lost data (yet).
Supporting hardware costs and power costs depending, you may find larger drive sizes to be a better investment in the long term. Namely, if you plan on seeing the drives through to their 5 year warranty, 18TB drives are pretty good value.
For my hardware and power costs, this is the breakdown for cumulative $/TB (y axis) over years of service (x axis):
Thanks for the info. How long did the failing drives last and how was the replacement process (warranty not the nas replacement).
Also these were from gohardrives right?
The first two died within 30 days, the second one took about 4 months I think. Not a huge sample size, but it kind of matches the typical hard drive failure bathtub curve.
I just double checked, and mine were actually from a similar seller on Amazon - they all seem to be from the same supplier though - the warranty card and packaging are identical. So ymmv?
Warranty was easy, I emailed the email address included in the warranty slip, gave details on order number + drive serial number, and they sent me a mailing slip within 1 business day. Print that out, put the drive back in the box it shipped with (I always save these), tape it up and drop it off for shipping. In my case, it was a refund of the purchase pretty much as soon as it was delivered to the seller.
Like others have said, for a thousand dollars you can get a ton of stuff. For comparison my latest bud cost me around $200 and has about 6tb of raw storage. It runs proxmox and is paired with a mini PC I bought when I first started. I have btrfs raid for the system and then a separate controller for a TrueNAS VM. It even has a bluray drive that I picked up second hand and a RX590 that had to be cut down to fit in the case.
$1000 dollars can buy you a mini data center with used hardware. I honestly don’t know what to recommend but what ever you do make sure its flexible down the road so you aren’t locked into stuff from the past. I would go for a beefier CPU with good cooling and plenty of pcie. Just a note Intel CPUs work better for video encoding.
Does a Nas require a dedicated PC? I’m hoping to run a few bits including a Nas off a PC I’m getting.
Maybe your misunderstanding. Nas stands for network attached storage. Thus means it is storage that is accessible over the network.
You could run your desktop in a virtual machine like I do but keep in mind some proprietary software with DRM will straight up not work. I use my main machine as a desktop by passing though the USB controller and GPU with vfio so that my machines works like expected. It may cost you a few percent of performance loss but assuming your card is well supported it will be smooth sailing.
Another option is to just build a separate system to work as a NAS the reason I was suggesting a full server setup is because you have a big budget. You can get something smaller and more power efficient for a bit less. SSDs are cheap these days you can pick up 4 sata drives which will work well with TrueNAS assuming you have plenty of RAM.
